A sad world but Harry’s still a star (From The Northern Echo)

A sad world but Harry’s still a star

11:55am Monday 21st September 2009

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TWO days away from the editor’s chair, playing golf with three friends amid magnificent countryside, was good for the soul. Fresh air, great crack.

We stayed at the Middle Ruddings Hotel, close to Keswick, boldly overlooked by Skiddaw.

It’s where a pair of Ospreys have made their home. I waited for a glimpse but they must have gone fishing in Bassenthwaite.

On the way to the Lakes, we had a round at Penrith. On the way home, we played Appleby, where the greens are protected by electric wires to ward off sheep, which pay not the slightest interest in birdies and bogeys.

In the clubhouse, a member was ordering a pint. A copy of the Daily Star, left on the bar, caught his eye: “I’ll never take Jordan back,” screamed the front page.

The latest in the utterly tedious saga of Peter Andre’s split from perennial publicity-seeker Jordan. It has been the subject of the Star’s front page for weeks. The Sun and Mirror have been almost as obsessed.

“Who the hell cares?” asked the golf club member, as he picked up the paper.

“There are lads dying every day in Afghanistan and they put that rubbish on the front page. God, it’s a sad world...”

What’s sadder still is that, of all the national papers in the country, sales of the Daily Star are up the most, at 19 per cent.

BACK to work, I was at Darlington station, catching a train to York, and in WH Smith, two lads were checking the papers.

“Isn’t that yesterday’s paper?” said one, picking up the Daily Star, leading on yet another instalment of the Andre-Jordan feud.

In fact, it could have been yesterday, the day before, the day before that, or the day before that.

He bought it anyway.

I CAN’T imagine there were many Star readers among members of Middlesbrough Probus Club, who made me feel so welcome at a speaking engagement the other day.

The vote of thanks was given by sprightly 89-year-old Norman Frankish, ex-RAF and brought up with The Northern Echo.

Norman recalled the days when “Mister Northern Echo Man” walked along Scarborough seafront, half-disguised by his trilby, in the distant summers of the 1920s.

Readers were urged to go up to him and declare: “You are Mister Northern Echo Man!”

If they could then answer a question which had been posed in that day’s paper, a ten bob note would be coming their way.

Perhaps we should bring him back.

IN a different way entirely, Harry Evans is still “Mister Northern Echo” to many.

His legend has lived on in these parts since he left his campaigning stamp on the paper as editor in the 1960s.

Harry’s autobiography – “My Paper Chase” – is published on Thursday. A copy arrived last week and I am delighted to say there is one similarity between us at least.

On page 232, Harry talks of his determination to raise the paper’s profile: “I made a point of stopping in newsagents as an ordinary customer, asking for a copy of The Northern Echo, and expressing amazement when they hadn’t one.”

I’ve done exactly the same thing. What’s more, I have a strange habit of tidying piles of Northern Echos in newsagents across the region, making sure there’s a nice, clean copy on top.

Perhaps I need another break in the country already.

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