Up to scratch

The audience at the Youth Centre was five, reduced to four when one chap’s bad back compelled him to go home and thus increased by 400 per cent when Hewin’ Goals tunnelled its way to the Voodoo Café in Darlington on Friday.

Eleven of the 16 were either me or were with me. Two were parents of one of the cast, a third his girl friend and the other two from New Zealand (and thought it well worth the trip.)

Ken Dodd’s Happiness Show was simultaneously running – doubtless overrunning – at the Civic Theatre, a quarter of a mile away, but at the Voodoo they were happy enough just to have 16.

Hewin’ Goals celebrates the Northern League’s 125th anniversary. “It’s like the Church of England,” said Canon Leo Osborn, the league chaplain, “not many people in attendance and those that are all sitting separately at the back.” Canon Osborn is a Methodist.

Backscratch are boisterous and brilliant – Crook-based, young, innovative, imaginative and joyously enthusiastic. The Voodoo Café has something about it, too.

Extolled in the 2015 Good Beer Guide, winner of an award for the top Latin-American venue outside London, it also has belly dancers on Monday nights and sells Havana cigars to take away. (There is no known connection between the last two items.)

The cast’s four-strong, the script and set ingenious. There’s Jack and Tom Burton, brought up at Sunniside above Crook – “a duet of fresh air, football and reggae,” says Jack – Mike Daynes from Darlington and Coundon lad jaunty Joseph Robinson.

The play had its premiere at Morpeth Town FC on October 10, the audience of 67 perhaps boosted because club chairman Ken Beattie not only paid for everyone to get in, but laid on pizza and chips at the interval.

It highlights some of the most memorable stories from Northern League history, none more memorably than the Crook Town “tea money” scandal of the late 1920s.

Jack plays the tea woman, a bearded lady from central casting, though rather resembling a hirsute Magi from a kindergarten nativity play. It was never like that in Knotty Ash.

There’s also a greatly jolly song called Footballs and Carrots When Saturday Comes, built around Seamus O’Connell, who starred for Bishop Auckland – and for Chelsea – in the 1950s.

Familiar in London society, Seamus is said on one occasion to have strolled naked from the shower through the middle of a posh party.

A London lady eyed him with interest. “Hung like that you should trot,” she said.

Backscratch remain upbeat, enjoying themselves no end, but itching for a few more folk. They’re at The Forum in Borough Road, Darlington, tonight, at Bishop Auckland FC’s Heritage Park ground on Thursday, Aycliffe Village Hall on Friday, and Crook Town FC on Saturday. There’s newsreel film of the golden age, occasional background music which rather resembles the soundtrack from Trumpton, lots of fun and with luck maybe even a chocolate digestive.

Pay at the door, it’s just £5, £3 concessions – a lovely, lively, exuberant vehicle on which to recreate a rich slice of North-East social history. All productions start at 7pm.

THE following evening to Crook Golf Club, where a fundraising comedy night for Tow Law Town FC is promoted – no joking – with the assurance of being “suitable for a mixed audience”.

One of the turns is an addled old act from Keighley who mumbles and stumbles and keeps looking anxiously at his watch. “I just wanted to tell you that Max Clifford has been in bed for two hours,” he says.

The other, Austin Knight, says that last time he played Crook he went down so well that he was approached by a chap from the Brittle Bone Society offering £10,000 to provide the cabaret at their annual dinner in London.

“I snapped his hand off,” he says.

The audience is at least 50 per cent female. They hear babe-innocent gags like the one about marriage being like a card game – “you start with two hearts and a diamond and end up ten years later wanting a club and a spade” – and about the difference between single and married women. It involves the fridge.

The best, if not the most original, probably involves the Yorkshireman – being a Yorkshireman is crucial to the story – who has to have his dog put down and is so upset that he asks a goldsmith to make a statue of it.

“Do you want it 18 carat?” asks the goldsmith.

“Nay lad, just chewin’ a bone will do.”

It has to be said that things become a little bawdier – and with language unlikely to appeal to the Northern League’s sensitive corps of secret shoppers – as the evening wears on.

One half of the audience shifts a little uncomfortably in its seats – but the women love every last minute.

SOMETIMES it’s necessary to provide your own entertainment – the term may be used pretty lightly – which may explain why I’m invited to address the Sedgefield U3A group on 50 years in the inky trade.

Interesting outfit, the University of the Third Age. Formed at Toulouse University in 1973, it’s now worldwide – an organisation for retired and semi-retired folk that seeks mentally and socially to keep them on their toes.

Among them is Isobel Nuttall, a former deputy clerk of Great Aycliffe Town Council, who recalls an early 1970s meeting at which a councillor called Alec Cessford made a short-shrift comment about her mini-skirt.

“It was only really an aside, but you always did have flapping ears,” says Isobel.

She’d been asked for a photograph, but the lady mayor drew the line. “I wanted to reprise the moment today, but my daughters wouldn’t let me,” she adds. Perhaps prudently, she wears a trouser suit instead.

THE Daily Telegraph reports the death of the Rt Rev Stephen Sykes, an honorary assistant Bishop of Durham and a former professor and principal at the university. He was 75.

Occasionally encountered by the At Your Service column, he was a man of scholarship worn lightly. Bishop of Ely from 1990-1999, he was the bookies’ favourite in 1994 to succeed David Jenkins as Durham’s bishop, proving only how little bookies know about matters ecclesiastical.

In recent years he’d spent much of his time in a wheelchair, adding “Re-learning to walk” to his list of recreations in Who’s Who.

Altogether happier episcopal news, John Pritchard – formerly Bishop of Jarrow, latterly of Oxford – is headed back north upon retirement. He and his wife Wendy will live in Richmond.

Their cat Amos – Christendom’s smartest feline – is sadly no longer with them, or us.

...and finally, following last week’s jottings on train spotting, an email from Paul Wilkinson in Knaresborough draws doubtless coincidental attention to the Dull Men’s Club’s 2015 calendar.

Among the 12 gentlemen mundanely immortalised on its pages is John Richards, former newspaper sub-editor and esteemed founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

The Dull Men’s Club’s 5,000 other members include a traffic cone enthusiast, a milk bottle collector and – get this – a drain spotter.

Regrettably, however, we must take dullard exception to the club website’s claim that the calendar can be “pre-ordered.” It can’t, for heaven’s sake, any more than someone can be pre-warned. It’s either ordered or it’s not: John Richards would doubtless concur.