NO sooner have we waved off Sir Harry Evans after his welcome visit than another former editor of The Northern Echo, Allan Prosser, gets in touch.

Allan was the man who had the vision to give me a job as a newly-qualified reporter on The Northern Echo in 1984.

A great editor who did much to re-establish the Echo's authority in the 1980s, he was moved to get in touch after going to see "The Power of Yes" by David Hare at the National Theatre.

"One of the characters was an un-named Northern Echo journalist talking in highly amusing fashion, and with some bitterness, about the antics of Northern Rock", explained Mr Prosser (he scared me - I always called him Mr Prosser).

"I wondered if you were the source of Hare's interview?" he wondered. I've assured him that I wasn't.

Anyway, here's a transcript of Act 6:

A journalist from The Northern Echo comes on, forties, abrasive

Journalist: There was something tragically provincial about the whole thing, wasn’t there?

Author: Tell me what you mean by that?

Announcer: Journalist. Northern Echo. Prefers not to be named.

Journalist: I’m not the first person to point out this wasn’t actually a British banking crisis.

Author: What do you mean?

Journalist: Come on, this was a Scottish banking crisis. HBOS and RBS, they were both Scottish. The Prime Minister was Scottish, the Chancellor Alistair Darling was Scottish and Northern Rock — where are we? Newcastle. As near to Scotland as makes no difference . . .

Author: That doesn’t make it provincial.

Journalist: No, no, I don’t mean like that, I mean the way the whole thing was like a Carry On film.

Author: What was?

Journalist: Northern Rock! You must have noticed, you could hardly miss it, Northern Rock was run by this ludicrous man called Adam Applegarth, with this enormous head . . .

The journalist puts his hands around his own head to demonstrate

Big head, bald head, pointy head and he had this woman, remember? He had a mistress in the bank and she looked like Cruella De Vil, and oh, he had to have his holiday at certain times, went nuts when his diary got changed, because secretly he was off with this woman — Amanda Smithson her name — and inevitably in the way of things, she became known as Randy Mandy, and there were Moulin Rouge-themed parties, attended by five hundred and twenty five what were called Northern Rockers.

There were anonymous letters to Applegarth’s wife, and the whole thing seemed News of the World. Very British, and very News of the World. Except it wasn’t. It was people’s lives, it was their lifelong savings . . .

(After a bit more blah with a character representing a Bank of England employee and another one representing Paul Mason, economics editor of Newsnight, the Northern Echo journalist returns)

Journalist: What I loved best was that Alistair Darling’s own mortgage was with Northern Rock. In the North-East we were quite proud of that. And I also loved that the FSA had recently rated Northern Rock. It was providing one mortgage in five in the UK, it was growing at 15 per cent, its lending had quadrupled from £25 billion to £100 billion, and it was rated ‘low-risk.’