NEARLY four decades after his death, the legend of one of the world's best loved comics is being kept alive in Bishop Auckland.

Fans of Stan Laurel have a new reminder of his early years in the town, which gave him his first taste for entertainment and influenced his legendary film partnership with Oliver Hardy.

A blue plaque erected on one of the family homes at the weekend helps mark a trail followed by Laurel and Hardy fans from around the globe.

It was unveiled by his 81-year-old nephew, Huntley Jefferson Woods, whose mother, Stan's sister Beatrice Olga Jefferson, was born in the house, South View, Waldron Street, in December 1894.

Appropriately for an occasion dedicated to a king of slapstick, the ceremony was not a dull affair.

The small band of devotees who keep his legend alive in Bishop Auckland, the Hog Wild Tent of the Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society, never pass up a chance to dress as their heroes in bowlers and moustaches.

They marched round the town passing other points on the trail, St Peter's Church where Stan was baptised, the site of the Eden Theatre, which his father managed, and the old King James Grammar School where he first showed his talent by putting on impromptu performances for his teachers.

Mr Huntley Woods, of Blyth, Northumberland, met both men backstage at the Newcastle Empire in 1952. He said: "By then the films were fading and they were doing pantomime for Bernard Delfont.

"Stan was very down to earth, a really nice person. I have been in the music business most of my life as a pianist and organist and so many people are over the top. They weren't." Stan was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in 1890, not in Bishop Auckland but at Ulverston, Cumbria, where his grandparents lived.

A sickly child, he was left there so that his parents Arthur and Madge, a talented actress and stage designer, could get on with their busy lives.

The Eden Theatre was the home of Arthur's touring melodrama companies and the plays he wrote were thought to be used by Stan as plots for his early films.

His time with his parents was limited to holidays and Christmas, spent first at 66 Princes Street and later at South View, one of many theatrical boarding houses in this part of Bishop Auckland.

After school he defied his father's wishes to join him in theatre management and eventually went to pantomime theatre in Newcastle, teaming up with Charlie Chaplin in the Fred Karno company and leaving with them for America.

Stan Laurel died in February 1965 aged 74