Sweet talk

Over here it mightn’t have mattered so much. Jelly Babies are relatively soft if thrown from the front circle and, in any case, make a change from ladies’ underwear. It was the Americans who caused the problem.

They’d never heard of Jelly Babies so threw jelly beans instead. Lest they be obliged to wear hard hats and body armour on stage, the Fab Four had to urge them to desist.

All this is mentioned, lest any wonder, because last week I was asked officially to open the new Mind charity shop on Yarm High Street – about which more in tomorrow’s John North.

About 95 per cent of Mind shops’ stock is donated: much the best seller among the rest are Jellyatrics, Jelly Babies in the shape of the elderly – like Bryan Bashful (“a retired university professor with a walking stick”) and Frau Zimmer who, it is said, tastes of orange and likes baking.

“They absolutely fly off the shelves,” said Alex Wood, the mental health charity’s regional manager.

The bag proclaimed it to be Jelly Babies’ 80th birthday. Since the anniversary seems shamefully to have passed us by, ten more little things that you may never have known…

■ Bassett’s launched Jelly Babies in 1919 to mark the end of World War I – then they were known as “Peace Babies”. Production was suspended during World War II – apart from anything else, the name was said to have become a bit ironic – but was resumed as Jelly Babies in 1953.

■ Three million Jelly Babies are said to be eaten each week, sales worth £14m a year. Each Jelly Baby has 20 calories.

■ Several Dr Who personifications, particularly Tom Baker, have been timelessly fond of the things. So was Basil Brush.

■ The Doctor once interrupted a game of rock-paper-scissors to place a Jelly Baby in Romana’s hand.

■ Since 1989, Bassett’s Jelly Babies have had individual names, too. The leader’s called Brilliant, the others include Bigheart, Bumper and Bonny – they’re said to be “streetwise”.

■ A popular science class experiment is said to be putting Jelly Babies into a strong oxidising agent, the resultant “spectacular” reaction known as “screaming jelly babies”. Passing scientists, or the learned Mr Robert Bacon, will have to explain.

■ The Guinness Book doesn’t have a Jelly Baby eating record. Fifty in a minute is reckoned possible (if wholly inadvisable.)

■ Women with children are more likely to bite the heads off first.

Childless women eat them whole.

“No great psychological conclusions have been drawn from this,” the survey added.

■ In blindfold tests, the most popular flavour was strawberry, followed by lime, blackcurrant and lemon.

■ A primary school in Sheffield once tried to make a mile of Jelly Babies. They failed.

THEN there’s the Scottish athlete Angela Mudge, who knocked 13 minutes off the women’s record for the Everest marathon (2,000m of ascent and descent, temperatures from – 4 to 20C) sustained throughout on nothing more adult than Jelly Babies.

The news doesn’t surprise our old sports scientist friend Sharon Gayter, from Guisborough, Britain’s top female 24-hour runner these past 13 years. “Jelly Babies are great running food because of the carbohydrates.

I always have them in my pack,” she says.

Last weekend she covered 54 miles in nine hours 45 minutes, though without need for baby food. “They can get a bit sweet. I was in cheese sandwich mode,” she says.

Sharon’s fighting back from injury, her last enforced appearance hereabouts after completing the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle to while away the inactivity. Now she’s tackling the world’s toughest, 18,000 pieces of jungle. It comes in quarters; the first took eight days.

Meanwhile, she discovers a 32,000 piece puzzle, made in Germany and costing 236 euros. “I’m hoping for it for Christmas,” she says.

A RATHER more sedate pace, it’s exactly ten years since I walked through the hamlet of Langton, near Gainford in south-west Durham. There again on Sunday evening, peering – myopically, incorrigibly – at the notice board, I’m spotted by Mr John Heslop and his wife.

John’s a former Darlington cricketer of note, still an occasional Hear All Sides correspondent. Had we not been acquainted, it’s possible he’d have called out a whole troop of Neighbourhood Watchmen.

Langton’s claim to fame, as we noted in July 2000, was that it had the North East’s least-used public phone box. Now the equipment is gone, though the box remains and there’s a notice headed “Telephone kiosk review.”

“Review” has been appropriated by the mealy-mouthed, as in “Bus Fare review”. In 2010, it’s a synonym for “bad news”.

THE notice board’s only contender for a parish pump paragraph, incidentally, was a council minute that the Wendy house in Gainford has twice been attacked by wreckers.

Even child’s play’s a target now.

LAST week’s column had cause to recall Fred Emney, the heavyweight actor/comedian who I had the misfortune to interview at Billingham Forum in the Seventies.

The Americans thought rather better of him. The New York Times, recalls the knowledgeable John Foster in Langley Park, once observed that there were three things any visitor to London should see: St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and Fred Emney.

The Billingham appearance, adds John, was in December 1973 in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, originally alongside the great Phil Silvers. For reasons that may only be imagined, Emney didn’t last long: Arnold Ridley found funny things on the way to the Forum instead.

COMING up to September and still just three summer days on which it has been sunny enough to adjourn to the outer office – that is to say, a picnic table in North Lodge Park in Darlington.

On one occasion, it may be recalled, the workmen restoring the bandstand had proved – shall we say – a rather too percussive accompaniment.

Yvonne Richardson now reports, however, that work’s almost complete and that the bandstand will officially strike up again on September 18. Day-long attractions will include three brass bands, something called the Parkettes, Punch and Judy, a steam train, “Mrs Posser’s Victorian kitchen” and a “Victorian rat catcher”.

Yvonne chairs the Friends of North Lodge Park. I’d be a Friend for life, if only they could do something about the weather.

…and finally, back to jelly good fellows and to a course 30 years ago for those supposed – in some cases clearly erroneously – to have a bit about them.

It was held in Hastings, by the Sussex sea. Among other detainees was Drew Smith, chief sub-editor at the time of the Basildon Evening Echo.

The day’s work over, we set out on what I hoped would be a search for a few decent beers but which Drew transmuted into a town-wide hunt for jellied eels. The finest dish known to man, he insisted.

Mr Smith went on to become editor of the Good Food Guide and one of the country’s top food writers.

Whether he remains partial to a plate of jellied eels, or indeed to biting the head off a Jelly Baby, it is sadly impossible to say.

Sweets for the sweet, the column returns next week.