UNUSUALLY, if not quite uniquely, there was no football last Saturday afternoon. Instead, as Tuesday’s column noted, we dined in style on the afternoon tea train from Bedale to Redmire on the Wensleydale Railway.

Timings sadly precluded a visit to Bedale Town FC, hitherto little known outside North Yorkshire save that former players include Sunderland manager Simon Grayson and his brother Paul, an England one-day cricket international who now coaches Durham University.

Now they’re enjoying global publicity after their sausage-mottled shirts – sponsored by Heck, a banger manufacturer based at nearby Kirklington – were voted the planet’s seventh most grotesque.

The bright pink shorts and socks may have had something to do with it, an’ all.

Sponsors with a slightly lower profile have previously included an ice cream maker and the local fish and chip shop. “You can tell our bodies are temples,” says club chairman Martyn Coombs.

The what-the-Heck shirts have proved so popular that the club website now sells replicas for £34 99, cycling shirts £5 extra, a fiver from each sale going to a local prostate cancer charity. The story has appeared on television stations from Turkey to Toronto and had a marvellous run on French television on Monday evening.

Emboldened, Bedale are now working on the world’s worst football chant, sung to the tune of the gloriously muddy Hippopotamus Song made famous by Flanders and Swann.

The column asks Mr Coombs for a rendition. “You aren’t recording it, are you?” he says.

INSPIRED by the French television crew, it’s Martyn himself who wrote it. “I did it while I was out on my bike,” he says.

Since little rhymes with Bedale, and perhaps less still with sausage, the words are more monosyllabic. “Heck, Heck, glorious Heck, nothing quite like it when you’re feeling peck….”

Any more? “Well, there are two verses but that’s about it, really,” says Martyn.

Thus encouraged, the teams now plan an end-of-season tour of France – work on designing a sausage themed team bus already under way. World’s worst? “Very likely,” says Martyn.

ALL this Flanders and Swann-upping recalls the entertainer Gordon Peters, who in the 1970s had his own BBC television show but was most recently encountered at Darlington Arts Centre (RIP) performing a tribute to the musical duo. An internet search reveals that Mr Peters, raised within a whistle of Shildon football ground, is still treading the boards and seeking work, most recently with a Noel Coward show. He will be 91 in November.

Yet more coincidentally, Richard Jones observes at the 5s and 3s on Monday evening that the pop pair Sparks have entered the UK’s album charts at No 7 – their first top ten triumph for a remarkable 43 years. This one’s called Hippopotamus.

ANOTHER topic of conversation at the doms was the identity of the player who equalised for Dover against Guiseley on Saturday. “Probably the most fabulous football name ever,” said the lads, and it seems impossible to argue. He was Mr Norte Nortey.

NOT usually much fussed about football, a friend on Saturday’s train trip seemed uncommonly concerned over the outcome of Swansea City v Watford.

He’d bought a Crunchie bar, allowing entry into an on-line Cadbury’s competition. By entering the code on the wrapper, the buyer is given a score forecast for a match in the next round of Premier League games.

If that’s the actual score, the winner receives a prize ranging from “the ultimate Premier League experience” to another bar of chocolate.

Peter had been given Swansea 4 West Ham 6, a little optimistic since City had hitherto scored just twice all season. When it came to the Crunchie, Watford won 2-1.

CRITICAL days for our long-time friends in the Feversham Cricket League, now batting with just High Farndale, Spout House and Slingsby. A meeting tonight decides the deep-rooted league’s future amid the harmonious hills of North Yorkshire.

Charles Allenby, the sedulous secretary, insists that he’s giving nothing away until then.

Altogether happier news, Brian Levison’s masterwork Remarkable Cricket Grounds – in which Spout overflows but which features Raby Castle and Bamburgh, too – has made the six-strong shortlist of the Cricket Writers’ Club book of the year awards.

Brian’s up against the likes of former players Mark Nicholas and Jonathan Trott and prolific writer Gideon Haigh when the winner’s announced next Tuesday. “I wouldn’t get too excited,” he says. “My money’s on Mark Nicholas.”

...AND finally, the only known anagram of “percussion” (Backtrack, September 14) is supersonic. David Moyes, early bird, first with the answer.

Since the right-hand side of today’s column had had a distinct sausage seasoning, readers are invited to name the former England cricketer known to team mates as Banger.

Out of the frying pan, we return next week.