Ever watched Judge Judy, she whose autobiography is entitled Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining? It's a mesmerising American television series, starring the formidably feisty Judge Judy Sheindlin presiding over real cases, usually involving small claims.

Over there, they reckon, it's bigger than Springer and Winfrey locked together, countless websites devoted to Judy-ism. "All about Johnny Rotten on Judge Judy"; "Judy on juvenile justice"; "About Judge Judy's decision to return a pair of shoes to Payless Shoe Store."

Word is - not many people know this - that they're planning a British version. Vera Baird QC, now Labour's candidate for Redcar, was among those auditioned before the parliamentary possibility arose. "The money was epic," she says.

We mention it, however, because last Wednesday's paper reported a case at Durham Crown Court sternly presided over by Judge Judy Moir - from Sunderland - whom we'd not previously encountered.

Her Honour Judge Judith Moir, it transpires, is a tough cookie, too. "Very bright, very shrewd, doesn't take crap," says our man in the wishy-washy well of court.

Perhaps the alternative Judge Judy has even read Judge Sheindlin's autobiography, or is anticipating the sequel. It's called Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever.

BEFORE them all, and more outspoken than any, came Judge Myrella Cohen - in 1968 the first woman from the North-East legal circuit to be appointed to the Bench, in 1973 the third woman judge in Britain and, observed Gadfly on February 3, 1988, the only man among the long-wigged lot of them.

The sentiment was echoed by Judge Denis Orde in commending a retiring police officer's 30 years service - "Thirty years? It sounds a little like one of Judge Cohen's more merciful sentences" - and the cuttings file maintains the strict tempo.

To prize-giving students at Polam Hall girls school, Darlington, in 1983:

"Don't be misled into burning your undergarments, taking part in torch-light processions or leading revolutionary marches. What a woman needs to succeed is loyalty, hard work and determination."

On student demonstrations, 1971: "There are in our midst trouble makers...who have come very often from abroad" - from abroad, mark - "to upset the ordinary sort of society in which we live."

At Durham Quarter Sessions, after a start delayed by 45 minutes: "I am very concerned about this lackadaisical attitude There is far too much of this." (1975).

And to members of Her Majesty's Press Corps, after ordering a retrial at Sunderland Quarter Sessions in 1970: "Just about the most indiscreet and thoughtless piece of reporting I've ever seen."

Born in North Wales, she married Lt Col Morduant Cohen from Sunderland. Now 73, she lives with him in Middlesex. Judge Judy could have modelled herself on her.

A LITTLE further down the judicial coconut shy, it is proposed - apparently because of the need of a £70,000 refurbishment - that Bishop Auckland magistrates court should close.

Whatever the dubious economics - like the cost of private security firms daily transporting prisoners to the courts at Newton Aycliffe - the move excites a nostalgia far greater than its petty sessional status.

Bishop court is where the column learned the inky trade, an innocent abroad among the guilty as charged, telephoning cubby copy from the carcinogenic call box.

Those Monday and Thursday mornings became almost like a club, a bench mark (as it were) on endless career paths, a social circle of polliss and prosecutor, defence and defenceless, hero and villain.

Justice's hand may yet be stayed. If Bishop court really is to be condemned, however, we may still have much to plead in its memory.

A ROUGHER sort of justice, no doubt, but we are grateful nonetheless to Charlie Westberg in Darlington for a front page cutting from The Star following his annual visit to South Africa.

"Angry commuters, protesting at the late arrival of trains, set fire to the Pretoria railway station last night, prompting a massive fire fighting operation that was set to continue all night." Some among the 6,000 homeward passengers had started to become "agitated" when the trains again failed to appear, says The Star. They had started beating up security guards and - "not satisfied" - set light to the Edwardian building.

Charlie doesn't recommend it. "In my experience," he says, "a letter to the general manager serves just as well."

LAST week's dissertation on oxymorons - those phrases which essay a shotgun marriage of apparently unsuitable opposites - drew a swift addendum from Chris Chappell in Esh Winning, near Durham.

At risk of life and limb, he writes - to which vengeful lady sub-editors might recklessly have been added - what about "feminine logic" and "woman driver"?

Or what, he adds, about Virgin Express, "fairly one-sided" and "strawberry blonde"? ("Have you EVER seen a blonde strawberry?)

Lynn de Prator in Darlington, who nurtured last week's loggerhead linguistics, seeks permission to add phrases like "domestic bliss", "non-working mother", "educational television", "casual sex" and (waspish, this) "free love".

Though grammatically disqualified, the most appropriate of all may be the only single word oxymoron on the block.

Briefing.

BOB Jarratt from Caldwell, near Richmond, takes a contrary - though not necessarily opposite - view.

The little treatise on oxymorons not only reminded him of a pamphlet he wrote in 1988 called How to Organise a Peace Riot - "a resounding failure" - but of a fascination with what Bob calls "the missing positives".

He means words like unkempt. "A man whose ill-kept and scruffy appearance leads us to describe him as unkempt, may smarten himself to compare favourably with a Guards officer, but we will not call him kempt".

They are words which appear to be negative but which have no proper positive. Like unruly, says Bob - "we have no etymological right to class our own children as ruly, little angels though they may be" - and ruthless and uncouth.

We have particularly drawn his attention, however, to PG Wodehouse in The Code of the Woosters: "He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."

Other examples, and an explanation of why flammable and inflammable share precisely the same meaning, would be welcomed by this not very shevelled columnist. What Bob Jarratt chiefly seeks, however, is a collective noun for such orphan adjectives.

Usually constant, Gadfly readers will doubtless oblige.

...and finally, back to that Gadfly column of February 3, 1988, in which we passed an appreciative verdict on Judge Myrella Cohen.

That same column mused upon a report to Sedgefield District Council - based upon information from the local health authority - which claimed that Newton Aycliffe had a "higher proportion of problems with regard to solvent use, drug abuse

and marital breakdown than anywhere else in the district".

Only one distinctly non-compliant councillor was disinclined to accept its damning judgment. "Bloody lies," said Tony Moore, unequivocally.

The health authority went away, looked again, and admitted that their report could have been precisely what Tony said it was. There were, the authority conceded, "no firm statistics"

Lies, bloody lies and no firm statistics, as Benjamin Disraeli very nearly observed.

It was one of many battles which Tony - who died last Friday, aged 59 - fought and won for his adopted town and its cosmopolitan people. He was a councillor for 28 years, most of the time an Independent, on every local authority there was.

We only twice came close to falling out, the first time when Gadfly pinched his carefully colour co-ordinated and ever-present top pocket handkerchief for the non-decorative purpose for which such things were more generally intended, and the second when Tony, in turn, purloined the column's Dennis the Menace whapper-snapper (or some such comical device) for the purpose of rousing the somnolent at Durham County Hall. For much of the time he fought alone, determined in the face of dirty tricks and democratic disregard that they would never grind him down. Nor did they, not once.

That he never lost an election says almost everything, but he never missed a trick, either. Tireless to the end, Tony was better, and braver, than any of them.