Maybe Keano could get Bono and The Edge to lean on Dave Stewart
Picture: atu2

Whatever happened to the Peter O’Toole interview? Why wasn’t I invited into Gina McKee‘s parlour, bought drinks by Dave Stewart or treated to a slap-up meal by Glenn Hugill?

This is my 2007 introduction to the very last piece to appear in the Celebrity Supporters series.

It was about the ones we didn’t nail. People who wouldn’t help, or didn’t feel qualified to. One who promised so much only to disappear from our radar. Others who turned out to be non-supporters or, worse, Mags.

Those failures, coupled with the misery of being a Sunderland fan in the dark days of 2003, could have given me something German scientists had just then identified as post-traumatic embitterment disorder. But the series was great fun to produce and when it came to an end, there were plenty of people to thank……………

(more…)

The Celebrity Supporters series has come to an end for the second time.

Unless I have overlooked anything, all the original articles have now been posted to this site, mostly as originally published, and the wrap-up piece is about to appear.

Updates will continue to be added, and where significant changes result I will re-post the item so that it appears handily to be read again (or for the first time if you are new to the site).

And who knows? Other names are bandied about from time to time and one or two of these may yet produce follow up interviews for Salut! Sunderland.

One of those wags from the London and Southern England supporters’ association branch came up with the suggestion that the Celebrity Supporters series should be followed by another, devoted to Scoundrel Supporters.

It is too long ago to recall whether the comment – read on to see who made it – was uttered before or after my interview with George Reynolds.

At the time, I could just about have got away with protesting that such a description of George would be a little harsh.

George*, it has to be said, had known his scoundrel days, nay his scoundrel years.

But he seemed, at the time, a reasonable choice of interviewee.

Was he not, after all, firmly on the straight and narrow, leading a blameless life of his own and also accepting invitations to go into prison not as a guest of Her Majesty but to lecture young inmates on the perils of opting for crime as their careers? And was he not also – again at the time of the interview – the go-ahead chairman of Darlington FC?

Sadly, the assessment was not harsh at all. A few years on, George was back before the courts, accused and convicted of tax evasion. He collected <a href=”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4364220.stm”>three years in jail in 2005 for cheating the taxman out of more than half a million pounds.

Salut!‘s man at the prison gates reports that George was released a few months ago, and is living in a flat at Nevilles Cross that he insists is a penthouse.

There was a spot of bother over a failure to observe the conditions of his parole curfew but he may now be defying the advancing years – he is, after all, 71 or so now – and seeking an honest living by getting pubs to install machines that sell you what is described to me as “a squirt of alluring perfume”.

(more…)