Flights of fancy

The World Darts Championship (well, one of the two) reaches its climax this weekend. To try to understand the game's appeal, Brian Viner spends the day with a beer-swilling crowd of Vikings

It is midnight in Frimley Green, Surrey. In fact, it might as well always be midnight in Frimley Green, at least during the Embassy World Darts Championship at the Lakeside Country Club, where daylight, like trouble, is not encouraged. There are 10 licensed doormen to keep out trouble, and during the afternoon sessions they doubtless do a good job of blocking the daylight, too. They are very large men indeed, and they take such manifest pride in keeping order that it's clear that by becoming bouncers at the Lakeside they have, in the dartboard of life, scored bull's-eyes.

But by midnight their evening's work is almost done. Most of the punters have left, although outside the Lakeside a curious scene is unfolding, featuring eight drunken Dutchmen in novelty hats and a drunken Englishman with tattoos of Dracula on his arms and chest.

The Dutchmen are telling the man with the Dracula tattoos that they "theenk hje iss fantasteeck". He is 34-year-old Ted Hankey, nicknamed the Count, a former Embassy world champion who tonight, despite the intimidating effect on his opponent of a new cape that opens out into bat wings, has surprisingly been eliminated. Since his defeat, the Count, who lives not in Transylvania but in Telford, has been submerging his sorrows in bottle after bottle of the eerily blue alcopop WKD. His mum and dad have been helping him to prop up the bar in the players' lounge. The Count's dad is anxious to get him back to the hotel, but his mother disagrees vehemently.

"Leave him, he's with his fans," she shrieks. She too seems to have had a couple over the eight. "You've got the 2004 world champion here," she tells the Dutchmen, with just a hint of menace, as if daring them to disagree, which of course they don't. Eventually, they all lurch into the night, leaving me to reflect on my inaugural visit to the world's biggest darts tournament.

Unlike just about everyone else at the Lakeside, I barely know my arrers from my elbow. But I do know that there are, confusingly, two world championships. One is the event that finished last weekend at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, Essex, organised by the breakaway Professional Darts Corporation. The other is the Embassy, which concludes on Sunday, and takes place under the proud auspices of the British Darts Organisation.

There is plenty of needle between the PDC and the BDO. The PDC, sneer the BBC-favoured BDO, stands for Phil's Darts Club, Phil being Phil "The Power" Taylor, who until last Sunday was the PDC world champion for as long as anyone can remember. The BDO and BBC, snap the PDC, are just jealous because Taylor, despite his defeat in the final by the Canadian John Part, remains the Michael Schumacher of darts. Whatever, both tournaments offer the same first prize – £50,000 – but the Embassy, now in its 26th year and harder to qualify for, undoubtedly carries more prestige.

And the fans feel the prestige as much as the players. "I'd always told my six children that before I die I want to go to Frimley Green," says Gwen Bradley, a 64-year-old great-grandmother from Nottingham, who's nursing a vodka and bitter lemon. "And I had heart trouble last year so I think they thought they ought to send me before I snuff it. They gave me the tickets on Christmas Day and I cried. It's the best Christmas present I've ever had."

Gwen – who has not missed a single dart since the 2003 tournament began, except when buying vodka and bitter lemons for her and her friend Pauline Topham – has only one regret; that she is not able to grace this long-awaited occasion with her best frock. "We're staying over at the Monkey Puzzle in Farnborough, and we have to catch two buses to get here every day, so I have to dress up warm."

In the Lakeside auditorium, keeping warm is no problem. It is heaving with humanity at its sweatiest and most raucous. So remarkable is the spectacle, in fact, that not one but two feature films are being made here this week, around and between the matches. One stars Ralf Little from The Royle Family, the other the comedian Johnny Vegas. Darts has hit the big time.

And I have hit, or at least become pressed up against in a crush at the bar, a ferocious-looking character with four sovereign rings on one hand and a goatee on the first of several chins. Her boyfriend is no looker, either. Darts, it has to be said, does not attract pulchritude, which may be why such a fuss is being made of Robert Wagner – not the film star, but a similarly dishy former bodybuilder from Austria, this year making his debut in the Embassy.

Still, for all the flesh, and all the sweat, and all the cigarette smoke – which must bring joy to the hearts of the sponsors Imperial Tobacco, but makes me wonder whether it is possible to contract and die from a passive-smoking-related disease within a single evening – it is fun being at the Lakeside. Opinion is divided on whether darts deserves to be called a sport, but it sure is cracking entertainment.

Between the matches, the venerable master of ceremonies, Martin Fitzmaurice – a London Underground train-driver before he found his métier telling the world who's next on the oche – even engages in some vulgar stand-up comedy. He asks a vast-bellied man in the audience whether he has a girlfriend. The man nods. "She obviously doesn't suffer from vertigo," says Fitzmaurice, elaborating unnecessarily that she must, out of survival instinct, prefer going on top during sexual intercourse.

Making stoutist jibes at the Embassy World Darts Championship is akin to shooting fish in barrels, but everybody laughs anyway. Besides, Fitzmaurice is like an Irishman telling Irish jokes; it's hard to accuse him of insensitivity, since he is weeble-shaped himself. Moreover, an extravagant waist measurement is still worn by some in darts as a badge of pride. In the case of Fitzmaurice, the Embassy programme even draws attention to it; until he recently slimmed down to a sylph-like 20 stone, he boasted, it excitedly proclaims, a 56-inch waist

The image of darts is trimmer than it was in the obese heyday of Jocky Wilson and Leighton Rees, and it is 10 years since competitors were permitted to take alcoholic drinks on to the stage with them, but the legacy endures of the Not the Nine O'Clock News Fatbelly Gutbucket sketch, in which competitors tried to outdrink each other while darts were casually thrown in the background.

After all, darts is still predominantly a pub game; indeed Andy Fordham, rated fifth in the world and nicknamed the Viking, is landlord of the Queen's Arms, Woolwich, and the size of a people-carrier. He is also Gwen Bradley's hero. "We love the Viking, love him to bits," she tells me. But the Viking, I venture irreverently, is physically one of the least prepossessing players around. "Yeah, but he don't have a mardy when he loses," she explains. "We love him anyway, don't we Pauline?"

Coming to the oche now, though, at just after 10.15pm, is the decidedly svelte James Wade, aged just 19, a left-handed tyro like Billy the Kid and tipped for greatness. He is an Embassy debutant, too, as is his opponent, Dennis Harbour, whose proficiency at finding double-top once won him a car on the television programme Bullseye. Unlike the Count, neither is a full-time darts professional. Wade is a mechanic, Harbour a cable-cutter. Most of the audience are rooting loudly for Wade, a local boy, although bellowing relentlessly into my left ear is one of Harbour's fan club, Ronnie Johnson, who plays in the Cambridgeshire B team. Harbour, she tells me, is the big-hitter for Cambridgeshire A. I ask whether he's a nice fella; Wade, I have heard, has a streak of arrogance.

"Dennis is absolutely gorgeous, he lives in Peterborough," she says. Before I have time to explore this apparent non sequitur, the match gets under way. Wade takes an early lead but, despite narrowing his assassin's eyes to little more than slits, repeatedly misses the doubles he needs to win the match. Harbour eventually prevails, and comes over to hug fellow members of the Cambridgeshire team, to whom I overhear him complaining that Wade kept putting him off by loudly snorting up phlegm. Seemingly there is gamesmanship, as well as showmanship, on the oche.

Both gamesmanship and showmanship thrive in the crowd, too. The last match of the evening features Steve Coote, a Bolton firefighter, whose many fans keep chanting "We love you, Cootey, we do!", to the discernible irritation of his opponent, Melvyn King. The Coote fans, of whom there are several hundred, are all wearing imitation firefighters' helmets, which brings me to the second-strangest thing about the Frimley Green audience: almost all of them seem to be wearing silly headgear, the silliest of which, in the form of bright orange wigs with pigtails, are sported by four strapping Dutchmen from Nieuwegein, near Utrecht. And this in turn brings me to by far and away the strangest thing about the Frimley Green audience: at least half of it seems to be Dutch.

Evidently, darts has for quite a few years been massive in the Netherlands, and has grown even more massive since Raymond van Barneveld, a massive postman from The Hague, became Embassy world champion in 1998, retaining his title in 1999.

The young men from Nieuwegein are not affluent – one works in a bar, another in a supermarket – yet they are each paying about €1,300 (£850) to spend a week in Frimley Green. It is their first time here, and like Gwen Bradley, they are in heaven. "The only surprise is that we thought every Englishman would be following the darts, but many don't even know it is happening," says Frank, who speaks the best English of the four, but can hear my questions only by lifting a nylon orange pigtail. "We got our tickets on the internet and we are staying at a Toby Carvery, which is very good."

This, it turns out, is a great deal more than Frank can say for the quality of the Lakeside's beer, of which he is none the less drinking copious quantities. "In Holland, if you order a beer and leave it there for one hour, it tastes like this. And then you throw it away. This is dead and warm, like piss, but you get used to it."

Bob Potter, I fancy, will not be happy to hear his beer compared with piss. Potter is the indefatigable 74-year-old owner of the Lakeside, and much in evidence during Embassy week, bustling around with the energy – if not the spotted bow tie with matching breast handkerchief – of a man 50 years younger.

While Mervyn King is beating Steve Coote, to the anguish of the coach parties from Bolton in their yellow firefighters' hats, Potter fills me in on the history of the Lakeside, which he built in 1972. "We've had everyone here," he says. "Sammy Davis Junior played here three times, and the third time, he died a month before he came."

Not for the first time tonight, I find myself thoroughly bamboozled. But there is no time for analysis; Potter is unstoppable. "Nowhere in England has had more stars than the Lakeside," he continues. "And before I built this place I ran the Agincourt in Camberley, where we had The Beatles, the Stones, Bee Bumble and the Stingers, everyone."

The Embassy, he adds, is one of the most profitable weeks even in the Lakeside's glittering calendar of events – next up, Jim Davidson, followed by international ballroom dancing. "We've done it for 18 years, but it took three years to get the crowd right, to get rid of the trouble, to sort out the wheat from the chaff."

Having seen the wheat, I'm dying to know what became of the chaff. Maybe it wound up at the Circus Tavern, Purfleet.