Sid Waddell began throwing darts seriously down at his local, The Voltaire. "We got there early," he gushes in the famous Geordie rap, "and the landlord gave us free drink. Later on the other team arrives, four trainee vicars from a nearby college. Their round is three half shandies and an orange. One of them had a dog collar on, another smoked a pipe. We got beaten. So I was always destined for the traumatic side of darts."

This was back in 1959 when the teenager broke with Northumberland mining tradition and left for Cambridge University while his father continued his job as a salvage man. Waddell was from Ashington, land of the Milburn and Charlton scions, where football was the alternative to a life in the coal mine.

"My father had one of the most dangerous jobs in the pit, the guys who pull the props out. That's what he did. I'm not that clever but I have a photographic memory and I have the patter. The masters saw that if I could crack that memory and start to really use my brains, I could get somewhere. So in Cambridge I did modern history, from 1450 to 1914, European and American and the Scottish Enlightenment. I ended up with a very good 2.1. Didn't do the work for a first."

It is arguable that Waddell would have emerged as The Voice of Darts, the Geordie Lip, even without the Cambridge instruction. Since 1977, when BBC2 first broadcast his off-kilter accent, Waddell has become the beloved chronicler of the old pub game of nerves and ale. He is to darts what Johnny Carson was to talk shows, Sinatra to melody.

"I speak totally from me throat - opposite of an actor's voice. No Joseph Locke stuff. And I'm asthmatic as well so I have to pause at odd times," he grins, delighting in the fact that his shortcomings have shaped his strength: individuality.

The "posh British papers", as Waddell terms the broadsheets, have all done portrait jobs on him, writing him up, he says "as some kind of warped genius." "I remember the Observer using this line I had about Phil Taylor being "like a Leopard on the snows of Kilimanjaro". They had it in as a sort of 'Colemanballs' thing - they didn't understand the reference to the Hemingway story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro . What is a leopard, who likes hot, flat sandy surface doing at 26,000 feet in a snowstorm? It was Taylor - he was so far ahead of the rest, he was like a leopard in a snowstorm. They never got it but I never said anything. Not my job to educate."

Since darts had a second TV coming through Sky, Waddell has been encouraged to lay on the performance. Soap stars, philosophers, layman's French, anything that comes to mind is thrown at the viewer.

"I don't want to attract the darts fan, I want the old dear to put down her knitting, the young lassie to stop doing her hair. Ideally, I want the 'Leu-ded reada' (Loaded reader) to sit down with a kebab and have his girlfriend explain the literary allusions to him. I find that idea pleasing."

Waddell believes darts offers a degree of profile to a culture and lifestyle in Britain that has been disenfranchised over the past three decades and that it captures a humour, a decency and above all, a tradition.

"I think the game is steeped in the occupation. Very few surgeons here or accountants. But a lot of these lads playing here know how to hump a bag of coal. It tends to be salt of the earth, working class lads from manufacturing stock. And you can't really take the pub out of the darts players. It's like the guys who lay stone or go down pit or lay steel - out of work at four o'clock, have your tea, have a sluice, in pub at half-six with your fags, your roll-up and your pint and your cardigan on and you sit back and go 'aaah'. That's the sort of culture that darts has emerged from and I think it's great that it stays so constant to that."

Still, darts culture is easily parodied since the epic drinking feats caught the tabloid and popular imagination. Jocky Wilson and Alan Evans were at the forefront of the darts wild bunch, ogres of men with delicate wrists and the sweetest of temperaments.

"That was the thing, they are all big jolly fellas. And real. If a player is throwing crap, you can say it. A commentator couldn't say that about Roy Keane or Nasser Hussein. But darts players demand it of you. People reckon the characters have left darts but I think it's just that the direction of the game has changed. Lads practise four and five hours a day now but still have a few drinks between games, which is fine with Sky. But in the old days, yeah, Jocky might knock back half a bottle of vodka and three or four pints and then get up and play brilliantly.

"Jocky was a genius on the oche. Had me best moments commentating on him and the late Alan Evans, a pioneer of the game. He used go round in this mauve Daimler back in 1976, always getting his hair done. A great old pal."

So, then, buoyed as it is by vast quantities of booze, what is darts? A sport or a game, a noble pursuit of balance, verve and hand-to-eye co-ordination or a good way to kick-start a bender?

"Well," says the Lip, "one of the best tributes ever paid to darts was from Wittgenstein, a great bloke, one of the brightest of all the philosophers. He said language was like trying to define sport. Language crosses borders, be it in a song or in a legal document, in talking to the wife or to a vicar - it's exactly the same as trying to work out what sport is. So is darts a sport or game? Dunno, but if it was good enough for Wittgenstein, it'll do for me."

Sid is 61 now and reckons he has "neva been happia". Sky treats darts coverage seriously, giving it a jazzy, upbeat image that suits Waddell's commentary style.

"I just say what I like. Got a lot of stick for saying, 'John Lowe, when he gets to Claycross, you'd think the Ayatollah Khomeini had come home.' But that's the way I am. No one's going to buy a house on what I say or sign a treaty on what I say. So I talk, I shout, I throw in French, Italian. Sir Walta' Scott. Joyce. I hope I'm still doing this when I'm 70."

n Sid Waddell is commentating on the World Grand Prix from Citywest for Sky Sports. His tip for Sunday night's live final is Richie Burnett.