Darts: Presenting: the master of allusions, the oracle of the oche, the bard of the board

Interview Sid Waddell: Darts would never have been the same without its loquacious ambassador. Nick Townsend talks - or rather listens - to him

It is hot in the commentary box. Hot as a tropical fever ward. Must be those metaphors and similes pinging around and colliding like atoms which create all that excess energy and heat. The outpouring of verbal allusions barely ceases. Quicker, you might suggest, than the trigger fingers at the OK Corral. There's something about spending any time with Sid Waddell that gets you at it, too. But there's no way you can compete with the master of allusions, this bard of the board, for either speed or complex analogies.

We are in the Circus Tavern, Purfleet, Essex, venue of the Professional Darts Corporation world championship, which concludes tonight. In progress, a third-round match between Dennis Smith and Denis Ovens. Waddell is rocking on his chair. Just a hint of perspiration appears on his forehead. He wipes it away with a flannel. Takes a swig of water. Smith prepares to throw.

Microphone poised, Waddell allows his partner for the match, Dave Lanning (yeah, that's him, the guy who used to commentate on speedway), to size up the image first: "Sphinx-like in his emotions," growls Lanning as the impassive features of the ponytailed Smith fill the TV monitor before them. "Aye, the Charles Bronson in emotions," Tyneside's most tortured tonsils cut in with precision timing, "... everything from A ta B."

Waddell's voice rises to a crescendo as he delivers that assessment. "Like a banshee on fire," as Waddell describes himself. Outside the box, the closest spectators can hear him. There is a burst of approval, no doubt repeated in many homes and pubs. For a moment, the question does pose itself: could there be the slightest danger that the man, blessed with this enduring gift of the Geordie gab, could be bigger than the sport itself? "I've never thought people switch on just to listen to me," he reflects. "I think I'm Moses. And the game's Jesus. I'm like a preacher."

To some, that may sound suspiciously like an entry from the management ethos of David Brent, Ricky Gervais's pathetic comic creation. But Waddell's delivery raises at worst a smile, not a grimace. At 62, this grandfather, now resident in Pudsey, Yorkshire, remains the orator of the oche, his idiosyncratic despatch of words placing him in the same style-file as the late Eddie Waring and the still eloquent veteran Stuart Hall. Unlike Brent, he also manages to be both superbly self-assured and engagingly self-deprecating.

Waddell halts in full flow, coughing vio-lently. "The dry ice," he explains (the players emerge through the stuff, disco lights twirling, at this glitzy tournament, like strutting pugilists) before continuing: "It's a job I never dreamt of. I'm asthmatic and I've got an awful voice. It's quite a personal achievement to have got on the telly with it. Me dad was in hysterics when he heard that 'wor Sid was on the telly, talking about something that he knew nothing about'."

He adds: "See, me mother wanted me to be a priest. Me dad, who was down the pit for 48 years, wanted me to be a nuclear scientist. Trouble was I was never very good at maths and I was never that hot on religion. But I suppose I was bred for it; socially, me parents loved darts, and so did half the village of Lynemouth, near Ashington, where we lived."

Later, in the players' bar – possibly the only sport where the participants visit such a location before a performance – we discuss Waddell's first contribution to the evolution of darts as a TV sport, not a natural progression for a man who had won a scholarship to Cambridge where he gained an honours degree in modern history before beginning a career as a documentary-maker, scriptwriter and TV director.

Without hesitation, he recalls the date of his first stint as darts commentator: 5 February 1978. The place: Nottingham. "I was working at the BBC in Manchester and before that had produced the Indoor League [which featured pub pursuits], so I knew the players. At the BBC bar I used to bend the ear of anyone who would listen that darts deserved a place on national telly.

"Anyway, Nick Hunter, head of sport at Manchester, decided to have a go at showing darts on TV, but they didn't have any commentators. He told his secretary: 'Send that Geordie bloke who never shuts up about it'. He chucked me into the deep end with David Vine. I sat with David on a balcony overlooking the action. It was a seven-a-side tournament. I just launched into it as I do now.

It went out on Grandstand on the Saturday, and at the end Frank Bough said: 'Wow, there's an enthusiast'. I did the world championship a few months later and I've never looked back."

Not that he didn't go to extraordinary lengths initially in the perfection of his art. "An hour before a game I was commentating on I'd be in a pub drinking tomato juice and listening to the Rolling Stones' 'Honky Tonk Women' – just to get me rhythm of speaking right," he explains. "I used to get very nervous when I was working for the BBC.

"A lot of the officials thought a player should be the commentator. I was very conscious about not knowing the 87 ways out from a 112. So I'd sit in the corner, with the scorebook, memorising bits of the scores, or standing at a board and throwing them, and just listening to the Stones. In fact, I got asked to leave a pub in Stoke-on-Trent once because I played 'Honky Tonk Women' seven times on the trot!"

The BBC were not entirely certain at first what to make of him, a man who describes himself as "manic, vivid and demotic, because I'm very much a working-class lad, albeit with a Cambridge education". He adds: "Someone once described me as resembling free-association jazz; like when Sidney Bechet would change from the clarinet to the soprano sax and go all over the spectrum of music.

"Sky's way of presenting darts needs our style. They produce it like a pop concert, because you can't put on 61 hours of this, a slightly one-dimensional sport, with monotone or dull commentary. Essentially, you're trying to convey the drama which is not always apparent."

That is why Waddell also enjoys commentating on pool, which has a worldwide audience. "I'm very big in the Philippines," he advises you deadpan. Waddell admits he would have also relished an opportunity behind the mike at cricket. "Except I'd drive the others mad," he says. "They tend to be England captains, and they tend to be dignified, and they tend to hedge their bets, apart from Boycott, who's one of my idols along with John Madden, the great American football guy. Boycs is a bit like me, he can be cruel about the thing."

Hence, the garrulous Geordie will always be remembered for such observations as he made about one certain player: "He may practise 12 hours a day, but he's not shy of the burger van!" Or the somewhat more surreal: "His physiognomy is that of a weeping Madonna."

Only once has his verbal jousting upset any of the participants. And that wasn't even a player. "Eric Bristow's mum once hit me with a handbag because I implied that her son was scared of Jocky Wilson. She came up to me and said: 'My son is scared of no man.' I said: 'I don't care. Jocky's a beast.' And she whopped me in the middle of the chest."

Wilson – "one of my best pals, in fact I wrote his life story" – ranks among his three favourite players of all time. Another is Alan Evans. "The first professional, a little guy from the valleys who was a genius. He's dead now, sadly." And finally, inevitably, Phil Taylor. "We never thought we'd ever see a master at this game, but we've not only seen that but a guy who will never be emulated. It's been a hell of a privilege to be a commentator in the Taylor era. You could have everything, be Prince Charles or Billy Connolly, and still not have that privilege."

To the sport's aficionados, Waddell is a much-loved ambassador – someone whose enthusiasm for the sport has never been diluted – while his cerebral approach also endeared him to those who thought oche was something you played with a crooked stick. The character who combines the impudent smile and wit of an Eric Morecambe and sharp tongue of Terry in The Likely Lads says: "I think some people picked up with darts because of me being on it, and I do have a cult following. But they're the edge: the students, the internet guys. It's the same as Colemanballs, the same as collecting cock-ups. Most people watch the games just because they love darts."

Here at the Circus Tavern, crunched in the most unprepossessing part of Essex, between the M25 and the Thames estuary, around 1,000 of these fanatics contribute to a pub atmosphere which is lively but never excessive.

As we talk, the next two players up, 10-times world champion Phil Taylor and young challenger Wayne Mardle, wander in between practice sessions, sipping at (soft, it must be said) drinks with the insouciance of nightclubbers out on the casual pull. But for Taylor's tattooed legend on his arm, "The Power", and Mardle's trademark Hawaiian shirt, they might be any amateurs in any local. Neither bear much similarity to the grossly overweight characters portrayed by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones in a celebrated Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch when, clad like darts players, they competed against each other in downing huge quantities of alcohol.

"There was that Geordie commentator's voice screaming out: 'And now Fatbelly needs a treble gin or a double martini'," recalls Waddell. "I fell about laughing. It was sensational. But the BDO [the British Darts Organisation] didn't like it at all. I was really sneered at when I said that not only had I wished that I'd done the voice but I wished I'd written the sketch."

He adds: "I think the BDO made a big mistake after that, in actually saying no fags and no booze on the oche. It was because they were losing sponsors hand over fist. But I thought it just sanitised the game. It was wrong to do that, although it was true that Jocky [Wilson] won seven of his titles when most humans couldn't stand."

Now, the players are leaner, fitter. Taylor has apparently lost three stone in four months with a view to running in the London Marathon, Waddell confides, before continuing in mock amazement: "Anyway, they now drink chablis, would you believe."

In the early Nineties, the British Darts Corporation, a "democracy" of 17 professional players, broke away and started promoting tournaments on their own. Sky took over TV coverage, and Waddell joined them two years later. "I think it's back now as near as it'll ever be to a major sport on Sky. I don't think it will get back to the peak of 8.3 million who watched the 1983 Embassy final, but audiences are very healthy. It's the second most-watched sport to football."

The BBC, meanwhile, have continued with coverage of the BDO tournament at Frimley Green. "It doesn't have the same calibre as this," says Waddell. "I think it's still regarded by the BBC as a little bit of a sop to the working classes."

With that, it's back to the mike, to describe the Taylor v Mardle contest in this Ladbrokes-sponsored tournament, with a statement of intent. "I'm trying to make what is a cult sport a world sport, a mainline sport," concludes Waddell. "At least I used to think that, but what Phil Taylor has done in the last few years has probably made me obsolete. I'd be happy to retire. I don't know where Moses went when he retired. I suppose I'd be sat in the wilderness for the first few years."

Biography: Sid Waddell

Born: 10 August 1940 in Alnwick.

Family: Married to Irene, a TV producer, has five children and two grandchildren.

Education: Was a history scholar at St John's College, Cambridge.

Sporting career: Ran the 100 yards for the North of England against Scotland and won 40 junior rugby caps for Northumberland.

Also: Worked as a road manager for The Animals, wrote the 1980s children's television football drama 'Jossy's Giants'.

Sid on Sid: "I also bring my academic and intellectual ideas to the sport. Why not? Lord Byron was a mean billiards player and Camus played in goal for Algeria."

On darts: "Darts players are probably a lot fitter than most footballers in overall body strength."