Speechification

In a week when the return of the messiah to Newcastle United has thankfully shifted the spotlight from off-field events at my team Liverpool, what better time to assess the ‘Geordie Nation’? And who better to explain it than Sid Waddell? And how better to explain it than to put him on Australia’s ABC Radio National and get him to try to explain to Australians, in the form of The Sports Factor’s gently bemused host, Mick O’Regan?

Sid Waddell is something of a legend in his field, and his chosen field is darts commentary. A real eccentric, hearing him articulate the attraction of both darts and Geordies is quite something. It gives some sense of what Waddell’s commentary is like - though we could’ve done with a few more recordings - and you can hear his Cambridge education occasionally surfacing amidst the maelstrom of a professional game of darts, such as in the now classic sequence:

“When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer …

Eric Bristow is only 27.”

And all this delivered with a fabulously rich Geordie accent (which he claims to soften for the benefit of listening Australians.) He also repeatedly tries to claim some deep spiritual connection between the Geordies and the Australians. He nearly gets away with it, but not really. Martin Kellner from The Guardian also phones in to explain the phenomenon that is Sid, and darts.

Nil points for Waddell’s terrible rendition of ‘When the boat comes in’ at the end, but top marks otherwise.

The Sports Factor: Darts: Verbal and regular (mp3)

This entry was posted by by dan on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 10:53 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.