MUCH though events at the World Grand Prix in Dublin last week absorbed us as only top-class darting action can, the temptation to look forward dreamily to the forthcoming head-to-head between the world champions of darts, Phil “The Power” Taylor and Andy “The Viking” Fordham, proved hard to resist. Mostly it proved hard to resist because any resistance one could muster was eventually ground to powder beneath the tracks of the tank that is Sky Sports’ trailer for the event — a noisy masterpiece of the genre, even by Sky’s unflinchingly deafening standards in this area.

Imagine the traditional boxing promotion, voiced, as ever, with a threatening low retch by someone who appears to have spent the past month or so gargling with lit matches. Then multiply it by about 74. “Two world champions,” the voice says. “One oche.” Meanwhile, lightning flashes and large, unsmiling faces loom menacingly from the half-light.

The implicit message that this is the heavyweight encounter to end all heavyweight encounters will possibly irk boxing fans and may also get under the skin of those last few hold-outs who don’t accept that darts is sport of the noblest kind. But it’s hard to dispute in the literal sense. I think The Power himself would happily admit that, even in his recent, controversially slimmed-down version, he doesn’t straightforwardly present as lithe.

As for Fordham . . . well, some historians claim there is archaeological proof that he is the original mountain that Muhammad eventually had to go to. An entire undiscovered tribe is widely believed to be eking out an existence in a remote region of his darts smock. At dusk, bears come out and play on his lower slopes. Thus there’s more than a small amount of justice in Sky’s superb, clinching tag-line: “This world is not big enough for the both of them.”

To take an early temperature reading, Helen Chamberlain visited The Power (PDC world champion and thus Sky’s man in the impending clash) at his house in Stoke-on-Trent. “Do you realise how massive this match is?” The Power indicated that the scale of it had not escaped him.

Incidentally, this was not the only time we were invited into The Power’s lovely home last week. On Thursday, on Tim Lovejoy’s All-Stars — essentially Chris Evans’s TFI Friday, except without Chris Evans and on a Thursday — The Power had been the honoured subject of the “Whose Loo?” slot. This is an inspired brain-teaser in which we are invited to identify a celebrity through his or her taste in porcelain and taps. After Thursday’s glimpses of a highly polished inner sanctum, I’ve got to hold a hand up and say that my money was on Susan Hampshire. But no: it was the upstairs bathroom of the greatest darter who ever lived.

Given that this was the week in which The Power was startlingly dumped out of the World Grand Prix by a qualifier in the first round, you could begin to see why Taylor’s prominence in the media has been known to rankle among his peers. They’re on the oche, he’s on the loo; but it’s still The Power who’s getting the coverage. That’s the harsh reality of showbusiness, though. Fame draws a crowd, even in the bathroom. And if Colin “Jaws” Lloyd wants to get his bog on television, he knows what he has to do.

Meanwhile, the BBC, in Bridlington for the BDO’s Winmau World Masters, tracked its man to hospital. Yes, hospital: never the best place to find a heavyweight with less than a month to go to a big bout. The bad news is that Fordham fractured his wrist in a fall in the Netherlands. The good news is that no Dutch people were underneath him at the time. The even better news is that he expects to be fit.

The BBC was there when the cast came off and when the pins were removed — an indelible and surprising image, even in the days of Cosmetic Surgery — Live. In fact, it was hard to decide which was the weekend’s more gruelling sight: Fordham’s flesh after a couple of weeks without daylight, or the sight of Quentin Willson, the motoring journalist, attempting the cha-cha-cha on Strictly Come Dancing. Willson got his ballroom comeuppance, big-time, from the judges, but sport’s interest in the second series of this prestige Saturday-night contest is still alive in the shapes of Roger Black and Denise Lewis.

It’s up to one of those Olympic athletes to make up for the disappointment suffered by Martin “Chariots” Offiah in the first series, but they’ve got their work cut out in a tough field. Aled Jones certainly knows his way around a chiffon shirt. Carol Vorderman is no slouch. And that Esther Rantzen can clearly produce a performance when she needs to.

Yet it was Lewis and her partner who topped the board at the end of the first evening, after a waltz of style and substance to the tune of True Love — and this while wearing a pink number with the kind of vast, floor-sweeping sleeves in which you could easily conceal a Ford Mondeo. “I’m not only speechless, but I don’t know what to say,” Lewis said. And she wasn’t alone.