AMONG the many things for which this column has vainly argued over the years is an obituaries page, once or twice a week, in The Northern Echo. Apart from anything else it would be risk-free, since libelling the dead is generally considered impossible. Scallywag magazine v the Rt Hon John Major may shortly present a rather different case, of course.

(Only the churlish would recall Mark Twain, who first observed that the report of his death was an exaggeration. Twain also wrote that cauliflower was nothing more than cabbage with a college education, though this is perhaps irrelevant.)

It might be a few weeks before we could emulate the idiosyncratic charm and posthumous vibrancy of the broadsheets' obits. After the death last month of the wonderfully eccentric Bishop Auckland goalkeeper Harry Sharratt, it may be recalled, the other half of the obits page in The Times was occupied by a tribute to the chap who wrote Tubby the Tuba.

Bifocal readers - those who read the Echo and Another Paper - maintain an Elysian cuttings service in the meantime. We are particularly indebted to the Stokesley Stockbroker for the half page from the Telegraph on Hilda Brabban, the lady who invented Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men.

Inevitably there is a Co Durham connection.

MRS Brabban, who was 88, created Bill and Ben for Listen With Mother - sitting comfortably? - and wrote the first three episodes. The BBC paid her £1 a time.

Originally the stories had been to entertain her troublesome brothers, William and Benjamin, whose indelible contribution to broadcasting folklore was that the rude noises they made in the bath were effortlessly translated as "Flobbadob".

Phyllis, Mrs Brabban's younger sister, became the Little Weed, who always knew when the man who worked in the garden had finished his dinner.

Though born in Castleford, where they considered erecting a statue to her, she and her husband Harold - both teachers - moved to Crook during the war.

He taught at the "local" grammar school - Wolsingham? - she ran a nursery school in Crook. Older readers may, with much luck, remember her.

The Flowerpot Men were adapted for television by Frieda Lingstrom. "They were comics who did not play with children as Andy Pandy did but who were busy about their own affairs," says one of the television guides.

Bill and Ben, rather appropriately, became greengrocers; Phyllis, Little Weed, survives.

The programmes, made between 1952-54 and repeated countless times thereafter, made the BBC several million from video sales. Apart from her £3, Hilda Brabban never received a penny.

AMONG the other obituaries recently forwarded - dead letters, as it were - was one of Whitley Bay lass Winifred Watson, author (said the Telegraph) of "rustic bodice-rippers".

It was a long time since - Mrs Watson was 95 - which might explain why Methuen rejected her first novel as too fruity.

Mrs Watson was tracked down to Jesmond two years ago, but declined interviews. "It's not the same as when you're young," she not unreasonably observed. "I've gone past all that being excited."

There's also an affectionate send-off for Eileen Colwell, who founded the children's library movement - daughter of the Methodist minister in Robin Hood's Bay - and for Sir Robert Wilson, described as "a miner's son from Co Durham."

Bob Wilson, born in South Shields in 1927 and educated at Kings College, Durham, became one of the world's leading astrophysicists and dedicated his book "Astronomy Through the Ages" to his old dad.

The Times cutting is from 75-year-old Tom Dobbin in Durham. "1927," he says reflectively, "was possibly a good year for Co Durham miners' sons."

T DAN Smith was a Durham miner's son from a rather thinner seam. Apart from anything else, he was born in 1915; his obituary was in the Telegraph on July 28, 1993.

Dan Smith, the last words concluded, was the nearest that Britain had had to a Chicago-style city mayor - the man who promised that Newcastle would become the Venice of the North.

George Brown, the former deputy Prime Minister, called him "one of the most outstandingly forthright, courageous, solid and loyal men I have met."

Donald Herrod QC called Smith a "wicked and cunning man, not even a straightforward crook."

Both were speaking at his trial, at which Mr Newcastle was sentenced to six years. In jail he encouraged a fellow prisoner to take up acting - Leslie Grantham, otherwise Dirty Den.

T Dan Smith's obituary is reproduced in a Daily Telegraph anthology, sub-titled "Rogues".

ALSO in the Rogues Gallery - the Telegraph is clearly equally aware of the dead man's handle - are Jeffrey Bernard, Hughie Green and Fanny Cradock.

Green may be best remembered for Double Your Money and Opportunity Knocks, a programme on which the actress Su Pollard tried her luck and finished second to a singing dog.

The Telegraph thought him unctuous, oleaginous (it means "oily") and servile. In 1996, he received an apology from the BBC after a character in the Vicar of Dibley remarked: "There hasn't been a bus through here since Hughie Green died." He lasted another year.

Jeffrey Bernard, eponymous hero of the play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, was a Soho journalist who existed chiefly on vodka, lime and soda until discovering that he was diabetic and giving up the soda.

Unsurprisingly, he had several wives. Marriage, he once said, was an interruption of the serious business of drinking and fornication but before finally he died, he was very unwell indeed.

Fanny Cradock - remember the old harridan? - was "the irascible grande dame of the kitchen", forever bossing round her wretched husband Johnnie ("a kindly looking cove sporting a monocle") and sacked by the BBC in 1987 for attacking Pamela Armstrong in front of a studio audience.

She'd been expelled from school at 15 for urging other girls to contact the spirit world, claimed a close relationship with the court of King Louis X1V and had plastic surgery on her nose after producers told her it was casting shadows over the food.

By all accounts, however, the lass could cook a bit, too.

* The Daily Telegraph Fourth Book of Obituaries: Rogues (Macmillan, 1998)

JOHN Briggs in Darlington - to whom an apology for doubting that the 1960s singer Eden Kane now plays a Klingon in Star Trek; John has forwarded proof - adds further spice to the Cradock mixture.

Famously, he insists, she was demonstrating doughnuts. "Perfect," proclaimed Johnnie to camera, "I hope your doughnuts are just like Fanny's." The story, it is to be hoped, is apocryphal.

MUCH else must wait another occasion, from the scarcity of string vests in Redcar to the problem with 9 down in Monday's quick crossword (pointed out by Maurice Heslop in Billingham).

Puzzled? I think the little house knew something about it, don't you?

Published: 02/10/2002