THE day he guzzled down a pint of Guinness from an over-sized baby's bottle, to the encouragment of a roaring audience, remains vivid in the mind of Brian Thompson.

Touching upon the showbiz scene of the 'fifties, Brian recalls that his performance took place on the stage of the Hippodrome, St Helens (now a bingo palace).

Part of a free show staged as a publicity stunt by Senior Service cigarettes and a Manchester evening newspaper around 1957, it starred a very youthful Claude Jeremiah Greengrass (actor Bill Maynard of television's 'Heartbeat' fame).

And Brian, from Boston Avenue, Runcorn, recalls: "Admittance was free if you bought a copy of the newspaper. And you had a chance of going on-stage if this had Bill's autograph written on it."

Brian's paper did. And he performed his bottle-swigging challenge - "spurred on by girls from Wolies (where I worked at the time) who were in the front seats."

His prize comprised 100 fags and a silver cigarette casket.

Brian also brings Synchopating Sandy back into the spotlight. He appeared in the late 'fifties playing a piano non-stop round the clock in attempting to break some kind of musical endurance record.

Says Brian: "We visited him in our break from Tunstall's the butchers to see how he was going on. The piano keys were dusted in talcum powder to protect his fingers and he was allowed the occasional toilet break."

Having been born and bred in Clock Face - remaining there for the first 22 years of his life - Brian well remembers Jim Hurst who sold wet fish from the back of a stately Rolls Royce shooting brake in immediate postwar years.

Jim, given a special mention on this page recently, used to park up in an entry off Bodden Street behind his house in Gartons Lane. And, as Brian lived close-by, he saw the remarkable Roller on many occasions. It had lengths of polished timber screwed to the sides, the rear and around its windows. And Brian believes the bodywork was either pale green or light grey.

He often wondered where Jim got his upper-class fish vehicle from. "But if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it had been commandeered by the army to help the war effort and that he bought it after the war as ex-army surplus."

AND Brian signs off intriguingly: "Where (if it still exists) is it now?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.