Kynren for the day

“The worst cramp since Sheffield United away,” says the elder bairn, a six-five, recalling a particularly pain-in-the-backside ordeal at Bramall Lane, which his father had insisted was a Christmas present.

These are the £47 seats, second best, room for manoeuvre so strictly strait-jacketed that the simple act of extracting a handkerchief might be supposed picking the next guy’s pocket.

So a light on the Night Show comes from two fresh angles. Firstly it’s from a journalist who paid to get in and, secondly, from one who remembers Bishop Auckland when it had nowt, or next to nowt, when the year’s social highlight might have been the vicarage garden party and the town clutched desperately at Stan Laurel’s tenuous ten minutes as its hopeless hope of visitor salvation.

The latter may offer particular perspective, for Bishop and its prospects are transformed beyond imagining by this Eleven-Arched extravaganza. Kynren offers a coruscating kaleidoscope, a many-splendoured triumph, the prospect of economic and social regeneration that none save Jonathan Ruffer could ever have envisioned.

For those of us who attended school there and who, wet-eared, worked there, who in the 1960s supposed life’s chiefest joys to be a pay day Wimpy or a smile from the nice lady at the Midland Bank, there’s a third perspective.

If not Bishop Auckland folk, we were close neighbours, kith and Kynren. Now we sit, or squirm, mightily to marvel at a miracle of regeneration and, every so often, to return from sublimely suspended reality.

Hold on, these are almost all volunteers. Hold on, hold on, this is Bishop...

JONATHAN RUFFER is a charismatic City financier who is said to rise each day at 5am and to spend the first 90 minutes in prayer.

Since he is unlikely to invoke the weather gods, he may also have luck on his side. Kynren is wholly uncovered; though a rain-resistant poncho may be had for £4, though there are those who cling to the phrase about wet and water rat, it won’t half help if it’s fine.

The main car park’s getting on a mile away, a distance some Bishop Auckland folk may not have walked since last the Town Service went on strike. En route, and everywhere, are high-viz attendants, more stewards than a CIU convention, almost universally, exuberantly, helpful.

Only the lavvy lad, having drawn the shortest of all short straws, seemed a mite (shall we say) preoccupied.

Two flags are £1, the programme £10 and worth it. It notes that there are more than 1,000 professionally trained volunteers, that 2,513 trees have been planted on the site with many more to come, that there are 63 miles of ducting, 2,367 costumes, 34 horses, 65 7ft Christmas trees – bought in March – and so forth into the fantastical.

Out the back there’s even a Pimms bar. Bishop Auckland may quaff more Pimms in one night of Kynren than in the previous 2,000 years of recorded history.

The performance lasts for around 80 minutes, a purple patchwork in which every seamless second is stupendous, each myriad moment memorable, each feat of sound and light yet more incredible.

The hydraulics, the logistics (save perhaps for the car parking), the electronics, the aquatics, the theatrics are all marvellous – but the guy who just a few short years ago stood in the middle of a forgotten field and simply saw the possibilities, that guy is truly a genius.

THE richly philanthropic Jonathan Ruffer is a Stokesley lad made very good indeed. When last he appeared hereabouts, July 5, it was to purloin his supposed motto from a Daily Mail interview – “Money changes people unless you are a s**t. If you start as a s**t, you stay a s**t, but with money.” Bill Bartle in Barnard Castle offered a slightly less scatalogical alternative: “Money is like manure: keep it in a heap and it stinks, spread it around and it does some good.”

BISHOP Auckland railway station once thronged, triangular, but heading in all directions. Gerald Slack has a poster of trains from Crook, Bishop and Darlington to Blackpool Illuminations – 14/3d, third class – when the return would leave the lights at 11.22pm, breeze over the Stainmore line and be back in time for breakfast.

Gerald and his friend Michael O’Neill steer the Auckland Railways Group, the Four Clocks Centre – the former Central Methodist church – their new station in life.

It’s now home to some wonderful old railway photographs of the town, to period piece playbills from the town’s theatres and even to a former Bishop station bench, bought from the last station master’s son.

Already there’s a handsomely restored Bishop Auckland NUR banner. They’ve now acquired the Shildon Works banner from 1919 – a bit femmer, as they say - and excitedly seek funds for its rehabilitation.

The Auckland Castle folk were themselves down there earlier this month with the thought of what folk like to call a “pop-up museum” while the castle is being reconfigured.

Gerald was born and raised in South Church, still wonders if it qualifies him to be a Bishop boy, has written several books on the area’s railway and industrial heritage and remains one of life’s enthusiasts.

The next book, he hopes, will be on the Hippodrome theatre opened in 1909 by the impresario who built Hipps in Shildon and Darlington and which, these days, is a bingo hall.

Lucky for some? “Oh aye,” says Gerald, “Bishop Auckland is really going places now.”

THURSDAY was Bishop market day. Time was when shoppers couldn’t stir down Newgate Street. Now there are the first shoots of recovery, though there may be a limit to how many e-cig shops a healthy economy can sustain.

It’s Thursday morning when we look into Fifteas, neatly named, an old-and-new tea room in the Market Place itself. There are tiered cake stands, croony moony music – probably recorded on Embassy – and a lovely waitress in a floaty-fifties frock.

Too much to expect Fifties’ prices, of course, but a good bacon butty and an excellent cup of coffee was £3. Retrospect suggests a return to Bishop Auckland.