EastEnders double Scott Mitchell aiming for trebles as he chases more Lakeside glory

2015 title winner bidding for a repeat performance at this year's BDO World Championships
Soap and glory: Scott Mitchell, winner of the BDO world title in 2015
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Every time the tungsten thuds into the dartboard in the Queen Vic in EastEnders, the arrow comes from the hand of Scott Mitchell.

The 2015 BDO champion is bidding for a second world title when the event gets under way on Saturday at Frimley Green’s Lakeside Country Club, all too aware of the doors that opened for him with the last win, including his moment in the soap opera limelight.

“It’s bizarre for a farmer to end up on EastEnders,” says the aptly-named Mitchell, who spends much of his time working on his father’s farm on the Dorset-Hampshire borders.

“The BDO got a call from EastEnders asking for someone to throw some darts on camera and I was only an hour away. I’ve done it a few times now. I’m in the green room with the other actors. Danny Dyer’s quite funny, they’re a nice bunch. It’s been fun.”

That 2015 victory brought with it a £100,000 cheque, most of which was spent on a tractor for his father Jeff, harking back to a promise Mitchell made as a boy. “I told him that when I was nine and it was great to be able to deliver,” Mitchell says of the tractor, which was immediately dubbed ‘Lakeside’ by the family.

Mitchell has been behind the wheel of it this week, using it to help hoist up a barn which had partially collapsed during Storm Eleanor.

It is not the only Lakeside-branded memorabilia he owns. A sofa at the home he shares with wife Sharon — bought from the earnings of his first BDO World Championship appearance — is also known as ‘the Lakeside sofa’.

As for the tractor, he says: “It’s nice as it brings back memories of 2015 every time I’m in it. This week, I’ll go from having 2,000 seagulls for company while ploughing the fields for eight or nine hours in the tractor to 2,000 people who don’t even know me screaming and shouting my name at the darts.”

Like every year, his preparation for the oche has been far from perfect as he performs the usual juggling act of his own landscape gardening business, helping on the farm that one day he will inherit and practising on his board at home.

“I never feel like I’ve done enough,” he admits. “It’s hard as you can have 24 hours of slicing down a big hedge, catching cattle and then throwing darts.

“But some nights I’m absolutely shattered and you’ve worked so hard there’s no point putting the darts in your hand. You can’t really feel it and darts is such a mental game as the last dart you throw is the one that sticks in your mind.”

Towards the end of the year, the requirements of the farm diminish, allowing him more time to focus on his Lakeside preparations.

In 2015, as he packed up his car to head to the Surrey venue, he remembers telling Sharon that “if I didn’t win it that year, I never would as everything had just been going great. Thankfully, that paid off”.

It was apt that in that final he should come up against Martin Adams — “Mr BDO” as Mitchell calls him — the underdog winning a 7-6 epic for that maiden world title.

“That was such a rollercoaster for me,” he adds. “I was so pleased to be playing Martin as he’s someone I’ve looked up to for such a long time. He made his Lakeside debut around the same age as me and we both have similar characters.

“So, to beat him was just mind-blowing. I had no idea what to do. I’d battled for three hours and then to hit that winning double, my head was in a spin.

“And, ever since that moment, every time I return to the Lakeside, it just feels like home.”

Three years on, Mitchell has made no promise of presents to his father or any other family member should he prove victorious, but the aim is just the same.

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