Older readers may recall how a bloke called Marty Butch used to contribute road test reviews to the ‘pages’ of Bankstone News.
Sadly, Butch passed away in a tragic accident of his own devising when his attempt to electrify Dixon Tilsley’s VW Up went horribly wrong back in the Spring of 2013.
Or… did he?
That’s what everyone thought for the past four and a half years. But was it really true? Bankstone News investigates…
Doubts first emerged when someone bearing an uncanny resemblance to the late lamented Butch was spotted playing Rugby League in a Halifax jersey.
And then, when we started asking questions around the West Yorx region, more and more people reported having caught fleeting glimpses of someone suspiciously Butch-like.
Months of patient investigation, culminating in calling his mobile number, revealed that… Butch lives!
Apparently we’re not supposed to tell anyone – because he’s assumed a new identity as Martin B Utch and is trying to make a fresh start, but our former motoring correspondent is in fact alive and… well…
When we quizzed him as to why he’d staged the elaborate garage-incinerating ‘accident’ in which Tilsley’s Up and (as everyone assumed at the time) Mr Butch himself were totalled, he confessed that he’d run up crippling debts to the Butch family swear jar and felt he had no alternative but to stage his own death and start afresh in Penistone.
But offers of a role as ‘loose forward’ with the Fax and a semi-regular stand-up spot at Bojangles in Wakefield lured him back into the spotlight where ultimately we found him (in the latter capacity one wednesday night) leaning on a mic stand like a foul-mouthed guitar-less David Gedge, boozin’ and faggin’, and rambling incoherently to general and lively acclaim.
To cut a long story short, he’s agreed to do some more road test reviews for us – but only so long as we use his pseudonym and don’t tell Mrs Butch, who – as far as he knows – may still be totting up the interest on his unpaid swear-jar debt.
So, as the clocking-off astronomy shift-worker says to his clocking-on colleague, watch this space!
That tantalising first glimpse
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