AT last 2005 can get back to witnessing proper sport.

The FA Cup's most memorable round has started, cricket is spinning into a delectable dnouement between South Africa and England and even golf's luminaries are back in action.

That means the annual flirtation with such frippery as the world's strongest man and darts is mercifully at an end.

Why is it that the ringing in of each New Year is also heralded by the grunts and groans of lycra-clad mastodons or the waddle and wallop of tent-bedecked dartists? Perhaps both events mirror the over-indulgence of Yuletide - a sort of heaving hangover from the excess of Christmas spilling, sprawling, spewing into the New Year.

Now even I can see how rolling a tractor-wheel down some sun-baked track or hoisting aloft a stone circle the size of a small elephant on to a wobbling pedestal involves more than a certain physical exertion and a substantial degree of strength.

But darts perennially leaves me colder than a penguin's beak in an Arctic hurricane. Such a reluctance to embrace darts comes from a reporter who rates former world champion John Lowe as one of the most generous of sporting ambassadors he has encountered in more than two decades of covering anything from archery to yachting, including a spell as unofficial 'arrows' correspondent for an official national strike publication.

'Everyone loves darts' doo-wopped one zany singing group called, appropriately 'Darts', in the 1970s. That's just not true.

There's no doubting the passion that darts engender almost each and every night in pub, club or other such hostelry the length and breadth of this land. But surely that's where darts belongs - in pubs and clubs and vying for attention with cribbage, shove hal'penny and skittles.

To my mind the annual television barrage of occupiers of the oche cannot disappear quickly enough. And surely it cannot be a coincidence that darts gets such saturation coverage from the BBC simply because the Corporation has lost so many sports to rival channels that darts now tops the all-action alternatives of underwater crotchet, bread-making or queuing for Lottery tickets.

It's definitely not what I want my licence money being spent on. It's just too much of a dud thing. It also beggars the question, what next? Bingo, dominoes, binge-drinking? Pardon me, that latter activity regularly features in lazy, reality television 'drinkers from hell' shows.

But seriously darts is as boring as those debates so many pub-goers, yours included, get embroiled in once throat tincture has taken too much of a hold. After all, it's only chucking three feathered, tungsten-shafted mini-missiles into a board from a short distance.

Of course, accuracy is needed in finding the required finish, no small degree of mathematical calculation too. And for someone who finds adding two and two a severe test of the little grey matter, I bow to those superior number-crunching abilities.

But in all honesty, where is the endeavour in darts? It's not as if you have to walk miles. It's not as if you are going to stray into any physical harm unless it's picking up your opponent's bevvie.

Maybe that's what televised darts needs - an edge. Perhaps as you go to retrieve your darts the board randomly spears them back at you. Or maybe as you try to reclaim your miniature arrows six steel-sharp scimitars swing intermittently between the oche and board.

As an excitement-quickener the board could be made to spin or the darts player be obliged to throw wearing a fish-patterned oven mitt. Don't mock, I was in a pub on a crowded Friday night when a work colleague did precisely that. I've never seen revellers turn so ugly so fast.

Any of those measures would surely hike up the spectacle for Messrs Taylor, Barneveld, Fordham and other mainstays of the current darts arena.

Better still, maybe they should introduce that flashing outer board championed by a certain J Bowen each Sunday tea-time several moons ago. "What topic do you want to answer questions on - food and drink, capitals of the world, or spelling? Spelling? Smashing, good, smashing. Right for your starter, spell tedium."

Updated: 10:33 Tuesday, January 11, 2005