Too dull to miss

An odd thing happened at the end of Ronnie "the Rocket" O'Sullivan's televised defeat of David Gray in snooker's Grand Prix on Wednesday night. As the two players shook hands, it became clear that something wasn't quite right with the Rocket's opponent. He looked dazed. He didn't seem to be completely aware of what was going on. In fact, he looked exactly like someone who had just sat through every second of seven long frames of snooker. Gray's dopey demeanour, which even the prospect of a winner's prize of £60,000 seemed unable to dispel, was quickly seized upon by those outside the sport. Breakfast television broadcast pictures of him shaking hands and looking a bit like your slightly daft octogenarian uncle when he's just been woken up from his afternoon nap and asked his opinion on the new Lil' Jon album. And once again snooker was being dragged, blinking, out of its natural habitat - the garage, the lockup, the dingy and fetid members' club - and asked to explain exactly what it thinks it's doing with its tuxedos, its long silences and, most of all, its insistence on stretching itself out all this week across three hours of prime-time BBC2 .

Not that snooker wasn't expecting it. Snooker won't be fazed by this kind of talk. The arguments always tend to boil down to the same thing: is snooker unbelievably tedious? It's a question snooker itself has never been afraid to confront. Last year at this very tournament O'Sullivan was booed by spectators after describing the sport as "boring" in a press conference. There are those who see it as a strangely British quirk that what is essentially a parlour game maintains a stranglehold over such a large volume of publicly funded air time. What exactly is all this snooker doing here, they ask - and how do we make it go away?

Oddly, the bits of snooker people tend to attack are precisely the things that make it great. Let's get the big one out of the way. Is it boring? Yes. Proudly and triumphantly boring. Snooker draws strength from its boredom. It presents its boredom to you unashamedly. Like many great British pursuits, like waiting for a bus or queueing at the post office, snooker moves to its own gentle and unhurried rhythms. It may not offer instant thrills. It may not be interactive, fast-paced or well suited to a jerkily edited hip-hop montage. Everything else is already like that; snooker offers you something else.

For a start, no other televised pursuit involves quite so much sitting down in a chair and staring into space. What could be more soothing than that? It is no accident that snooker is so closely associated with late nights, sweaty clubs and, above all, drink. Snooker is comforting. It's always there. It comes to you from a dimly lit place where people move slowly, where smoking is not just permitted but positively encouraged; where going to work on the train, fresh air and daylight are all things that other people do.

And beyond the boredom, there is substance. As a contest, snooker is about character. It all boils down to bottle. There are no rewards here for athleticism, agility or physical power. You can't throw money at it. The only way to get really good at snooker is to play loads and loads of snooker. A snooker match is all about the slow, incremental revelation of character. Drama, intrigue, smart suits, smouldering male leads, lovely upholstery - it could be a lavish BBC costume drama. Except snooker is much, much cheaper and doesn't feature anybody called Rufus.

There are other reasons snooker deserves to be on TV. For a start, it even looks like a TV. The green baize table fits perfectly into the rectangle of your box. It's simply meant to be there. All those primary colours: it looks like a Rothko painting. Who needs abstract expressionism when you've got 18 frames of Peter Ebdon versus Graeme Dott? Not only that, the players are, without exception, really nice chaps. Modest, unassuming and very good at snooker - if slightly pale - these a re the kind of sporting role models we want on our screens.

But couldn't it just jolly itself up a little bit, you ask? This is a mistake snooker has made in the past, noticeably during its televisual heyday 20 years ago. Helped by the absence of live football, snooker gradually gathered momentum as a spectacle, reaching a peak in the mid-80s, when Barry Hearn's Matchroom stable of high-profile cuemen became household names. An audience of 18.5 million watched Steve Davis lose to Dennis Taylor in the 1985 final. A year later the song Snooker Loopy entered the charts, a cheerful Chas and Dave singalong featuring the vocals of five leading snooker players. Snooker had never had it so good.

The idea of the "charismatic" snooker player had already been floated around with the success of Alex Higgins. Now so-called "flair" players, showmen of the baize, were being presented to us as exciting, larger-than-life figures. Kirk Stevens wore a white suit and developed (oddly, for such a sedentary pursuit) a cocaine habit. Housewives' favourite Tony Knowles was pictured lolling in a Jacuzzi surrounded by blondes before a world championship semi-final. It couldn't last. Quietly, methodically, boringly, the unreconstructed purist Steve Davis hoovered up most of the titles and most of the airtime too. The crash was coming. By the early 90s, snooker's popularity was on the wane. Dependent on the oxygen of television, it has periodically found itself shunted to one side by its noisier cousin, darts. Darts is like drunk snooker. It's snooker without the dignity, the bow ties, the air of severity. Darts is caveman snooker.

In all its terribly apologetic attempts to make itself less boring, snooker has experimented with format. Shorter matches are in vogue. The current Grand Prix kicked off with a weird league format. Even the TV companies have attempted to jolly things along with snappier graphics and instant slow-motion replays (yes, really) featuring an exciting "thunk!" noise when the ball hits the pocket. Needless to say, none of this has made any difference. "I want to be like Billy the Kid. Lots of snooker players are too intense and serious," O'Sullivan said this week. This is, of course, just talk. Billy the Kid didn't play snooker. And if he did, he would have been rubbish at it. Snooker remains unchangeably what it is: a business of potting balls, sitting in a chair and occasionally shaking hands.

Which isn't to say that vultures aren't circling the professional game. Rumours persist that many leading players have been tempted by offers to join the lucrative US pool circuit, where they can be given silly nicknames and paid lots more money to pot five balls rather than 21. There is much hopeful talk of the sport's fevered popularity in China, a country with a vast and mythical appetite for boredom.

Whatever happens, the game itself will remain the same. Gray shouldn't be hounded for falling asleep during his own match. Far from betraying the sport, he may just have been making a public stand for the great, boundless, glacial - and occasionally very boring - forces that make it so much fun in the first place.