IT'S not exactly water under the bridge yet with the Environment Agency nosing around and Spectator, no stranger to the banks of Bedale Beck, is saddened that the well intentioned efforts by the town council to improve the area should have provoked a backlash.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the timing, it has been a public relations disaster. Although the beck between Bedale Bridge and the weir had become an overgrown and smelly eyesore crying out for attention, to Spectator's knowledge the full implications of the proposed work were never made sufficiently clear at either of the recently abolished civic committees, nor at any full council meeting beyond a brief reference duly reported here in January, when a rise in the parish precept was being justified.

So who can blame environmentalists and ordinary people for reacting so violently when something of this magnitude is suddenly thrust on them? Spectator thinks much of the present grief could have been mitigated had the town council used the wider local media to make an earlier and rather more detailed statement than the brief, anodyne notice which someone appears to have inserted almost at the last minute in the Bedale Bugle community newsletter.

If, as has been claimed, the work was overdue by almost 30 years, that surely reflects on the inertia of previous town council administrations which allowed the beck to lapse into that sorry state, mainly through pointless arguments over responsibility.

It seems that it is only the initiative for market town renaissance that has finally galvanised somebody into action. Now that such drastic work has been done, Spectator trusts that the town council will keep on top of it, will allocate appropriate funding and will not be facing a similar crisis in 2035, when the grandiose visions contained in a renaissance document published last year may or may not have been realised.

Election colour

ONE of Spectator's colleagues has just put down the telephone following a mind-boggling call to deepest Giggleswick, near Settle, to speak to 90-year-old Robert Leakey, a late entrant representing the Currency Party in the General Election stakes for the Skipton and Ripon constituency.

Mr Leakey is obviously not acquainted with such modern contrivances as e-mail. A two-page manifesto faxed to us from the nearest pub threw out radical ideas like fireworks, some of which might have seen him hanged, drawn and quartered in a less tolerant age. More details, in an abridged form, may be found on our election special page elsewhere.

The gentleman may not thank Spectator for saying so, but his approach seems to be the nearest anybody has yet got to that of the Monster Raving Loony Party, which brightened up the Richmond election in 1989 and once claimed that some of its theories had actually been taken seriously by those with more clout.

All power to Mr Leakey's elbow, even though he is unlikely to make even the smallest dent in David Curry's omnitopent majority. What this election needs more than anything else is a bit of eccentric colour.