CALLED "No Peace for the Wicked", there is an episode of Porridge in which Fletch - Ronnie Barker - tries everything he knows one Saturday afternoon for a bit of penal solitude.

Endless interruptions are climaxed by a commotion at his cell door. When Fletch looks down from the top bunk - always the top bunk for Norman Stanley Fletcher - he sees a winsome model of Muffin the Mule, made meticulously over many years by innocuous Old Man Blanco.

Until we bumped last Saturday evening into a papier-mache effigy of Fr Eamonn Croghan - this week celebrating the 50th anniversary of his calling, and unalone in his jubilations - Muffin was the most mesmeric model in memory.

This one, however, was in a class of its own.

It had been presented the previous day by the children of St John Vianney primary school in Hartlepool to mark Fr Croghan's 50 years as a priest, though he claimed not to recognise the likeness.

"It looks like some fat old fellow," he had protested, though in weighty matters (it should gently be said) the children of St John Vianney may have erred on the side of Christian charity.

Unashamedly he loves it, of course, keeps sneaking a look at it, had joked about placing it on the altar to see if anyone could spot the difference.

It is a fitting spitting image, an A-plus for effigy and attainment - as mischievous, as faithful, as twinkling and as disinclined to debate doctrine with the godless denizens of HM Press as is Fr Croghan himself.

Now 74, he was ordained 50 years ago today, becoming one of five priests - times change - at St Joseph's in Sunderland. He served subsequently at St Andrew's in Newcastle and at Langley Moor, near Durham, before - a parish priest at last - being sent to the church of St John Vianney in 1970.

"Absolutely great with the children in the schools and loved by them in turn," says Bob Garraghan, himself a former deputy headmaster.

"A tremendously hard worker from the word go, a man of vast humility who will do anything to help the distressed," says Charlie Archbold.

"Great people, real people," says Fr Croghan - and he has proved the people's champion.

He is also, they agree, a priest who has never been known to ask for money.

"The Lord will provide for that sort of thing," says Fr Croghan.

St John Vianney, dedicated to a 19th Century French parish priest, is in King Oswy Drive, Hartlepool. The King Oswy pub is opposite, West View Methodist church dwarfed alongside.

Before the Catholic church was consecrated on St Patrick's Day 1961 they had held services in a works canteen, in the King Oswy and in a community centre, white painted, nearby. The local joke, says Bob, was that they'd been to Mass in the White House.

Fr Croghan had always been pastorally active, became deputy director of the Samaritans on Tyneside and helped form the Durham branch, spent countless hours visiting the sick and at the hospital for "incurables" - as then it was called - at Hunters Moor, Newcastle.

Among his claims to fame, he says, is that he instituted bingo for the bedridden, using equipment begged from the Rediffusion television service.

Like those in Hunters Moor, Hartlepool folk didn't have their problems to seek. Eamonn Croghan was always alongside them.

"A 24 hours a day priest," says Bob Garraghan.

"They haven't had much luck of late," says Fr Croghan, who has guided four of his Hartlepool flock - three of them altar boys - to their own ordination.

He has also been chairman since 1973 of the governors of the English Martyrs Catholic secondary school, promoted ecumenical links between the town's churches - "we had the Salvation Army band in one Christmas, they asked if I wouldn't get into trouble" - and has found time to act as photographer-in-chief (as they call him) of the acclaimed diocesan newspaper.

He is impishly evasive, however, on some of the major issues facing the Catholic church - and guarded about the week's other jubilee. "I've nothing against them," he says, "let them get on with it."

With an eye on Far Eastern events the following morning, we joined 120 or so at Saturday evening's vigil Mass. The primary school children had also decorated a splendid tea towel in his honour, alongside it a card overflowing with tributes to a faithful priest and a wonderful friend.

Fr Croghan's Irish accent appears undistilled, though he used the word "bad" as a Hartlepool lad might - and in a rare moment of criticism.

"The only trouble about people around here," he said, "is that they don't tell you they're bad until they're dead and buried."

Though no date has been fixed, he expects shortly to retire, a trigger for parochial re-organisation among Hartlepool's seven Catholic churches. Now they each have their own priest, soon they will be divided into two "clusters" - with four priests, it's expected, between them.

"I'm starting the ball rolling," says Fr Croghan, who could hardly be the thin end of the wedge.

A celebration Mass was held last night, a dinner follows next week. He plans to live with his brother and sister in Ireland, a family life which since the age of nine he has scarcely known.

"Hartlepool will miss him terribly," says Charlie Archbold. A model priest, undoubtedly.