DOUBTLESS recognising that the Gadfly column has its finger on the region's musical pulse, Ian Luck rings after a night in the Indigo Alley bar in Scarborough. It's not just the best blues bar in town, says Ian, but is regularly visited by Doctor Rock, he of BBC Radio York.

What he really wishes to point out, however, is that outside Indigo Alley is a sign saying AMOS.

It stands for All Manner of Stuff and is a phrase apparently quite common among trend setters, image formers and others of an upwardly mobile persuasion.

"AMOS is the new literacy," says Ian - and, come to think, it's a pretty appropriate motif for the Gadfly column, an' all.

STILL on the sunny North Yorkshire coast, last week's column wondered why Whitby folk refer to their Scarborough neighbours as Algerinos. Two theories, both plausible, have emerged.

Phil Westberg, Darlington lad long in South Africa, quotes a 1641 account by the Rev Derereux Spratt, carried off by Barbary Coast buccaneers while sailing from Cork for a couple of weeks in Morecambe, or somewhere.

"Before we had lost sight of land, we were captured by Algerine pirates who put all the men in irons."

Bob Harbron's nautical explanation is more recent and much different. During World War II, he says, many anti-submarine sloops of the Algerino class were built in both Canada and the UK. Many were named after east coast ports, Scarborough almost certainly included.

Had Whitby and Scarborough fallen out over a sloop of the tongue? More waves, perhaps, next time.

IF today's column is a dance to the music of time, however, the words may need some watching. We're into rugby songs here, bed and bawd.

After references hereabouts to The Sexual Life of the Camel, and other numbers of a scrum-and-get-me nature, retired polliss John Walker in Bishop Auckland sends an asterisk-rich anthology called Why Was He Born So Beautiful (and Other Rugby Songs), published in 1967.

All he asks in return is a pint of Black Sheep - not to be confused with the Ram of Derbyshire, page 152 - and may be assured that it will shortly be his.

There are 139 other songs, ranging from the Good Ship Venus to the much sought after Virgin Sturgeon, from the German Officers (who crossed the line) to Dinah, who by showing a leg frequently did likewise.

There is Eskimo Nell and The Wild West Show, which made the oozelum bird one of the most sought after in all ornithology.

John played his 60s' rugby for Darlington GSOB, now Mowden Park, though he was never at the grammar school.

"Every now and then, I take the book from the back of my desk drawer to remind myself of some of the good old days of my social upbringing and the development of my love and understanding of English literature," he writes.

The preface notes that the rugby song has a crude sort of folk culture of its own. "At its worst, it is simply a bawdy chorus, a Chaucerian obsession with the basic functions of the human body being the essential linking theme of all good rugby songs.

"At its best, it may tell a moving story or make a pertinent social comment. Keir Hardie himself could not have resisted the socialist appeal of 'They're digging up my father's grave to build a sewer'."

There are other gems like The Doggies' Meeting, Nobby Hall (the monorchid), The Hole in the Elephant's Bottom and She Went for a Ride in a Morgan - which could as easily have been a Morris Minor.

Most joyous, most vivid and most effortlessly ingenious of all is The Harlot of Jerusalem (a lady who rather conveniently appears to have been called Cathusalem).

It's one of many innocent amusements. How come English rugby became tied to that bitter sweet chariot?

IN the pub, they reckon that many of these hugger-rugger ditties had their origin in an RAF mess. The reader who prefers to be known as That Bloody Woman puts her remarkably extensive knowledge of them down to deep and formative experiences with the pot holing club.

The really alarming thing is that out of John Walker's 140 sounds of the sixties, around 125 were sung - perhaps slightly less explicitly - whenever St John's church youth club in Shildon went on a bus trip.

We look back on it as the age of untrammelled innocence. Whatever must the youth club sing today?

BILL Taylor, who in his Bishop Auckland youth knew more rugby songs than a whole pantheon of prop forwards, returns the script to Journey Into Space - one of several 1950s shows we were discussing a few weeks back and which are being re-run on BBC Radio 7, the digital station.

Bill knew that Andrew Faulds had played Jet Morgan but hadn't realised until journeying into the Internet - "whatever did we do without it?" - that both David Kossoff and Alfie Bass played his sidekick Lemmy or that many other voices were provided by David Jacobs "who was an impressionist before he became a disc jockey".

Jon Smith in Barningham, Teesdale, who has also been hooking up again with Journey Into Space, hopes that Dan Dare may follow it back from the future but finds other 50s' favourites curiously dated.

"Was The Navy Lark really that bad? The Goon Show so unfunny? How did Kenneth Horne get away with those appallingly camp double entendres?"

He'll stick with Radio 7, nonetheless. "It beats The Archers, any day."

DAVID Kossoff played Billingham Forum one December in the 1970s. Was he, we asked innocently, looking forward to Christmas? "Like all Jews, I absolutely adore Christmas," said Kossoff and to this day, we don't know if he was being sarcastic.

...and finally, a front page paragraph in last Wednesday's paper claimed that the number of complaints about a mock "seance" on Channel 4 was the third highest ever for a television programme.

Which aroused still greater ire?, asks Lynn Briggs in Darlington, and before the ink's dry on the e-mail, answers her own question.

Second placed in the hall of shame was Brass Eye, a "spoof" programme on paedophiles, and in first, a screening of The Last Temptation of Christ.

So, without complaint, ends another shift. AMOS, again, when the column returns in a fortnight.

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Published: ??/??/2004