IN Coronation Street, enjoying one of its better spells, a startling confession is made: Steve McDonald used to write love letters to Wincey Willis, a woman said to have been much older.

Remember Wincey Willis? She was the Tyne Tees Television weather girl and animal enthusiast in the early 1980s who achieved a national stage and in 1986 won the Head of the Year award for what apparently is known as a mullet.

A picture in the Echo archive even describes her as a mealworm expert. No doubt someone has to be.

Born Florence Winsome Willis in Gateshead, she had her first break on Radio Tees, lived with getting on 100 pets of all descriptions in the former railway station at Winston, on the Barnard Castle line, and was taken to TV-am by Greg Dyke.

Dyke supposed her to be more famous for her mistakes than her predictions, but reckoned no one was much bothered about the weather, anyway.

“I just tell people that the bits which stick out will be the coldest,” said Wincey.

She also became familiar on Treasure Hunt, and on her own pets programme, but increasingly turned her attention towards global wildlife conservation.

Last we heard she was in Hereford, did a bit of local radio work, made a few personal appearances, but was chiefly devoted to her animals.

The column has been unable to track her, but a curiosity arises. Though Wincey – always coy about her age – will be 69 next month, she appears to bear a marked resemblance to 46-year-old Sally Ann Matthews, the actress who plays Jenny Bradley in the soap.

It was with Jenny Bradley that Steve McDonald was making a comparison. In Coronation Street, as always, the plot thickens.

GREG DYKE also recruited from Tyne Tees Television a pugnacious, but highly effective news editor called Peter McHugh, a Hebburn lad who’d previously worked at The Northern Echo. Peter’s obit in The Times last week noted his reputation both as a hard drinker and a bit of a bruiser. It was confirmed on his first day at TV-am, when he got into a lunchtime fight in the pub.

IT’S coincidental, like so much else, that we should again be invited to a Tyne Tees Telly reunion, in Northallerton. Talk’s turned towards the winsome Ms Willis.

Separately, two or three recall a late night live production at the former Newcastle studios when she’s walking along a corridor with one of the gaffers when they’re passed in the opposite direction by a gentleman in a state of total undress.

“Who the hell’s that?” asks the gaffer.

“I don’t know,” says Wincey, “but he doesn’t work at Tyne Tees.”

Of course, they collectively add, the story may well be apocryphal.

AMONG those at the reunion is Paul Frost, the Hartlepool lad still affectionately remembered from his days as the regional evening news presenter (or anchor, as in the circumstances may be more appropriate). He now runs his own production company; its credits including The Great Survivor, a 57-minute DVD on the story of HMS Trincomalee, docked and restored in Hartlepool and the world’s second oldest ship still afloat. Trinc’s marking its 200th anniversary, which makes it yet more surprising that Royal Navy Museum Services, which now runs the Trincomalee shop, declines to stock the DVD. They say there’s no interest. What Paul says may be repeatable only after the watershed.

BERNARD HALL, whose first novel is based on his experiences as a county council social worker in Shildon and Spennymoor, spoke a few nights back to Shildon Recall History Society.

We meet beforehand in Costa, the one next to the tattoo parlour. Bernard supposes that the old town hasn’t much changed since he was there in the early 80s – it isn’t meant as a compliment – though he seems oddly taken by the Egregious Arches.

Teresa, his wife, thinks it quite the grandest Costa she’s ever visited.

Bernard’s now 78, had been an economics lecturer at Durham University, joined the county council almost forty years ago. “It was a meeting of two entirely different worlds,” he tells the amateur historians.

“At Durham University they were often more concerned about which way to pass the port. Working here was the happiest time of my life.”

In Miss Perfect, his delightful and somewhat mischievous novel, Durham becomes Rudham, Spennymoor is Moortown and Shildon, more carefully camouflaged, is Brownlow. A lot of his work, he says, involved children at risk – though the poor social worker had also become an endangered species at the clenched hands of some of the less appreciative fathers.

There’s also a story about a horse in a council house bedroom, attested hand on heart by generations of south Durham folk – usually in the magistrates court – but never brought to water.

Bernard insists that they recently saw the same story in Kent. “I didn’t even know they had council houses in Kent.”

The talk’s in the Methodist hall. Someone tells Teresa that, either side of the war, Shildon had seven Methodist churches and was known as the Holy City. To some of us, of course, it still is.

n Miss Perfect by Bernard Hall is available on Amazon and Kindle or from Waterstone’s in Durham.

THEY’RE a good lot, the historians, committed not just to preserving the past but to inspiring the younger generation.

Alan Ellwood, the leader, gives school talks. “I take a piece of coal. They smell it, they lick it, they don’t know what it is. A lot of kids have never seen a piece of coal.”

At the back of the hall there’s a little exhibition: the gilded key which opened Shildon Rec in 1912, the truncheons wielded (sparingly) by the polliss, pop bottles made in Shildon.

There’s also a silver salver presented by grateful patients to Dr Samuel Fielden, the town’s GP in the early 20th century. Alan says that the doc’s son Edward – “known as Mouse, even to the Queen” – became Captain of the Queen’s Flight.

Googling confirms that Air Vice Marshall Sir Edward Hedley Fielden GCVO, CB, DFC, AFC did indeed hold that position, and before that with Edward VIII and George VI. We’re all high fliers in Shildon.

BENEATH the long-awaited headline “Brotherlee love”, we wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Weardale hamlet of that name. It wasn’t original. David Walsh emails a clip of a 1989 Kenny Everett sketch called Brother Lee Love, though this appears to be a spoof Jerry Lee Lewis and a nuns’ chorus. It sparks an exchange about Everett and Germaine Greer, who gave the world the Female Eunuch, but also appeared in earlier Everett shows. David met her a couple of times – “seemed nice and friendly and loved puns” – recalls that she still writes an occasional gardening column for Private Eye. Her pseudonym’s Rose Blight.