My parents’ bedroom was womblike. It was still daylight but the curtains were drawn and the soft summer rain outside added an ambient calm. From a TV in the next room I could hear the muffled cries of the commentator Steve Cram as Mo Farah sprinted away to win gold in the 2012 Olympics: a magical sporting moment.
My father, Sid Waddell, a darts commentator renowned for his high-octane, colourful commentary, would have loved it. But he was lying in bed, desperately ill, a few days from death. I was sitting in vigil beside him. The rest of my family were out.
He was drifting in and out of consciousness, and when he was conscious he was barely lucid. But then his eyes opened, he half turned towards me and smiled. “Where are they?” his voice was a hoarse, dry whisper. I picked up a glass of water and helped him take a sip. “They’re having a bite to eat. They’ll be back in a bit.”
I felt his hand squeeze mine. I think he knew from my voice I was crying.
He turned again, this time to face me. This is not how he wanted it to be, wasting away like this in front of us.
“We had some laughs didn’t we?”
I let out a snotty, teary laugh.
“Did we ever,” I said.
The truth is, we had to laugh because Sid wasn’t like other dads. I know many people claim that of their fathers, but I say it with absolute conviction. He was an unconventional, eccentric man with a unique story. The son of a miner in a pit village in the north-east, he lived in dread of the colliery siren that signalled an accident in the mine. So he buried himself in books, got into grammar school, was awarded a scholarship to Cambridge University, went into television, tried folk singing, novel-writing and scriptwriting with varying degrees of success, before stumbling into darts, where he made his name weaving the likes of Attila the Hun, Wittgenstein and Madonna into his commentaries, often during the same match.
He approached parenting like he did darts: differently, and with lots of beer. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I realised he wasn’t like other dads, but it might have been when I was off school ill and he took me with him to work in Manchester. At Leeds station he bought me a comic, which I started to read as the train pulled out. “What’s the duck doing to the lady?” I asked.
Sid glanced up from his newspaper to see. Howard the Duck, for it was he, was mounting a naked woman with naked breasts. “Playing,” he said, confiscating it.
I was four years old.
Or it might have been when I realised that Sid, unlike every other dad I knew, didn’t drive. This was a relief to the drivers of West Yorkshire as Sid was temperamentally unsuited to it, but it also gave any journey with him an epic quality.
He once took me from my grandparents’ house in the north-east to watch Liverpool play Manchester City at Maine Road. We rose at dawn, and took two long bus rides to Newcastle station, where we had a sausage sandwich. Then we rode a train to Leeds, before taking a rattler across the Pennines. After the match we took a train back to Bradford and another bus home in the dark.
I felt like I had crossed continents. The Match of the Day cameras had been at the game and I was allowed to stay up, but I was so exhausted I fell asleep on the sofa before the end of Dallas.
Or it could have been when I found him sitting in his armchair one day, muttering under his breath about someone at work who had said something to upset him. I asked if he was all right. I wasn’t used to seeing him brood.
“Can I give you some advice, kidda?”
I nodded, keen for some fatherly wisdom. “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink.”
I was 11 years old.
Sid was not the sort of dad who taught you to ride a bike. Or change a plug. But he did teach me not to take myself or life too seriously, as well as how to behave in a pub, all of which has proved more than useful.
In fact, I think I taught him more about the practical side of life than he taught me. He couldn’t cook but I showed him how to make a rudimentary bolognese sauce. Then when he finally and reluctantly got a mobile phone, which he held as if it would explode in his hand, he asked me what the symbol in the right hand corner meant. “It means you’ve got messages,” I said.
I showed him how to dial in to retrieve them. There were more than 50 messages, all unlistened to, going back at least six months. He was an analogue man in a digital world.
When I was growing up, my three sisters, stepbrother and I didn’t see that much of him. His day job as a television producer in Manchester meant he left our house in Leeds before we woke up and often got back after I had gone to bed.
So when I had the chance to go to the darts World Championship in Stoke-on-Trent with my mate Glen when I was 12, I grabbed it because it meant more time with him.
I still remember us standing on the pavement outside Jollees Cabaret Club as the rain slanted down in sheets, then being ushered in through some double doors to be met with a miasma of fag smoke as thick as a pea-souper and a gigantic beery roar as Eric Bristow hit a double. Then it fell silent as the next leg started (“You could hear the drip off a chip” as Sid once said). It felt like I’d not only crossed into the world of darts but the world of men.
From there, Glen and I were taken through the fug to a tiny prefab hut where Sid was commentating. Sid was not a big man but his energy was uncontainable and in there he was “like a buffalo in an airing cupboard” (that was Dylan Thomas not Sid, but could easily have been one of his).
Inside, Sid waved manically before turning back to his monitor, microphone pressed so tight to his lips it looked as if he might swallow it. On stage, Bristow hit double 16 to take the set. “With all the accuracy of a Kalashnikov rifle!” he screamed.
Glen and I were in hysterics. Not because Sid didn’t know the first thing about guns, but because he had leapt from his seat as he spoke, rising like a centre forward straining for a header. “The rug was pulled and the mat was sent!” he shouted and sat back down.
Nearly 33 years on, I’m still not sure what that line meant. It didn’t matter, Glen and I thought it was hilarious.
I didn’t miss a world championship for the next 12 years, and few others until Sid died. It was still precious time with my dad, to laugh, sing and dance. Unlike home, there were no curfews or early nights, or any boundaries at all. However, darts players don’t make great babysitters. There was one terrifying episode when an inebriated player took command of the hotel shuttle bus, with me and my two mates in the back, and drove us straight across a roundabout until the keys were wrestled off him, and another more salutary one when I was hustled by a darts player on the pool table and Sid had to pay my debt.
Sid always referred to the darts as a boy scout jamboree with beer and as I reached drinking age – about 14 in Sid’s book – the memories become hazier and more blurred. “A night to dismember,” Sid would say in the morning, as we pushed our hotel eggs and bacon queasily round a greasy plate.
No matter how many times he said it, we still laughed.
• We Had Some Laughs: My Dad, the Darts and Me by Dan Waddell is published by Bantam Press, £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
