A little learning

THESE days, young uns have to jump through 360 degrees, and to have three or four after their names, to have much chance of a journalistic career. Back then it was a bit easier.

We learned shorthand, law and one or two other things on two eightweek block release courses led by a bloke who looked like Bamber Gascoigne, but probably wasn’t.

They were augmented by twice-yearly weekend schools.

The weekend schools were partly social occasions, and very enjoyable.

One was at Grantley Hall, near Ripon – so long ago that there was still a train service to Ripon from Northallerton – the other at van Mildert College, in Durham.

It was after a studious Saturday at van Mildert that the cream of the North’s young reporters adjourned to the Top Hat club, in Spennymoor, then one of the region’s best venues.

The weekend’s tutors, all bosses from our newspaper group, decided to join us. It was a mistake.

Nightclubs were much different 45 years ago, civilised places like Baxter’s in Bishop Auckland best remembered for their crab sandwiches and for the gurning contest – about which the least said the better – judged by me and the youthful Luke Casey.

The Top Hat was a bit racier, among the chief attractions an ostrich- sized gold cage in which a scantily-clad and amply-proportioned young lady would dance for the benefit of the punters.

We knew about it; the gaffers didn’t.

Among them was Maurice Wedgewood, the Echo’s pipe smoking deputy editor, a man wise, kind and learned, but so old school he could have been Dotheboys Hall.

When he saw the bird in the gilded cage, the ever-present pipe almost dropped from his mouth, like Popeye on discovering Olive Oyl in an illegitimate embrace with Bluto.

Even in her state of some undress, he was right to find the lass familiar.

Not only was she a reporter on the Northern Despatch, next office to his own, but she’d just finished a hard day’s weekend, learning her trade at van Mildert College.

IT’S different now. Among the many benefits of advancing years is that you are deemed ineducable, and thus no longer sent on courses.

Around 30 years ago there was a course in Hastings, if not quite for high flyers then those who’d lumbered off the ground. Among others present was Drew Smith, chief sub-editor of the Basildon Evening Echo.

As was said of Laurel and Hardy, we were two minds with but a single thought: how soon could we escape to the pub.

Drew wanted extras, however. We scoured the town looking for jellied eels. Ten years later he became editor of the Good Food Guide.

THERE was a course on lateral thinking, on which frequently I strayed offside, another two-day job that everyone in the company was, in groups, required to attend.

The bloke paraded in shirt sleeves and red braces. It was Narcissus, more Greek mythology, who was in love with his own image. This smarty pants was smitten by his galusses, an’ all.

You’ve never heard such rubbish in your life. Finally the time came to burst the psycho-babble bubble.

It had been a long and tedious day, impossible any longer to stifle a yawn. The sarky nurk in red braces spotted it. “I’m sorry if I’m keeping you awake, Mike,” he said.

“Not at all,” I replied, instantly, “the very opposite is the case.”

The room fell momentarily silent.

I swear it was my finest hour.

THE second finest may have been the MBE, the investiture a courtly and wonderfully orchestrated occasion on which it is almost literally possible to feel the bristles standing on the back of your neck.

Three guests are usually allowed.

Finding himself without any appropriate hosiery, the younger bairn wore his referee’s socks, instead. The Lord Chamberlain appeared not to notice.

The Queen’s amazing, 110 medals in around an hour and a careful, personal word with every recipient.

It’s meant to be confidential, but now it can be revealed. “If they ask you to go on any more courses,” she said, “tell them you’re washing your hair.”

Radio times

IT may not have been the world’s most sensational piece of research, but it was enough to attract the attention of the BBC North Home Service, back in 1966.

The Shildon St John’s branch of the Anglican Young People’s Association had conducted a survey of the town’s youth – ten of them, at least, maybe even 12 – which concluded that 60 per cent had drunk under age.

The other 40 per cent, it might be added, were probably being a bit economical with the truth.

I was branch president, or something.

The BBC sent George Lambelle, carrying an amount of kit that these days might broadcast the Olympics, to do an interview in the back room of the Bay Horse in Bishop.

It was my radio debut and, yes, mother could hear very well.

There have been very many more, frequently with a Northern League connection. Whatever other challenges the world’s second oldest football league faces, under-age drinking is rarely one of them.

SOME time in the 1970s, still young and impressionable, I was invited to open the carnival at Mickleton, in Teesdale.

The chairman told the assembled Mickletonians that it was good to welcome Mike Amos, but that the first choice had been Mike Neville. “Mike Neville had been £50,” he added. “Mike Amos was nowt.”

The following Monday’s John North column wrote of the “poor man’s Mike Neville”. The BBC picked it up, invited me to co-host that night’s Look North and to read the news.

That caused another colour clash. The script was on yellow paper, something to do with reflections. I couldn’t read it, hasty retyping necessary. So much for the glare of publicity.

There’s still a rather battered photograph at home, the two Mikes almost predating the Two Ronnies. Both of us could have done with a haircut. Only one of us could afford it.

THE highlight of this very lowfrequency broadcasting career came a couple of years ago, invited onto Radio 4’s flagship Today programme to talk about the Northern League’s cussed stance on swearing.

It was 7.50am, acknowledged as the peak listening sector for the nation’s opinion formers. It was also Budget Day, the politicians kept in their place.

The sabre-toothed Naughtie proved perfectly nice, but wouldn’t have been had I unleashed on air the sort of expletives which players use with impunity on the footy field.

As ever, the BBC didn’t pay. Probably something to do with the budget.

THE nadir, many years earlier, had been on Tyne Tees Television, in the days when programmes ended about 11pm with an epilogue. I’d been asked to record one, five minutes of pious nonsense.

Regular viewing figures were put at 20,000, half of whom had fallen asleep in front of the television only to be awoken by that awful, highpitched whine after the thing had closed down.

The other half were probably taking the dog for a last walk around the block, and had forgotten to switch the telly off.

Shortly before it was due to be screened, me and me mam sitting wide-eyed in Shildon, Tom Coyne or someone announced that the epilogue would be delayed because a space craft had gone into orbit around the moon.

Tom kept on reappearing. The ruddy thing could probably have landed on Mars by the time they showed the epilogue.

It was 3.45am, the 20,000 rather having fallen by the wayside. The official viewing figure was put at two, me and me mam back, half-asleep, in Shildon.

Calling the bans

IF not quite a rite of passage, it is perhaps a journalistic badge of office – a notch on the barrel – to be barred out of a few places.

Long before the Eating Owt column, I’d been excluded from one of Spennymoor’s pubs – the Hillingdon, memory suggests – for describing the toasted sandwiches as “grotesque”.

One of the most unwelcome episodes was at the Old English Gentleman, a pub in Darlington where – in the earlier John North incarnation – I’d asked to put in a lunchtime shift behind the bar.

Unfortunately it was the last day of Christmas term at what was the College of Technology. High spirits, a few under-age drinks, were only to be expected.

What rather took them by surprise was the couple on the pub stairs enjoying what Private Eye liked in those days to describe as Ugandan discussions in full view of the rest of the Christmas carolling clientele.

They chucked the lot out, closed the pub, almost forgot about the supplementary barman. Never mind John North, the story made the next day’s front page.

I’d been barred out of better places and worse, but never before for citing an act of congress.

THE out-and-out champion was Norman Fannon, a wonderful character who for 40 years ran the greyhound stadium – what folk call a flapping track – at Wheatley Hill, a former mining village in east Durham.

It was 1986, the same day that Mike Cowling, a large and genial Echo photographer, had single-handedly emptied the bar of the village workmen’s club by walking in with a camera.

“We thought you were the Nash,” they chorused.

That night we went to the dogs, the tobacco fug in the bar as purple as the House of Bishops. The column called it carcinogenic, a smoke screen which poor Norman wholly failed to appreciate.

Another bar bar, another black sheep.

THE exclusion zone remained, despite two subsequent attempts to gain entry. Norman always could spot a wrong ’un.

When he died, in 2005 – “without doubt the last of a breed,” said local bookie Johnny Ridley – it seemed right to try again.

They were smashing. “Don’t worry,” said Jean Booth, Norman’s friend and colleague, “there’s not many around here who haven’t had a run-in with him at one time or another.”

“There wasn’t a dog man in the village who Norman hadn’t barred out,” they said in the Conshy Club, though there wasn’t one he hadn’t gone out of his way to help, either.

He lived in Shiney Row, loved Wheatley Hill, continued – unflappable – a North-East tradition when much of the rest of the region had become a trackless waste.

Norman was particularly proud of the hare system – they nicknamed it the McFannon – that he’d developed from hundreds of ex-Army bedsteads.

It was copied all over the country.

Jean thought he was lovely, firm but fair. “People would come here all the time. Their dog had a bad ear, their dog had a bad toe. If Norman couldn’t solve the problem, it couldn’t be solved.”

Norman was 78, had run a straight race, earned an affectionate obituary. You might almost have called it purple prose.

Earlier this year, well-known journalist and author Matthew Engel rang for a brain-picking session for a book he’s writing on County Durham. Where, he wondered, might he find some real colliery tradition.

I sent him to Wheatley Hill dogs, a steer for which he was truly thankful.

“It was a breath of fresh air,” he said.