a post-midnight audience for any British television channel. The total match time of 14 hours and 50 minutes is the longest ever recorded for a best-of-35-frames match. It is the only final at this venue to contain no century breaks.

The final is one of the most famous matches in snooker history and part of the reason for the surge in the sport's popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Two hour-long BBC documentaries, When Snooker Ruled the World from 2002 and Davis v Taylor: The '85 Black Ball