Cod Almighty | Diary

With acknowledgements to Devon Diary and Guest Diary

15 December 2016

Middle-Aged Diary writes: If one son of Doncaster turns up, Town fans will need to be at their very loudest to drown out the home crowd on Saturday. Brian Blessed is nowadays best known for being willing to shout whenever the occasion demands, or indeed does not. Diana Rigg (the distinctly posh Emma Peel from The Avengers) and Jeremy Clarkson were also born in Doncaster.

If Saturday's match is decided by which town can claim the greatest number of counter-stereotypical celebrities (it's an idea FIFA was toying with before Sepp Blatter was suspended) then Doncaster have the edge. However, we will surely field the player of the match. Not only do we have Patricia Hodge – she of the commanding nose and the southern vowels: we can also point to John Hurt, visibly heartbroken in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? when it was shown that his supposed Irish aristocratic ancestry was made up out of whole cloth by a fish merchant forebear. And John Hurt is the Omar Bogle of visible heartbreak.

Until Doncaster can show Jeremy Clarkson on primetime TV expressing shame at his background, Grimsby can claim a moral victory. Actually, Jeremy Clarkson being ashamed of anything would be a step forward.

Is there a more serious point to be made here? Do well-off people still stay in the towns to which they owe their fortunes, bestowing on them imposing buildings as they did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Do their sons and daughters, with the leisure and the opportunities to cultivate their dreams, grow up in northern towns?

For the less well-off, the ladders to fame have become more uncertain over the last quarter-century, but they no longer require the aspirant to ditch their accent. Were Doncaster or Town playing Tranmere on Saturday, Glenda Jackson – the 80-year-old daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner from Birkenhead – could strike a formidable blow: the archetype counter-stereotype. No-one would be surprised that Sheridan Smith is from Epworth, near Scunthorpe. But if she were cast as Queen Elizabeth I, that would be a shock.

Grimsby does have another star actor to deploy. Patrick Wymark appeared in Where Eagles Dare and won a BAFTA for playing a hard-nosed businessman in the 1960s. That BAFTA was eclipsed by having a cul-de-sac in Nunsthorpe named after him.

Wymark died at the age of 40 in 1970. This is a particular shame for Cod Almighty. Despite his ruthless stage persona, his wife described him as "the most inefficient, dreamy muddler in the world". And although he cultivated his ties to Grimsby, he was an exile, dying in Melbourne. He sounds like the stereotypical Cod Almighty diarist.