Live from The Crucible: Sunset Vine makes the first subtle changes of many for its ongoing production of the snooker World Championship for BBC Sport By Heather McLean Thursday, April 17, 2025 - 12:47
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Sunset Vine's Scotland and London teams are working together to produce the 2025 World Championship, which is the pinnacle of British snooker
This weekend, live from The Crucible theatre in Sheffield, England, Sunset Vine's Scotland and London teams are working together to produce the 2025 World Championship, which is the pinnacle of British snooker.
Taking place from 19 April to 5 May, Sunset Vine Scotland is first to the table with 19 days of coverage of the World Championship led by executive producer and head of Sunset Vine Scotland, Grant Philips. He and his team will be producing coverage for BBC Sport and Channel 5.
The Worlds' is Sunset Vine's third snooker event of the season following the UK Championship and the Masters in the first year of its three year deal with the BBC. It took over the contract from IMG.
Speaking to SVG Europe, Philips says on filling IMG's shoes for this prestigious event: One of the big challenges is following anybody that's produced it for 20 odd years is a big task, a huge task. So I'm pleased to say that first two events, the UK Championships and the Masters, have gone well and backed up a lot of the things that we said we would do, but there's no doubt the biggest challenge lies ahead.
The World Championships is the biggest and longest event. We just have enough time to sleep and then we're back on air. So it's a huge undertaking just simply putting it on the TV to a discerning audience, and trying to make the coverage seamless so that viewers don't really notice it has a new production company. That is the big biggest task of all. So we've done OK in the first two events, so let's hope we manage it at the World Championships.
Changes afoot
Despite making the transition between production companies seamless so that viewers at home do not notice any major differences, changes are afoot that make the production Sunset Vine's. Working with the BBC, Sunset Vine has started making subtle tweaks to the production and the look of the output.
Philips explains: It's a new production for us, of course, so it's important that we give it the Sunset Vine feel. Changing it too much would probably be unnecessary, if I'm brutally honest. But we have made quite a lot of subtle changes.
We modernised some production techniques to our style and our standard, continues Philips. The first thing that we looked at was the airtime and how can we be on air longer and give the viewers a better experience. Every ball is now potted across all of BBC's multichannels, 1, 2, 4, and iPlayer website. The matches will finish live on BBC 4 in the evenings most days. So we've increased the on air time. And we've given it a brand new look and feel around how the set is, and the graphic design, and that kind of thing. So there have been quite a lot of changes already and nobody's really picked us up on anything, which is good.
He continues on working with the BBC: It's making the most of the games and how we look at it together. Most of the priorities now are around how people consume sport and TV differently than they used to, so it's just about making [this production] as successful to as many people as possible and trying not to make it too technical, but technical enough to satisfy the viewers.
The BBC have had a huge part of it. We talk if not every day, certainly every week in the buildup. And Phil Bigwood [BBC Sport executive producer for football and snooker] is our BBC point of contact and he's been really super helpful; you would think it's just putting the snooker on the telly and chatting in the gaps, but it is a very complex production over many, many hours and many, many days. So he's been super helpful and really involved us with all aspects of the BBC and introduced us to all the relevant people and thus far it's been a very seamless transition.
On the technologies being used in the production, Philips states that the cameras have been a key focus, adding that, budget of course is a big factor in upscaling cameras . He goes on: For the snooker in the auditorium the players need total silence, certainly when they're over the ball, which has made finding perfectly silent cameras a goal. The team is using Sony HDC/2500 cameras, and the operators work in silence, with the cue lights switched off on external heads.
New vision
Overall, Sunset Vine has concentrated on making differences through its crewing for 2025. One of those crew members that is set to make a differences is well-known football director, Jamie Oakford, who has in the past directed snooker but is bringing his eye for a slightly larger and singular ball, to the snooker table for the World Championship.
Says Philips: We've gone with experience. It's a great blend of technology and people. How we've attacked it is to try and provide the best crews and directors. Jamie Oakford, for example, is a director and he's one of the world's best directors, he tells me, laughs Philips. We've tried to bring experience [to the Snooker Championship] but also a different look through the way we've staffed it.
Philips adds that there is friendly competition between the directors on getting that maximum break shot on screen: I am actually directing as well, and we've got one of our chaps, Craig Coughlan from our office in Glasgow who's becoming a bit of a multisport expert and he's a huge snooker fan. In fact, both Jamie and Craig have directed at the first two events, and they both managed to cover a 147 [maximum break] eac
