The better to facilitate a roving, all-terrain approach to this year’s Lakeside world darts championship, Ray Stubbs and Bobby George, the BBC’s special operations unit on the ground, are wearing headset microphones. Good move. The bewildering scope and blistering pace of an important international darts tournament means that our duo have to be permanently ready to go, be they backstage in the players’ bar, at a table in the auditorium or backstage in the players’ bar again. Unrestricted movement is a minimum requirement in such fast-developing circumstances.

The disappointment is that the technical department has issued the Stubbs/George combo with those thin, tubular microphones that football referees have, taped tightly to the cheek, which make the wearer appear to be on a drip. It’s not a good look on Mike Riley and neither is it on George, especially when taken in tandem with the darting legend’s leather-lunged, oxygen-ready chuckle. At the very least they could have found him a gold one, in keeping with his status as “The King of Bling” and the darts world’s most fearless accessoriser.

Still, the routine that’s developing goes as follows. Between games, George and Stubbs stand in the hubbub of the bar, wirelessly analysing the action, until the victorious player joins them direct from the stage. And thus far Stubbs and George have manfully resisted the urge to say: “That’s funny, we were just talking about you.”

In truth, though, there is nothing George has got to say about any darts player that he isn’t prepared to say to their face. As he openly explained to a victorious Darryl “The Dazzler” Fitton: “You’re a little bit dodgy on your finishing sometimes.” Nor did his tone so much as minutely modulate when Gary Robson wandered up, directly after defeating Tony “The Deadly Boomerang” David in what was, even by the standards of the early rounds at the Lakeside, a shocking game of darts.

“Terrible,” George said. “Awful. It was a right Mickey Mouse game. You couldn’t even hit a single treble. Terrible darts.” Honest, unsparing and, frankly, confrontational, this was sports punditry with a difference. George, on this form, could prove a valuable guide over the coming week. And this is even before we factor in the detail that he is also the only person to have publicly addressed Stubbs as “Raymond”, with the possible exception of Stubbs’s mother when she was angry with him.

All in all, the BDO World Championship at the Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green, Surrey, offers the BBC a chance to build on gains made last time, when the “poor man’s worlds” produced a water-cooler final - Martin “Wolfie” Adams managing to choke on a 6-0 lead over an abruptly transformed Phill Nixon before killing him off in the deciding set, and all to the visible confusion, astonishment and, at times, scathing contempt of the players’ watching wives.

What’s more, with the PDC’s rival event having upscaled this year from the Circus Tavern in Essex to Alexandra Palace in North London, there is room for the Lakeside to stake a belated claim to be the one true low-ceilinged home of darts. Is it interested in the challenge, though? The walk-ons would suggest not - lame, low-budget affairs, the effect of which you could achieve in your hall at home given a red light bulb, a boiling kettle and a tape of Van Halen’s Jump.

Of course, the tournament’s biggest handicap remains the lack of big-name players, nearly all of whom eventually cross the political divide, often (like Mervyn “The King” King) about four minutes after saying that they would never dream of it. Accordingly, as long as the likes of Ted “The Count” Hankey ring your darting bell loudly enough, you’ll be fine, but by comparison with the PDC championship, the Lakeside is destined to offer the majority of viewers an obscure field of men with beards.

It didn’t help when last year’s finalists were drawn together in the first round. “I know how Phill can play darts,” Adams said beforehand. “He’s a dangerous cookie.”

Which, incidentally, raised the important question: which cookies, in particular, count as dangerous? My feeling is that you would have to consider the significant claims of the fruit and nut Boaster in this area.

Those shards of nut can rub painfully against the roof of the mouth if approached from a careless angle.

In the event, Nixon was simply crumby and Adams won swiftly. Whereupon he promptly blubbed all over Stubbs with the emotion of it all. “Oh dear, oh dear,” an unimpressed George said. “If he’d lost, I could understand him crying.” Bobby, don’t go anywhere. This tournament needs you.