Darts Federation of Australia

Some facts on the Embassy

The Embassy has an ability to produce new characters to delight the fans each year. This time it was the turn of 'bouncy' JOHN BURTON, who delighted the crowd in his First Round match with Darryl Fitton before going on to meeting Raymond Barneveld - and, of course Norway's ROBERT WAGNER, who somersaulted on stage and into the hearts of darts fans everywhere. Great entertainment and great darts!

In the Women's World Championships, Trina Gulliver's performances stamped her out as a true Champion. She started off in the Quarter Finals with a 25.81 average. In her Semi-Final against Mieke de Boer she increased to 27.01, and in the Final against Scotland's Anne Kirk she moved up another gear to 28.31.

Both the BBC viewing figures, together with those from Dutch TV Company SBS-6, reflected the enormous response from the public.

Official figures from the Dutch version of Ceefax revealed that while the PDC final was watched by 540,000 viewers on RTL-5 in The Netherlands, SBS-6 recorded 1.125 million for the Embassy First Round matches on the same night!

By the end of the week, SBS-6 were attracting between 3 and 5 million Dutch viewers for the Semi-Finals and Final.

Average BBC audiences for the Championships showed increases all round, with the Semi-finals up by a very healthy 0.9m on 2002 figures.

The final attracted an average audience of 2.8m and an audience share of 12%, rising to 3.4m and then 3.8m when the final dart was thrown. The entire programme was 0.9m and +2% share points ahead of the BBC-2 slot average throughout the year. The average audience for the Semi-final and Final combined was 2.7m compared to 2.4m in 2002 - an increase of 0.3m.

In comparison, it was reported that just 600,000 viewers on Sky watched the PDC Final.

BBC's weekday coverage also increased its audience with Wednesday night's classic Tony O'Shea/Colin Monk Second Round tie-breaker attracting an average audience of 1.3m and a very healthy 19% share of the audience. This produced an 11% increase on the average viewing audience for that time slot!

To put it in perspective, at some time during Embassy week an incredible 15.7 million, or 29% of the entire UK population, tuned into BBC coverage of the Championships!

From the WDF Website

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