So where did it all go wrong?

A waiter entered to flute more champagne. "Tell me Mr Best, " he said, "where did it all go wrong?" Fast forward 30 years.

"Tell me, Mr Reynolds?." George Reynolds neither talks nor acts like a man wanting to pull the blankets over his head, insists that life has rarely been bubblier, refuses ? and here we had best abandon the amorous analogy ? to take things lying down.

He is unapologetic, unrepentant, wholly and happily unreconstructed.

"It's a funny thing to suggest but I really like me the way am I now, " says the man who tumbled from Rich List to the brink of the bankruptcy court and from adulation to opprobrium.

"I'm quite contented, never been happier for a long time. The really funny thing is that a lot of people out there think that way about me, too." In the past three months, the 68-year-old former Darlington FC chairman has bought a luxury penthouse apartment in Durham ("I'm thinking of putting a rumours board outside, " he says) and plans two more, in London and Lytham St Anne's, the third just because he's always liked Blackpool.

He has bought five new Mercedes cars, including an £83,000 sports convertible for his own use, employs 39 people at a factory in Birmingham and has another plant in Co Durham.

He declines to say where ? "you get pestered" ? but promises big things. "They haven't put the fire out yet.

It might have been smouldering for a bit, but wait until I chuck a can of petrol on it.

"Why I'm successful in business is because everyone trusts me. If I do a deal, I stick by it." He has plans for a chain of high quality men's and women's clothes shops, for a free newspaper with a 100,000 postal distribution and promises more six inches headlines ? "the biggest exclusive you'll ever have had" ? by next January.

Isn't he supposed to be on his uppers? "I could never ever be skint, it's impossible.

You could take George Reynolds and stand him in the middle of a field with an empty suitcase and he'd make money "One morning at eight o'clock I told my staff to lock me in a room with a telephone, bring in a couple of pies at dinner time and not let me out until I'd made £200,000. By twenty past three I'd made a quarter of a million." He has had a turbulent and a torrid time, for all that.

A year ago he was putting the final touches to the magnificent Reynolds Arena, acknowledging the adulation, the hands high hero worship.

Now the huge lettering has been torn publicly and symbolically from the side of the stadium, his own name and reputation dragged through the mud with it.

Wherever else he might be on the opening day of the season, it won't be watching Darlington.

He has lost £21m on the football club alone, he says.

He is the subject of endless gossip and 99 per cent of all known rumours, among the more surprising those of his supposed sexual prowess.

"If you listened to all the stories I should be a super stud, in every porn mag going, " he insists. "I'd make Errol Flynn look like a bloody beginner." The soundbites flow as freely as ever, a rich gift to the journalistic trade he professess ? with one exception it is to be hoped, for we go back to Bishop Auckland court days ? so devoutly to detest.

The most familiar is that so-and-so ? insert council, critics or newspapermen ? would have been thrown out of the Gestapo for cruelty.

Others are more up to date.

On why at 68 he still works so relentlessly: "If the brain is active you live longer; if you pack in work you become bored and miserable. I want to be among it.

"I've never been to work for money, not ever; I've always been to work for the aggravation. If there was no aggravation I'd never go to work. What is there left in the North-East apart from eating, drinking and aggravation?" On the media: "The great advantage I have over the press is that they can't beat me because I don't care; I'm indestructible, me. They don't pay my electric, they don't pay my rates "In Sunderland (where he grew up) I walk on water.

People queue up for autographs and photographs. In Darlington doing well is a crime, and they want to lock you up for it." On the Quakers saga and its aftermath: "They chucked everything they had at me and I paddled through like a dirty duck, just another chapter in my story." On being 68: "I don't feel my age; I've a mental age of 12?." So we are old friends, back 35 years to the everentertaining court appearances when he had nowt that hadn't once been in the Co-op safe, to the back street ice cream factory and the happy little night club in Shildon, through scrapes like the Duchess of Dewsbury and the battle of Brusselton Folly, through the multi-million days of worktop supremacy and to the wholly unexpected decision to buy Darlington FC when all bets were in the last chance saloon. He's never regretted it, he says.

He grows progressively rounder, looks little older than he did ten years ago ? in 1994 he looked 67 ? appears bright and animated, talks, as always, in torrents.

Where GR goes, a lot of legless cuddies try to follow.

Though his £7m Co Durham home has been sold to the Sterling group which bought the club, he continues to live there until the Durham apartment is ready.

He eats fish without chips in a pub near Darlington, drinks a couple of halves of lager and lime ? a lot for George ? appears addicted to Nicorettes, talks so affectionately of his four grandchildren that half way through the conversation he breaks off to call one of them, for the simple pleasure of hearing her voice.

Buying the football club, he says, was neither a business proposition nor a trip on the egotistical equivalent of Concorde.

"I was well known all over Europe before I ever got involved in football. I could have made money a whole lot more easy ways than Darlington, you'd have to be barmy to believe it was business.

"It was a community thing, something for the town, certainly not for the power." "It was a dream to have Darlington in the Premiership. I'd have done it if they'd left me alone. I was too far ahead of my time really, that's always been my trouble, the council still had a parish pump mentality." The subsequent events ? the struggles for control, the extreme reactions, the very public dirty linen washing ? knocked the stuffing out of him, he admits. His wife Susan was even more greatly affected.

"It did her head in. The press did a complete assassination job on her." Pushed, he describes their present relationship as "soso." "I never did anyone any harm I never criticised anyone, but if people have a go at me I have a go back.

They say I wanted to demoralise, humiliate or victimise people but I didn't want to start anything. If you do nothing, they walk all over you." Despite the pressure, the headlines and the 17 hour days, he insists he never had a low point. "I don't know why, but I always seemed to be cheerful. It's what makes me unique.

"I've been in orphanages, sold as a slave, slept in dormitories with no sides and spent years in prison ? they can't hit me with anything worse than what I've been through.

"I'm not worried for myself, I'm used to it, but some ? a small minority ? have destroyed families." Though he insists he has slowed down, he has no plans to retire. "I can't stand golf, I don't like rugby, I hate cricket and tennis "I'm all right at draughts but you can't sit around playing draughts all day. I like people, I like meeting people, the best way to do that is through business." So where did it all go wrong, Mr Reynolds? "It hasn't. I've always completed what I set out to do, including that football ground.

"The greatest pleasure in my life is proving people wrong. The vibes I'm getting are terrific; I'm looking forward to doing it again."

Published: 30/07/2004