Baize of Glory:Gods of Snooker.

"Snooker loopy nuts are we, me and him and them and me. We'll show you what we can do with a load of balls and a snooker cue. Pot the reds then screw back for the yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black. Snooker loopy nuts are we. We're all snooker loopy"- Snooker Loopy, The Matchroom Mob with Chas & Dave, 1986.

It wasn't just Chas & Dave who were snooker loopy back in the eighties. We all were - or at least a huge number of us - and much of that was down to some of the great characters that played the game. Gods of Snooker (BBC2/iPlayer) takes a look at a few of those players and their stories up to and including that decade. Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry, Jimmy White, and, most of all, the player most others credit with being the one that popularised the sport - Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins.

Higgins died in 2010 so he wasn't available to be interviewed but the other three were - and they all proved both interesting (yes) and amusing. They're joined by fellow players like Cliff Thorburn, Dennis Taylor, John Virgo, Ray Reardon, Ken Doherty, and Tony 'The Melter' Knowles as well as manager Barry Hearn, commentator Clive Everton, and snooker fans Gary Lineker and Richard Osman.

Plus a few people I'd never heard of. Higgins, along with Margaret Thatcher and David Attenborough, features in archive interview footage. Including the time he drunkenly, live on television, told the snooker authorities "you can shove your snooker up your jacksie. I am not playing no more".

It's one great line from a series of programmes that features plenty of them as well as some occasionally touching footage (for me, Jimmy White and Kirk Stevens playing each other and applauding each other's shots at a Benson & Hedges semi and Higgins, quite randomly, singing "if I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake on a TV chat show) and a (mostly) great soundtrack.

Music's always important for me with these things and I noted down appearances from Echo & The Bunnymen, The Undertones, Neu!, Dr Feelgood, Kraftwerk, Melle Mel, The Sweet, T.Rex, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Thin Lizzy, Tears For Fears, OMD, Boston, Cream, Bronski Beat, Department S, The Cure, The Human League, The Beat, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, Sade, and Fairground Attraction.

A fitting soundtrack to a show that begins with Alex Higgins beating Ray 'Dracula' Reardon 18-15 in May 1982 to win the World Snooker Championship, a tournament that captivated the nation and raised snooker's profile immeasurably. Reardon was by far the more successful player (as he bitterly mentions - "I won it six times and he (Higgins) won it twice"), but Higgins was the showman, the nation's favourite.

The audience were on his side. But his demons, and the drink, made sure that in the years following that victory he would dissipate the enormous amount of goodwill he'd amassed with a series of transgressions that would cause his life, and his game, to fall apart. Despite that, he is still well remembered, admired, and loved by snooker fans to this day.

The programme takes us back to Higgins' youth in sixties Belfast. Playing against grown men for mone7 in the notorious Jampot and winning the Northern Ireland amateur championship at the age of eighteen. But, at that time, snooker was a very niche sport - and one that was played out over a very long period.

When Higgins won his first world title in 1972 he beat John Spencer 37-32 and the match took six days to complete (that's not even close to the longest, in 1952 Horace Lindrum prevailed over Clark McConachy 94-49). It took place at a British Legion club on the outskirts of Birmingham. The seating was on stacks of beer crates.

Nobody bothered to televise it. The only snooker you'd see on television in those days was on Pot Black. Nobody was going to show a game that lasted six days but a series of one frame matches between the best available snooker players seemed to make sense. Colour television had arrived in the UK in 1967 and Pot Black first aired two years later.

Colour TV was quite important, viewers needed to be able to distinguish the colour of the balls,d but people still watched snooker on black and white tellies though. I remember it well. A bigger problem, potentially, is that the first ever episode went out on the same night as the moon landings.

A fairly decent competitor for the ratings but Pot Black still did very well and stayed on our screens, with its familiar theme - Black and White Rag by Winifred Atwell - until 2007. The likes of Eddie Charlton, John Spencer, and Graham Miles dominated the early years of Pot Black but it was Reardon, the Prince of Darkness, that was winning the world championships.

The years following Higgins' first world title saw Reardon, a former policeman from the Welsh valleys, reel off four champioships in succession. No wonder it rankled that Higgins was still considered the star player. Higgins had moved to Lancashire, gone professional, and acquired the nickname Hurricane. Within a year, he was peacocking around in emerald green suits and had girls hanging off his arms.

He also threw his cue at spectators, had fist fights with opponents, pulled a gun on a couple of female fans in Australia, and stayed up until 7am drinking the night/morning before important games. When, in 1980, he married his second wife, Lynn, and had his first child, Lauren, he tried to change his ways. He didn't succeed.

In 1977, the World Snooker Championship found its permanent, and now spiritual, home at the Sheffield Crucible and, for the first time, began to be broadcast live on television. This caused the tobacco forms to increase their sponsorship, raised the prize money, and started to see a host of characters slowly becoming household names.

Tony Knowles, Terry Griffiths, Kirk Stevens in his white suit, and Cliff 'The Grinder' Thorburn who was seen as the houswife's favourite because he looked a bit like Omar Sharif. But the man who was to outclass them all was Mr Interesting, Romford Slim, the Golden Nugget, the Ginger Magician, the Romford Robot  - Steve Davis. 

Davis won his first world title in 1981 (beating Doug Mountjoy) and went on to add five more during the decade (his last win was in 1989, thrashing John Parrott). At that time, Higgins was playing so badly that he lost to a man who played one handed and, even worse - as would have been the implication during that less enlightened era, to a woman.

He went into some kind of rehab where he continued to drink vodka and tried to get off with the nurses. It was still a healthier lifestyle than the one he'd had before and when he came out he was starting to get his game back. In the 1982 world finals, he beat emerging talent Jimmy White (Higgins was White's idol and soon to become his friend, more of him soon) in the semis and lined up against Ray Reardon in the final.

Higgins won 18-15 and famously cried and cuddled his baby daughter on the stage. But it was never so good for him again. Davis was back the next year (beating Thorburn) and never really went away for the rest of the decade. I saw Davis a few years back at a Teeth Of The Sea gig at the Moth Club in Hackney. He was downing cans of Beavertown Neck Oil, squeezing his younger girlfriend's bum, and, later, while DJing, dancing alone on stage to Atlas by Battles.

He seemed a fun guy and nowhere near as boring as he was once made out to be. He certainly didn't seem like a Tory anymore but video evidence of him joking about the importance of "potting reds" at a Tory party rally shows he once was. In his defence, he now describes the eighties as a Thatcherite decade of 'loadsamoney' that led us to the shit we're in now. Or, referring to that specific incident, "the biggest bollock we ever dropped".

That 'we' is important. Barry Hearn had met Davis at a snooker club in Romford in 1976 and, from that moment on, was nearly as big a part of Davis' success as Davis himself. Or at least it looked that way. Hearn marketed Davis as boring because he was clinical, dedicated, rarely made mistakes, and would never be seen out on the lash, like Higgins, the night before a game.

He clearly saved it up for his later life! Of course, audiences lapped it up. Davis the boring guy, the robot, was sometimes even booed when he played. He didn't like it but it didn't put him off. Before beating Mountjoy to win that first title, he outgrinded The Grinder by beating Thorburn in a fourteen and half hour long semi-final.

While Davis was practicing, practicing, and practicing some more, Higgins and Jimmy White were partying with UB40, Thin Lizzy, and Def Leppard. In the case of Leppard, partying with them must have been infinitely preferable to listening to them. Higgins' marriage was falling apart and, after taking an overdose in Majorca, he spent four days in a mental health facility.

Then, seven days after being released, he beat Davis 16-15, after being 0-7 down, in the B&H Masters. A rare highlight as his career began to fade. Davis had replaced both him and Reardon at the top of the game and Hearn had had an idea that would change the game of snooker, or at least its profile, once more.

He expanded his Matchroom Mob of players to take in several other top players and, like an early version of The Spice Girls - except with snooker cues and penguin outfits, they'd all play up to certain personality traits. Thorburn was, of course, The Grinder. Terry Griffiths came from Wales so he can sing all the time. Willie Thorne, err,  gambled, and Steve Davis was the boring one.

What Tony Meo's singular attraction was is never specified but he's there in nearly every piece of footage of the Matchroom Mob, gurning away like someone who's won a competition to meet famous people.

Hearn was turning snooker into wrestling. No wonder the audience hissed and booed Davis like a pantomime villain. Matchroom Mob merchandise became available, from snooker table duvet covers to aftershave, and the Courage brewery paid a cool £1,000,000 to sponsor Davis.

Hearn had put together a large number of the world's best players but he shied away from Knowles (who'd been involved in a tabloid kiss and tell scandal in which he'd been revealed to wear his girlfriend's knickers - that was actually shocking to people once) and Higgins who had recently thrown a television through a window.

Not a hotel window but a window in his own house. Another played not signed to the Matchroom Mob was Dennis Taylor. The joker in the upside down glasses who, in perhaps snooker's most famous ever moment, beat Steve Davis (on the final black ball in the final set) to win the 1985 world championship final in front of a television audience of over eighteen and a half million.

Not bad for a game that didn't finish until after midnight. A day after the final, Hearn signed Taylor up. Which upset Davis who was still hurting from his defeat. Taylor had joined the stable just in time to record Snooker Loopy with Chas & Dave and his fellow Matchroom Mob members. It went to number six in the UK chart.

A sequel, The Romford Rap, only reached number 91 (even Four Away (Higgins, White, Knowles, and Stevens) reached number 40 with their rival song, a cover of The Wanderer) and saw an end to snooker players bothering Top of the Pops.

While Davis, Taylor, and, somehow, Meo were coasting to mainstream fame, Alex Higgins was further disgracing himself by headbutting a tournament director and getting into a fight with John Spencer! While all this was going on, a new star was appearing on the scene. Stephen Hendry was a young, spotty, mullet sporting, snooker genius from Scotland and he was to dominate the next decade of the sport as surely as Davis had done the eighties.

But Hendry, despite coming across very well (he's enjoyably sweary) in his interview, was not as interesting as Jimmy 'Whirlwind' White so the programme makers told his story instead. Though Higgins had been White's hero, and both shared a passion for the nightlife, White was a more introverted character and he looked uncomfortable in the video to Romford Rap (yep, Hearn signed up White too - he had a certain type of lifestyle to support) and in the clothes his manager, Harvey Lisberg - previously in charge of 10cc, Sad Cafe, and Herman's Hermits, chose for him.

The idea of White sporting a 'punk' haircut was vetoed for fear of upsetting middle England but White's team had him kitted out in some fairly flashy suits. He looked slick, if uncomfortable - and not as slick as his good friend Knowles, but, like Higgins, he didn't always act that well.

He was banned from a Pontin's tournament for drunkenly throwing pint pots in the air, he spent nights down Peter Stringfellow's Hippodrome on the bubbly, he sank a speedboat in Hong Kong, and got into cocaine. Or, as he calls it, "the devil's dandruff". He also lost six world finals (four of them to Hendry).

He started going on three day long cocaine binges and progressed to doing three month long crack sessions (crack, White memorably observes, is "like sucking the devil's dick. It's that evil) which cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds. White had been the young Hendry's hero but if Hendry wanted to win world championships, and he did, he would need to follow the model behaviour of Steve Davis instead.

It was a cruel twist of fate that Hendry should win his first world title, in 1990, by beating White in the final. Hendry went on win again in '92, '93, '94, '95, '96 and, finally, 1999. Seven titles in all. The most of the modern era. The 1990 final had taken place in April of that year and later that summer Italia '90 turned everyone's attention back to football (hooliganism had seen football have a tough eighties) where it has remained ever since.

Snooker has remained popular and still has its characters (most obviously Ronnie O'Sullivan) but it seems unlikely it will have the presence it had in the eighties ever again. For that you can probably thank Jimmy White, Steve Davis, and, most of all, Alex Higgins. The man who once advised his friend White, during a game with Davis, to "shove the fucking cue up the ginger cunt's arse".