THOUGH something of which Lord Reith would doubtless have disapproved, BBC3 is screening a comedy programme called Tittybangbang - described by the Radio Times as "disturbingly funny" and by the Financial Times as "wilfully repellent".

The characters include a group of middle-aged Harrogate ladies who do needlepoint while naked from the waist downwards and the women's darts team - "three goofy ladettes" - from the working class Scorton Social Club, "somewhere in the North of England."

Any resemblance to the toxophilitic tranquility of Scorton, near Richmond, is doubtless unintended.

What particularly disturbs Harry Watson in Darlington isn't the programme - "not very funny at all" - but the insistence on the Echo's television pages of calling it "T***ybangbang."

"Who has decreed that 'titty' is not a word for sensitive Echo readers to see?" asks Harry.

"When I was a bairn on Tyneside it was a perfectly acceptable word, the nippers would drink their milk from a titty bottle then afterwards suck a dumb-tit. If my memory serves me correctly, somewhere on Tyneside there's also a Titty Bottle Bank."

The censorship puzzles him.

Asterisks? The gall.

THE word titty, often in relation to "titty bottle" but twice as an allusion to the tough sort, has appeared in The Northern Echo nine times in the past 17 years.

It may be no great revelation that in every case I was the author, not through any great wish to test the bounds of what is acceptable but because few others may even know the term.

The At Your Service column has had two titty bottles, one at All Saints RC church in Lanchester and the other just last month during a Palm Sunday service at a farm near Bedale. None appears to have been offended. We have written about Titty Bottle parks, as locals appear universally to have called them, on Redcar sea front and in Cockton Hill, Bishop Auckland. There was a Titty Bottle school at West Auckland and, at the long gone Eden Theatre in Bishop Auckland, a torch wielding usher known as Titty Bottle Richley.

The Eating Owt column had cause for some risible reason to reprise the chorus of the Ballad of Bethnal Green, a 1950s song by Paddy Roberts.

To my rit-fal-lal, to my titty fal-lal, to my itty-bitty fal-lal day.

The Internet's only reference to Titty Bottle Bank is in Shildon, alongside such once-familiar haunts as Coza, Fairy Glen, Johnny Best's Beck and the descriptively named Hilly-Holey.

Titty Bottle Park in Redcar appears to have been a splendid place 100 years ago, though public toilets now stand on the site. Rather less endearingly, the locals now call it Bog Island instead.

ANOTHER website reckons that the Redcar park was given its soothing nickname by a "local stage artist" called Weary Willie.

Though a Cleveland connection has proved impossible to trace, the character Weary Willie was a tramp who first appeared in Illustrated Chips comic in 1896.

Two years later, a film called Weary Willie featured a tramp who tried to gain sole use of a park bench by driving others away with his objectionable behaviour.

Could it have been in Titty Bottle Park?

Soon Weary Willie was teamed with Tired Tim, enduring in various forms until 1953 before no doubt collapsing, exhausted. Weary Willie was also the name of a horse on Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1911 and the nickname of one of Kaiser Bill's less effective mortar bombs.

You know, of course, the etymology of "bottle", meaning courage? Maybe that's another story. . .

ANXIOUS to assuage Harry Watson, for whom PC was probably Dixon of Dock Green, we have referred his email to Peter Barron, the editor - born and raised in Eston, between Middlesbrough and Redcar. The reply is happily coincidental: there was a park of that nickname in Eston, an' all.

"As someone who has spent a lot of time in a pram in Titty Bottle Park, I feel sure our readers are able to cope without the assistance of asterisks, " he writes.

Though television listings are provided by the Press Association, the editor is now authorising a local amendment. We will be milksops no longer.

BACK to changing times, and to this week's Church Times, in which a vicar's wife describes how her dog, Dibley, has won a Sky TV talent show called Mega Mutt. (The title Bone Idol had inexplicably been discarded. ) Shaggy or otherwise, reality dog shows have become all the rage, she says.

This one appears to be the brainchild of the column's old friend Bob Whittaker, a Shildon lad whose journalistic career began many years ago on the dear departed Auckland Chronicle.

Another show's called Dog Borstal, described as a last resort for bad animals. It's on BBC3, clearly the place to be.

APOLOGIES to retired surgeon Tim Stahl, a volunteer guide at Darlington's restored pumping station, who - said last week's column - wanted to register the new disease "anoraksia nervosa", a condition that affects him and his colleagues when know-alls are about.

What Tim actually detected was anoraksia verbosa - more deadly yet - and someone who knows nothing about a subject and is proud of it should be an ignorak, he adds.

LAST week's column was in saintly mode, wondering - among much else - who St Johnston was and why "St Johnston's riband" was a Scottish term for the hangman's noose.

"There never was a St Johnston, just Bob Johnston and he's lovely, " says Elizabeth Steele in Staindrop, who a couple of times met Tyne Tees Telly's meteorological marvel when comptroller of Raby Castle.

"St John's Toun", adds Elizabeth, was the old name for Perth - and remains, of course, the name of its football club.

Why the noose should be "St Johnston's riband" eludes both Elizabeth and the ever-erudite Tom Purvis in Sunderland, though Tom sends a lengthy extract from Sir Walter Scott's "Old Mortality" in which there's reference to "St Johnstone's tippit."

In clothing, a tippit was a stole with hanging ends. Readers may no longer be able to stand the suspense.

SEEKING action on the withdrawal of evening and Sunday bus services from the Scorton area, Richmondshire district councillor Tony Pelton has written constructively to Arriva - "copies to Mike Amos and to Jonathan at the bus stop in Middleton Tyas." They're more likely to be stirred by the second.

. . . and finally, we note that on May 24 the Centre for Lifelong Learning in Newcastle offers a "taster course" on poisonous plants.

Suck it and see, as probably they used to say in Titty Bottle Park, the column returns next week.