Ted Lowe

Well-loved voice of television snooker

Ted Lowe's whispering commentary on Pot Black brought snooker to a mass audience
Ted Lowe, who has died at the age of 90 after a short illness, was the voice of snooker commentary from the time the game began to be shown on television until his retirement in 1996. He continued to follow the sport for the rest of his life. Born in Lambourn, Berkshire, Lowe was an enthusiastic amateur player, and became involved in mainstream snooker in 1947 with his appointment as manager of Leicester Square Hall, London. This was the shop window of the professional game, when the roost was ruled, on and off the table, by Joe Davis. Lowe's duties ran from introducing the players, to drumming up publicity, to cleaning the toilets. The BBC used its man of all sports, Raymond Glendenning, for its earliest commentaries, but when he showed up one day with laryngitis, Lowe was thrust into the breach. There was no commentary box, so from the fourth – and back – row of the audience he adopted the "whispering" style that became his trademark. At the other end of the scale, he once commentated from the gods at Blackpool Tower Circus, where he could distinguish between Fred Davis and Walter Donaldson only by "Walter's bald head". Snooker in those days was a niche sport with a rarely changing cast of fewer than a dozen professionals. In 1955, Leicester Square Hall closed after a rent review, and Lowe became sales manager for Ind Coope, the brewers. "Basically I was drinking for a living," he once quipped in relation to the social and entertaining duties to which this sociable man was well suited. In its years in the wilderness, snooker was limited to black and white showings on BBC's Saturday afternoon Grandstand programme. But in 1969 colour came to BBC2 and there was suddenly a requirement for low-budget programmes to which colour was intrinsic. Through its variety of values for different balls, snooker qualified amply on both counts and Philip Lewis, one of the Grandstand producers, rang Lowe to ask if he had any ideas. From this, Pot Black was born, with Lowe providing the players and of course the commentary. An entirely new audience for the game was captivated by keen competition between impeccably dressed and behaved players. Adopting the views of Joe Davis, his lifelong hero, Lowe had strict views on the standards of dress and decorum to be expected of a snooker professional, and clashed with Alex Higgins for that reason. Pot Black contributed to snooker's emergence as a major television attraction, though Lowe could never be persuaded that Stephen Hendry, Steve Davis or any of the modern greats could seriously be compared to Joe. While the modern style of commentary leans heavily on shot analysis, Lowe's was more atmospheric and economical, letting the action largely speak for itself. One word, a surprised and concerned "No", said it all when Steve Davis overcut the short-range black that handed the epic 1985 world final to Dennis Taylor. Sometimes Lowe was an inadvertent source of humour. "For those of you watching in black and white," he once said when not all households had colour sets, "the pink is next to the green." Such remarks seemed only to increase the affection in which he was widely held. He had no enemies in the game and was always on the alert to do it a good turn. The minute's applause for him before the start of this year's world championship final was warm and heartfelt. He is survived by his second wife, Jean, and his son, Michael. • Ted (Edwin Charles) Lowe, snooker commentator, born 1 November 1920; died 1 May 2011