George Reynolds was in the dock yesterday, grilled about his business dealings.

Chris Lloyd witnesses a courtroom drama with more than a touch of comdey.

THERE is a popular comedy on the television at the moment called Little Britain. One of its main characters is a spotty teenage girl in a shellsuit called Vicky Pollard.

She has a problem with authority, and every time she is questioned by her teachers, police or the social, she blurts out a long contradictory answer.

"Yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah," she blusters, "but I dunno, I wasn't there, you'd better ask..."

Yesterday at Teesside County Court, there was the Little George show.

Mr Reynolds was in the dock in the Vicky Pollard role, all dropped aitches and mysteriously placed consonants, facing the perfectly pronounced questions from the liquidators' barrister Anthony de Garr Robinson - and with a wonderful name like that, you don't get more of an authority figure.

"I think really you are chucking figures at me and I am oblivious to all that," responded Mr Reynolds at one point. "You are better off asking the accountant what you are h'actually saying."

Mr Reynolds had delayed the hearing a couple of times suffering from stress. Happily, he has recovered, but now appears to be suffering from memory troubles.

For example, he denied ever seeing a letter sent to him on June 18, 2002, by his own solicitor. "I must get ten thousand faxes but I never read them," he said, plausibly.

Mr Robinson then produced a solicitor's note dated June 19, 2002, detailing a phone call he received from Mr Reynolds in response to the previous day's letter. Helpfully, Mr Robinson asked if Mr Reynolds wished to reconsider his memory loss.

He didn't. "I can't remember seeing that letter and that telephone call is him remembering it," he said, all Vicky Pollardish.

Later, he noted: "There's all sorts of things coming out of the woodworm."

There was a point to the proceedings, but it is difficult to tell what, precisely, it was. It was especially difficult as Mr Reynolds, the architect of the web that was to be unravelled, was "oblivious" as to how it had been spun in the first place.

To the untrained eye, the proceedings seemed to revolve around the fact that Mr Reynolds had once owned GRUK, a chipboard manufacturer in Shildon, which he had sold to a company called Vertex. GRUK had then gone bust, and the proceedings were trying to establish, on behalf of GRUK's creditors, how the bankruptcy had occurred.

The proceedings were complicated by the fact GRUK had, in May 1999, bought 83 per cent of Darlington Football Club's shares. In something called a "post-balance sheet event", these had cost GRUK £200,000. But when the balance sheet came to be written, they had, in fact, cost GRUK £666,066. Then, though, they were sold to Mr Reynolds himself for, the liquidators say, £1.

"That's wrong," said Mr Reynolds, although he couldn't remember what he had paid for them. "I will get my man Ian to take out my cheque book stubs."

To complicate the proceedings further, GRUK had loaned DFC anything up to £6.8m. These loans were written off, although Mr Reynolds was unable to say why they were written off and was not involved in writing them off.

Mr Robinson: "You were loaning money furiously to Darlington and then you suddenly stopped and then wrote it off on the basis that it couldn't be paid. It seems very curious."

Mr Reynolds: "But it is. I agree with you."

Not quite as curious as the disappearance into thin air of a 400ft, 3,000 tonne, £4m chipboard production line, but a rare moment of unanimity nonetheless.

Mr Reynolds, though, blamed his accountant and his solicitor for giving him the advice about the write-off and the share-transfer.

"I rely on accountants because I am not a scholar," he said.

But, contrarily, he said he never took any professional advice from anyone.

"All my life I have been very successful in business, created a lot of jobs, and I have always done things on impulse, and whenever I have listened to experts like yourself . . . the last time, I had to take them to court for professional negligence," he said.

Mr Robinson then asked if Mr Reynolds had taken any professional advice about building a 27,500-seater stadium for a club like Darlington where the average attendance was about 3,000.

"No, thank God," said Mr Reynolds.

This may, or may not, explain why the football club is itself in administration with an unfathomable level of debts.

Said Mr Reynolds: "To be quite honest with you, there's been that much going on in me head with transfers for the football club, I would not know whether we were in the New Year or New York."

Indeed, Mr Reynolds' head must have been in a real mess. "I had too much going on in my head at the time," he said. "My head was like spaghetti." Anyone trying to follow the day's proceedings knew exactly what he meant.

But then, it was a great day for Reynoldsisms. Asked why he wanted to sell GRUK in the first place, Mr Reynolds said it was because he had too many business interests.

"I couldn't split myself like a h'orange into different segments," he said, and you knew immediately what he meant. And you also knew exactly what he meant when, to defend his belief that it was pointless to check the accounts that he was signing, he said: "You can make figures look anything. You say two and two makes four, but put it on a blackboard and it makes 22."

Mr Reynolds' problems stem from his belief that, because he had put his heart and soul and money into GRUK, he was entitled to take out of it whatever he wanted. Be that cars, cranes, or football clubs.

"It was my money that was in GRUK that started it," he said. "The only difference is that it could have gone round a different circle."

He appears unable to differentiate between what belongs to George Reynolds UK - and so to GRUK's creditors - and what legitimately belongs to George Reynolds.

He also appears not to understand what is going on around him. Just before lunch yesterday, it was revealed that one of his companies had loaned another of his companies £999,444 and in return had received only £158. "It is impossible. Something has to be investigated. Something has to be checked," he shouted in disbelief - to the public inquiry into his affairs.

He also nurses a genuinely held belief that Vertex owes him £7m and that that £7m would have put everything right and kept the football club solvent. Time and again he returned to it.

Mr Robinson: "You have a solicitor writing a letter...saying you must decide a value of the (football club) shares...

Mr Reynolds: "We are getting away from the facts, despite you pounding figures at me, we are owed £7m..."

Mr Robinson: "I am focusing on this share transfer..."

Mr Reynolds: "I am focusing on my £7m."

Mr Reynolds is a love or hate figure. You can laugh with him or you can laugh at him. You can regard him as a simple, uneducated man, floundering out of his depth, drowning in a sea of accountancy and bureacracy, but motivated by a honest desire to make money, to employ people and to save football clubs.

Or you can see him as a cunning man who rides roughshod over other people and flings dirt in the faces of those he leaves trailing in his wake.

"Yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah..." as Vicky Pollard says.

The case continues, and will for some time yet.