British Professional Championship
darts tournament

The British Professional Championship was a darts tournament organised by the British Darts Organisation and televised by the BBC between 1981 and 1988. After the 1988 championships, the BBC withdrew their coverage of the event and it left UK terrestrial television with only one televised tournament – the World Championships. The game was at an all-time low and players eventually went on to set up the World Darts Council in an attempt to bring back sponsors and television.
Jocky Wilson won the title a record four times – John Lowe also reached four finals but lost them all.
“British Professional Championship” enters the record as darts tournament. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what British, Professional and Championship can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“British Professional Championship” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, British, Professional and Championship provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4970634. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1988.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “British Professional Championship”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow British Professional Championship primary sources, British Professional Championship archive and British research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “British Professional Championship”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “British Professional Championship” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.