RIGHT at the end, the anecdotes the audience really wanted to hear began to roll, but dammit, it was too late! We were out of time.

Journalist, raconteur and all-round people person Hunter Davies found fame in the Sixties as the writer of the only authorised biography of The Beatles in existence.

He went on to ghostwrite the autobiographies of Wayne Rooney, Paul Gascoigne, Dwight Yorke and John Prescott.

Now aged 81, he was in Hexham ostensibly to talk about his book, The Co-op’s Got Bananas! A Memoir of Growing up in the Post-War North .

His mother used to give him and his siblings mashed up parsnip during the War, he said, telling them it tasted just like banana. He well remembered when, at the age of six or seven, he first set eyes on one.

“I was in the park and the shout went up, ‘the Co-op’s got bananas’,” he said. “Everyone started running down the hill – hundreds of kids at once.

“My mother bought one and I was one of four, so she cut it into four pieces.

“The others all ate theirs at once, but I kept mine to show off. When I did eventually eat it, it didn’t taste anything like parsnip.”

There had been “no money” as he grew up in a council house in Carlisle, following his father’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis while in his forties. Somehow, though, his disorganised, but generous, mother had managed.

“Mind, I shared a double bed with my brother and when I came home from university for the holidays, I found she’d let out my half of the bed,” he said.

“It was to a boy from a home who was leaving school and had nowhere to go.

“I was so furious, I made him sleep on the floor.”

In the end that was all he actually said about his book and his memories of growing up in the North, instead devoting three-quarters of his talk to his late wife – novelist, biographer and literary critic Margaret Forster.

It was all rather poignant, listening to his eulogy to the woman he’d shared his life with for 60 years and who lost her second battle with cancer last year.

Despite his insistence he had accepted every invitation going in a determined bid to ‘carry on’, he has spent the past year sorting the contents of her office and reading the estimated one million words in her diaries with a view to publishing them.

So it was that as the hour was just about up, Hunter began to gossip about those footballers and that band.

Gazza wasn’t a drunkard, rather he had mental health problems, and he was, contrary to appearance, an intelligent and articulate man.

While none of the others he’d ghostwritten for had even bothered to read the manuscripts, Gazza had gone through his with a fine tooth comb, correcting Hunter’s grammar.

But even Hunter, renowned for his candour and veracity, balked when Gazza started telling him the most appalling stories.

In one of them, the footballer served his friend Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’ a sandwich filled with what can best be described as the contents of his toilet, frozen to disguise what it was.

Hunter said: “I told him, ‘you can’t put that in the book’. However, I tell people ...”

The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, had been equally colourful.

“I went to his lovely house in Belgravia, his butler let me in. He was only two years older than me, but I felt such a total hick next to Epstein, he was so smooth and urbane.

“He was gay, of course, and everyone thought he fancied Paul, because he was pretty, but he liked butch boys, so it was actually John he liked.

“He used to go out picking up butch boys. They would come home and they’d beat him up – that was his pleasure, being beaten up. They would steal from him while they were there.”

And then, we ran out of time ...