The man who made the Queen's eyes water

The next 200,000 words would be bright biographical, from a steam-smut childhood within the sound of the wagon works hooter to coruscating glory on the Mall.

Wilf Scott is the celestial choreographer who made the Queen's eyes water, who lit the blue touch paper for the most spectacular fireworks display that London has ever seen, who in the pyrotechnic Pantheon has become the local lad made god.

He has worked for the Russian government and for the Saudi royal family, for Wet Wet Wet and the World Wrestling Federation, received a personal message from the elder George Bush after illuminating the G7 convention.

Pyrovision, his company, won last year's Monaco International Fireworks Competition, lights up the Edinburgh Festival, ensures that the Lord Mayor's Show goes refulgently up in smoke.

It's the explosive success of the Golden Jubilee display, almost a quarter of an hour from detonation to dazzling denouement, which confirmed him as pole star in the fantastical firmament of fireworks.

The biography, we suggest over the fifth or sixth pint, should be called Famous for Fourteen Minutes.

After the Lord Mayor's show, however, after the Golden Jubilee skylark that Catherine wheeled beyond a million imaginings, he sits in his local in Cambridge - black-clad, jiggered, rapidly rolling his own - with just one thing on his mind.

"How are things back home?" asks 55-year-old Wilf Scott and in three and a half hours of mutual meandering is interrupted just once, by the friend who wonders if he's seen the Sunday paper suggestion that the chap who masterminded the fireworks should be put in charge of Britain's railways, too.

"I'd absolutely love that," says Wilf. "I'd put some railwaymen in there for a start."

His dad, a colliery engine driver's son from Sunnybrow, near Willington, owned a bakery alongside the railway line that shunted endlessly back and yon to Shildon's hammer and tongs wagon works.

"It was the biggest train set in the world," he recalls. "You could see into the cabs from our front window, I knew all the drivers, would get half a crown from Herbert Dobson for looking after his engine on a Saturday."

When the works closed in 1985 he tried to get financial backing - "I came very close to it" - for a departing display to involve a pyrotechnic steam engine and a 10ft inflatable Margaret Thatcher. The Prime Minister, it may go without saying, would have come off distinctly second best.

On Saturday mornings he and his brother John, who became a squadron leader, would have to light the coke fires in the bakery. "I'd pretend that it was a Gresley A4 Pacific and that I was in Darlington shed lighting the boiler.

"If we wanted to go out on a Saturday afternoon, my brother and I probably had to spend the morning boning half a side of beef that my dad had got from Bishop Auckland Co-op."

Arnold and Peggy Scott had made everything they sold. "He understood about food, knew the chemistry, read library books about what makes pastry rise," says Wilf.

Arnold Scott was also a renowned cake decorator. Perhaps in his rich imagination, there was to be a slice off the old Battenburg.

As a child Wilf was already an avid collector, even then a bit eccentric - "a bit Bohemian" - recalls a friend of the family.

"By the time I was 14, I had about 24 brass bedsteads and a dozen grandfather clocks which people at that time would pay me half a crown to take off their hands."

When he left university after six years and two degrees, it took two pantechnicons and five Transit vans to shift all his stuff.

Yet at the church primary school in Shildon, he'd been virtually written off. "The headmaster told my parents just to send me down the pit, or two the wagon works like everyone else.

"I suppose what I really wanted to be was an engine cleaner at Darlington, and to work my way up."

When he failed the 11-plus his parents ("I just can't imagine the sacrifice they had to make") sent him to the fee paying Scorton Grammar School near Richmond.

It meant leaving Shildon on the 6.20 every day. "I think I quite enjoyed it," he recalls. "It was trains."

His collecting mania had extended to militaria, weapons and period costumes. Probably it was around that time that he could be seen busking on Darlington High Row whilst wearing a night shirt and a German helmet, or in the full uniform of a Coldstream Guard drummer.

"I wouldn't care," he says, "there wasn't an instrument I could play."

The theatre, particularly the Georgian at Richmond - "Lady Crathorne would invite me to her stately home; it was amazing how she kept that theatre going" - was a natural extension.

For his 15th birthday his mother, who'd never been to London in her life, gave him a ticket for Waiting for Godot at the Royal Court Theatre. He travelled down in Victorian finery - "top hat, cane, the lot" - and returned, alone and similarly clad, on the last train.

"I suppose I was a bit of a loner, but my parents gave me confidence," he says, his ambitions to own a stuffed camel and a uniform from the Battle of Waterloo.

"I got the stuffed camel, one that when you pulled the side down there was a xylophone inside, but I still haven't got a uniform from Waterloo..."

His interests never extended to the effigy and blinding of November 5, however. "I hated fireworks, though I'd go round collecting all the scrap iron off the bonfires afterwards and sell it to Taffy Rowland."

At 18, he and a friend spent eight months walking around Spain and into Morocco - "my parents gave me £28 to go with, I came back with £8 and hepatitis" - at 19 he went to read fine art at Reading University.

Its climax was a set of sepia photographs of everyone in the arts department in vintage uniform, with weapons and sound effects ("crow scarers") which not only won him an MA but made the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band look like a playgroup fancy dress parade by comparison.

The crow scarers had another effect: they kindled an interest in fire and all its works.

After university, he had spells as a film set painter, antiques dealer, film producer, bargee and inventor - "a picaresque path to pyrotechnics" a 1991 profile observed - before the moment that changed his life.

"I had a poky little flat in London next to a newsagent's run by a little Jewish women who'd give me the big papers that she couldn't sell.

"The Guardian had quite a kind review of one of my art exhibitions and there I was with only enough to buy a half of beer or ten cheap fags, not both, and with certainly not enough for paraffin to keep the place warm."

He turned, dramatically, to fireworks. "I was a crap painter, anyway," says Wilf. Already he'd provided the display for the Queen's 40th wedding anniversary and for other Buckingham Palace occasions when invited to mastermind the greatest royal show of all.

He's worked on it for months, spent six weeks clambering around the roof of the palace, grabbed four hours sleep in as many days - and then the palace caught fire.

"I rang my wife and told her I'd probably be home early after all. There was I planning to fire a rocket towards the palace and the day before it catches fire, anyway.

"It was extraordinarily brave of the royal household to allow it to go ahead, and us with tons of explosives around the back."

The starting point, of course, was when the Queen launched a rocket from the Mall towards her own home.

"The one thing you never do in this industry is stand a living monarch on top of a pile of explosives and ask her to press the button.

"We'd worked at it, tested it, but it's pyrotechnics not computer science. What if it had all gone wrong? Next time I want to be in charge of the concession toilets because the strain really was too much for me.

"When the rocket went of she was just shrouded in smoke. I thought 'Oh my God, it isn't a happy moment for her, no one can see her', but she never flinched.

"She's probably got my name already and I'm off the Christmas card list, the man who made the Queen's eyes water and got away with it."

In truth, he is more likely to be among those honoured next New Year's Eve - a busy night in the trade - when the Jubilee is again gold weighted in the balance.

"People were saying Jubilee Schmoo- bilee, but the whole atmosphere of the weekend brought out something special in people. Everyone suddenly felt together.

"I've worked with crowds all over the world but this was something overwhelming. If royalty does nothing else but engender a feeling of national identity, then they are doing their jobs."

When he began there were five firework display companies, now there are 170. The competition, he says, is "lethal" - and so is the risk.

He has seen two men die ("one with 53 per cent burns"), lost nine friends ("good friends, people I worked with") in the 1980s. The biggest danger, he says, is complacency, and he himself had never been burned until the party at the end of the Jubilee weekend.

"Lord Stirling insisted I come, turned around to greet me and nearly burned my ear off with the Havana he was smoking," he says.

Twice married, he regrets that worldwide commitments have meant he has seen little of his family and that he was never a good businessman.

"It's been a fly by night, seats of the pants existence - always £20 in, £25 out - but I've seen most of the world in extraordinary circumstances.

"I've had defeats, I've been on my backside so many times you wouldn't believe it and if I'd handled myself better I'd have been a wealthy man.

Remaining ambitions include working on the High Level Bridge in Newcastle ("I'd love to get my hands on that") and meeting Darlington Football club chairman George Reynolds. ("Like me, he's a Shildon lad and proud of it.")

For the moment, the lights beckon ever more brightly. "In this game they say you're only as good as your last show.

"I suppose if that's the case, the last one went pretty well."

SPORTSMEN'S dinners can be a chew. The best ever was Richmond Town FC's, featured World Cup winning England footballer Alan Ball who was brilliant and Fr Michael McKenna, who upstaged him.

Ball swore just once. Former British heavyweight champion Brian London, he said, was the only boxer he knew who had a cauliflower arse. Fr McKenna, memory impels, didn't swear at all.

We mention it because to mark the 40th anniversary of his priesthood, Fr McKenna launches this weekend a collection of his humorous writings called -of all the coruscating coincidences - Light Squibs of Mirth.

"My hope is that it may be the occasion of people falling asleep each night," he insists.

Yet more wondrously coincidental, his father - later a teacher at St Mary's Grammar School in Darlington - was raised in the Surtees Arms, now the Grey Horse, in Shildon. "Canny place," he says.

Fr McKenna has been a priest in Durham and Northumberland, port chaplain at South Shields and for five years a chaplain at Durham jail where he discovered a prisoner running a book on the appearance and sequence of hymn numbers each Sunday.

Now he's at St Aidan's in Ashington, where the paintings include one of the much underrated prophet Amos - described in a biblical commentary as "the first great literary prophet."

The 180 page book, joyously illustrated by Fr Leo Coughlin, will be launched between 11am-2pm on Saturday at St Mary's Cathedral bookshop in Clayton Street, Newcastle when Fr McKenna will assiduously be signing.

Thereafter it's obtainable for £6 99 (plus £1 75 postage) from The Secretary, St Aidan's Presbytery, Station Road, Ashington, Northumberland NE63 8AD.

SPEAKING of humour, and attempts at it, the reference in last week's column to Handel's well known Coronation music Zorba the Greek ("or whatever") was intended entirely to be jocular. In truth, as several readers have pointed out, the melody of the moment was Zadoc the Priest. "You should stick to missing apostrophes," says a lady in Spennymoor. Alas, she may well be right.

...and finally, before Wilf Scott flashed fabulously across the horizon, the unlikely heroine of today's column was to have been the lovely Lola Montez (nee Eliza Gilbert).

She'd briefly tantalized - "a wastrel among the worthies," we'd concluded - in the second volume of Durham Biographies, mentioned last week.

Educated in Sunderland, claimed by that city for its own, Lola was an erotic dancer so seductively successful at her art that a 19th century King of Bavaria lost his marbles (and very nearly his throne) for her love.

It seems likely, however, that Ms Montez is not the same Lola as in the 1970 Kinks hit, reprised by Ray Davis at last week's Golden Jubilee gig. Apart from anything else, that one was a feller.

With thanks to those readers who have sent information, much more of the luscious Lola - as probably they used to say at the Munich Essoldo - next week.