LEDBURY born and raised actor Will Merrick has said playing one of the country’s most famous and successful sportsman in a first-of-its-kind BBC movie was a ‘fantastic honour’.
The 22-year-old, who recently starred in E4 drama ‘Skins’, plays six-times world snooker champion Steve Davis in ‘The Rack Pack’ which was first aired online earlier this month.
The film, the first ever comedy drama feature film for BBC’s iPlayer channel, has earned rave reviews in the world of snooker and broadcasting for its attention to detail as it goes back to snooker’s golden days in the 1980s.
Directed by Brian Welsh, the comedy drama explores the glory days of the seventies and eighties snooker scene, when huge characters became household names and Chas and Dave’s famous ‘Snooker Loopy’ hit troubled the pop charts.
The film, written by Shaun Pye, Mark Chappell and Alan Connor, also stars Luke Treadaway as Alex Higgins, Kevin Bishop as Davis’ manager Barry Hearn and James Bailey as Jimmy White – arguably snooker’s greatest player not to have lifted the World Championship.
In the 1980s snooker enjoyed a booming period when a mixture of personalities on the baize grew the sport’s popularity to huge and unknown heights.
In 1985, the climax of the famous world snooker final between Davis and Dennis Taylor was watched by 18.5 million people in the UK, which remains a record for a post-midnight audience for any channel in the country.
And ‘The Rack Pack’ celebrates that golden era when a determined, straight-faced Davis dominated the game and his rivalry with the talented Ulsterman Higgins who had audiences on the edge of their seat playing a brand snooker which at that time was unseen and unheard of.
Merrick, who was the offered the role last summer, told the Observer playing Davis was a challenge he loved every moment of.
“I was over-the-moon to be playing Steve,” he said.
“It was my first experience of a biopic role so that was a very new and exciting experience for me.
“It was a fantastic honour for me to play him and it was a different approach to building a character and scriptwriting which I experienced before.
“The film’s had a fantastic reaction from movie fans and those in the snooker world, we could not have asked for a better response.”
Davis, who now works as a snooker commentator and a radio presenter, remains one of snooker’s greats winning the World Championship six times and is known to millions for being classed a snooker robot who could win matches in auto-pilot.
Merrick said he studied loads of coverage Davis in his hey-day before and during the filming stages.
“There was such a wealth of footage of Steve on the tables and off it when he was doing interviews,” he added.
“We (the production team) had to make sure his table manner and stance was as authentic and on the money as it could be.
“I think what’s so interesting about the film is it is a real unique pocket of sporting history where a sport completely changes in the public and the media and becomes more professional as we hit the late 1970s.
“And that is down to Alex Higgins who completely revolutionised the game. His arrival lead to the standard, the technique of the game going up.
“Alex Higgins’ story is a tragic one but he did wonderful things for snooker and I think we try to get that across in the film.
Will admitted before he got the part he did not follow snooker much but said he wa aware of what it meant to lovers of the game.
“My family and in particular my grandad also tried to get me down the Legion to play snooker. He got me into cricket but never quite snooker.
“But I remember him explaining it to me when it was on the TV and it was always on at my grandparents’ house.”
The film is currently available to watch on BBC iPlayer. To watch the film visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
