JOHN Briggs married Lynn de Prator at Darlington register office last Friday: if ever a wedding picture demanded the headline "Glad All Over", it's this one. John is worldwide organiser of the International Friends of the Dave Clark Five, Lynn was the American membership secretary.

Though the group sold 60 million records in the 1960s, Glad All Over was their only UK number one.

Together they also compile the Friends' magazine, called Bits and Pieces. Bits and Pieces reached number two a few months later.

John, 22 years a North-East railwayman, more recently landlord of the Travellers Rest in Cockerton, and now living in peace with his free pass, was a member of the original famous Five fan club in 1963.

Lynn, who saw them on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 and loved the "Return" LP that her mum brought home from the Pennsylvania supermarket, is said to have an "amazing" Dave Clark Five scrapbook.

Comparing Clark's tales, number one fan met number two over the Internet in 1998. He told her he looked like Homer Simpson. Whilst Mr Simpson considers his options, they had cinnamon doughnuts (Homer's favourites) from America and a Homer Simpson wedding cake, an' all.

The Dave Clark Five had their first hit with a cover of the Beatles' Do You Love Me in 1963, enjoyed 21 other chart successes, but split in 1970.

They won 14 gold discs, were the first British group to undertake a full US tour and played in front of 70,000 fans in Manila.

Like everyone who was anyone, they also appeared before rather fewer folk at The Globe in Stockton.

Berry Gordy, it's said (by John and Lynn) based the Motown sound on Dave Clark's drum beat; Bits and Pieces was reckoned the first ever "punk" record.

The Five remain alive, and well. The two, once 5,000 miles apart, are now happily united in the Dave Clark cause. Lovely couple, they will live in Darlington but continue rocking all over the world.

RICK Huxley, a fifth of the Clark quintet, was born in Dartford, Kent, on August 5, 1940, but three years later evacuated, with his elder sister, to separate families in Cockfield, Co Durham.

His cousin Michael, three years younger, became yet more famous as the leather- faced lead singer with the Rolling Stones.

Rick, doubtless unsurprisingly, remembers little of the Cockfield experience, save for the long terrace, the outside netty - didn't they have those in Dartford? - and the nearby railway viaduct over the Gaunless Valley.

Now in electronic wholesaling, he hopes to re-visit his childhood haunts in March, and by that time to have remembered the names of those with whom he was billeted.

Memories from the Cockfield end, or of other evacuation procedures, much welcomed.

WE revealed before Christmas that when unlucky-for-some former French president Giscard D'Estaing stayed recently at the Morritt Arms at Greta Bridge - near Barnard Castle - a teddy bear had to be provided at table to increase the numbers in his party from 13 to 14.

No such superstitious nonsense attends Eric Smallwood's wine tasting group in Middlesbrough.

When only 13 attend, they bring in a rubber duck, instead.

IS Mike Neville MBE, now eligible to draw the old age pension but still pulling teatime television audiences, about to announce his retirement?

"Yes," says the rumour around Tyne Tees Television. "They've already commissioned a tribute video. He's going in May."

"No," says Tyne Tees programme controller Graeme Thompson. "Mike is about to celebrate 40 years as a daily news presenter on regional television.

"His ratings are excellent and he is half way through his contract. If he is leaving in the Spring, it's news to us."

So why the tribute video? "It's the 40 years that's the key," whispers another insider.

Chosen from 200 applicants, the former Pay Corps corporal landed a job as a Tyne Tees news reader and continuity announcer in 1962, joined the BBC two years later and was wooed back to the rival station in 1996. He was 65 in October.

MAYBE Mark Simpson, whose admirable father organises the world egg jarping championships in Peterlee, will himself be in a Mike Neville role a few years from now.

Recently graduated from the media studies department at Sunderland University, he led and directed a group that made a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Bishop Auckland Football Club - "Three Tony's, Two Blues, One Goal" - that earned the course's highest ever marks and has been shortlisted for a Royal Television Society northern award.

Regrettably, his parents have been unable to get tickets for the event - doubtless glittering - at the Federation Brewery on January 26. The column's attempts to help ("sorry, it's heavily over-subscribed") also seem doomed to failure.

It would be a shame for them to miss out on what could be the Bishops' enthronement. Can any media men help?

LAST week's column, alas, featured four funerals and little frivolity. Among the departed was nationally acclaimed writer and literary critic Ian Hamilton, who as a Darlington Grammar School pupil in the 1950s had lost his buttons - his prefect's badge, anyway - for selling door to door a scurrilous alternative to the school magazine called The Scorpion.

Sadly, our appeal for back copies of The Scorpion or memories of Ian Hamilton has fallen on unreceptive ears, though Harry Thompson has kindly dropped in some Grammar School magazines from the 1930s.

There is news of the Science Society's visit to see artificial fertilizer being made at Blank Banks chemical works, of a thrush that has laid some eggs and of the discovery of a hornets' nest in the "school mound". A hornet isn't the same as a scorpion, of course.

Chris Lloyd recalls his 1993 interview with Hamilton to mark the publication of his eulogy to Paul Gascoigne, a fellow enfant terrible. ("He's got this wonderful, precocious gift but it is precarious and fragile," Hamilton had observed.)

He also remembered childhood days watching Darlington on the old Third Division North. "The crowd was always pretty miserable. I used to look at people and work out why they were there."

...AND finally, John Burton - the former Shildon footballer who became the Prime Minister's constituency agent in Sedgefield - rings cheerfully to draw attention to an unfortunate error in the Echo's latest Northern People publication.

Many of those included have been asked their views on regional devolution. "It should be another tier of government tacked onto existing councils to satisfy councillors who failed to become MPs," says John on page 51.

Unfortunately, we appear to have omitted the little word "not".

Published: 17/01/02