BBC to screen film on snooker rivalry between Steve Davis and Alex Higgins with coverage of the sport facing axe

Snooker’s glory years saw millions tune in on television to follow the heroes of the green baize. Now the BBC is to screen a feature film dramatising the 1980s rivalry between Steve Davis and Alex “Hurricane” Higgins – amid warnings that coverage of the sport faces the axe due to budget cuts.

At the peak of its popularity, snooker drew 18.5 million viewers to the early-hours climax of the World Championship in 1985. The Rack Pack, a comedy-drama produced exclusively for the BBC iPlayer, charts the rise of a game once relegated to smoky club back-rooms.

The mutual antipathy between Davis, the ice-cool potter played by Will Merrick, and Higgins, the maverick genius played by Luke Treadaway, is depicted in the film. It also shows how promoter Barry Hearn, played by Kevin Bishop, stoked the pair’s rivalry and transformed snooker into a hugely lucrative business.

However, the drama, which premieres on 17 January, arrives as snooker’s place in the BBC’s sports portfolio is under threat. The BBC has already dispensed with Formula 1 rights in a bid to shave £30m from its sports rights budget, and insiders warn that snooker is next.

Mr Hearn, now chairman of World Snooker, said the World Championships could ultimately move to Sky or BT Sport. “We’ve got a long-term deal with the BBC and snooker is staying on the BBC for the next few years,” he told The Independent. “But the fact is the world has changed and the BBC has to adjust to a frozen licence fee. Sports fans are now served by a host of broadcasters. The BBC has to make cutbacks yet they still manage to spend millions on Sports Personality of the Year, which I can’t get my head around.”

Mr Hearn, who built his Matchroom Sport empire around Davis, after discovering the teenage prodigy in his Romford snooker hall, said: “I’d like to see snooker stay on terrestrial television as the game belongs to the nation but maybe in the long-term it will go somewhere else.”

A lack of personalities to match the appeal of characters like the explosive Higgins, Jimmy White and latterly Ronnie O’Sullivan has been cited as a reason for snooker’s diminished television profile. Brian Welsh, director of The Rack Pack, said: “The film is about a certain sanitisation of sports personalities. I think it would be very hard for a character like Higgins to succeed nowadays.”

The drama shows six-time world champion Davis confronting a broken Higgins, bitter over his rival’s superior commercial appeal, about the alcoholism which fuelled the Northern Irishman’s self-destructive behaviour. “I’m not your enemy. Drink is,” he tells Higgins, who died in 2010.

Hearn criticised the BBC’s decision to release the film exclusively on the iPlayer instead of a mainstream terrestrial channel. “The vast majority of people don’t what the iPlayer is yet,’’ he said. “This film should be commercialised, it should be syndicated globally. If something is good, don’t let it be a secret, shout about it.”

But Victoria Jaye, head of TV content at BBC iPlayer, said: “The iPlayer promises a revolution in the way we can entertain audiences. It’s an opportunity to pioneer new forms of programming.”