How Virgo’s Big Break saved him from ruin MEMOIR
A fter the former postman terry Griffiths unexpectedly won the 1979 World Snooker Championship, he and reigning UK Champion John Virgo embarked on a tour playing exhibition matches.
On the Welsh leg of the tour, Griffiths invited Virgo to stay at his home in Llanelli. Bizarrely, Virgo woke up one morning to find his host energetically washing his car. Griffiths explained that since he’d become world champion, buses used to stop outside his house for people to gawp. He didn’t want them seeing a grubby vehicle in the drive.
this is just one of many entertaining anecdotes in Virgo’s colourful life story, which divides broadly into two halves: before 1979, and afterwards. He grew up on a row of terraced houses in Salford identical to Coronation Street. He was passionate about Manchester United and strangely fascinated by the broken snooker cue his mother used to unfasten the airing rack that hung from the ceiling.
On Christmas Day 1954, eight-year-old John’s interest in snooker was properly ignited when he got his own baize. It was 6ft by 3ft and sat on the dinner table.
really that was the day a future champion was born, not to mention a co-host of Big Break, one of Saturday night television’s more improbable lightentertainment hits — and, unlikelier still, a huge favourite of Margaret and Denis thatcher’s.
North-West england in those days was the cradle of the game. Dozens of snooker clubs, originally called temperance Billiard Halls, had sprung up in and around Manchester early in the century, to give the unemployed something to do.
As a teenager, Virgo made one of them his home from home. It was also where he learned how to bet on horses and dogs, a habit that years later, with his snooker career on the wane, would almost ruin him. He once blew £10,000 in a couple of weeks and, to conceal his mounting losses, started borrowing against his mortgage. Around the same time, his second marriage went the way of his first.
By 1990, Virgo recalls, gambling was ‘in danger of ruining my life’. But the aptlynamed Big Break began the following year,
giving host Jim Davidson his catchphrase, now the title of this book.
It was Virgo’s mickey-takes of the mannerisms of Hurricane Higgins, Ray Reardon and other top players which helped to make him the obvious candidate for a starring role alongside Davidson in the BBC’s snooker-based game show.
In time, Virgo overcame his addiction. He is also now happily married, for the third time.
Snooker’s rise from those smokefilled Temperance Billiard Halls began at more or less the moment in 1969 when Ted Lowe, who became the game’s leading commentator, persuaded BBC2 controller David Attenborough that it would perfectly suit the advent of colour TV.
Not that Lowe’s prescience stopped him dropping a famous clanger: ‘For those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.’
Now a leading commentator himself, Virgo is capable of making his own faux pas, both on screen and off. He relates them cheerfully here, but the best clanger in the book comes courtesy of his great friend, stuntman Rocky Taylor, one of the organisers of the Stunt Ball, a charity event held annually at the swanky Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
The guest of honour one year was Dame Vera Lynn, who made her way to the stage to a standing ovation but, after presenting the raffle prizes, walked back to her table in near-silence.
Rocky wasn’t having that. He ran to the stage, grabbed the microphone, and bellowed, ‘Come on lads, let’s hear it for Dame Edna!’
Virgo is laughing still.