IN August it will be 30 years since I appeared on “Mastermind”. On the whole, the most you can say about my performance is that I didn’t finish last in my heat. However, I did provide five minutes of fame for Melvin Burgess who died last weekend aged 74.

Melvin was groundsman, dressing-room attendant, brewer-up and supporters’ club vice-chairman at Ewen Fields back in the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to my bumbling, his fame spread beyond Hyde and Joe Adamson’s engineering works for a week or so.

In the run-up to recording, Magnus Magnusson told us contestants to do our very best not to pass. “Say anything,” he said. “Say Fred Bloggs. Just don’t pass.” At the end of my general knowledge round, the timer warbled and I heard the legendary words “I’ve started, so I’ll finish” followed by “who was Vincent Van Gogh’s neurotic psychologist?”

I had no idea and for reasons I still don’t fully understand, stuttered: “Melvin Burgess”. At the after-show reception, a woman asked me if I had meant one of the Burgesses of Harley Street. “No,” I said. “Markham Street in Newton.” She gave me a bemused look but no one there realised the significance of my answer. They certainly did in Hyde.

For the next few weeks Melvin was in the papers and the subject of all kinds of taunts at work. Trouble was, I couldn’t remember the question and thought I had been asked about a ballet dancer. It seems that every time Melvin looked round at Joe Adamson’s, someone was doing a pirouette.

He took it all in good part, just as he did when David Jones watched “Sesame Street” and came across a puppet called Crazy Melvin. To add to Mel’s horrors, a lunatic called Jools “Zanussi” Zauczinski took to writing to clubs we were about to visit, asking them to wish Melvin a happy 80th birthday over the Tannoy.

Melvin regularly went to away games, travelling in a mustard-coloured Mini with his dad, Frank, who was as big a character as his son. They would always have a flask of Oxo, but it wasn’t the sort of stuff Elaine serves up in the tea bar - it was a brown sludge in which you could stand up a teaspoon.

Frank is the only Tigers fan I ever knew who considered George Oghani to be rubbish. I never knew why. All he would say was that George was tricking us all … what, by scoring 20-odd goals a season?

The family lived in Newton and, on top of the television set, there was a framed photo of Melvin eating a chicken leg. Unbelievably, both his parents died in the same weekend in August, 1986.

Holidays were spent on a boat with supporters’ club treasurer Norv Coates. How the two of them got on together I have no idea. Norv was hard of hearing and the sort of person who came to meetings with accounts scribbled (literally) on the back of a fag packet. Melvin told me Norv wanted stay on the boat every night reading.

Melvin, God rest him, also had a fixation with walls having ears. He was convinced he was being spied on and used to drag me into a room under the stand to speak to me, shutting the door and even putting up planks against the window. Because of this he coined one of the club’s most enduring nicknames. He called a certain person “The Parrot”, and it stuck. People from the early 1980s will know what I’m talking about.

As I sit at my computer, I can still remember Melvin sitting on his mower, or hiding pots of paint in the tea bar boilers so that Jack Harrop wouldn’t find them. He once told me that he had a job at Walls moving milk churns of blood (it was used for making black puddings) and lost a cotter pin in the mix.

No man can stem the passage of time but Melvin’s death marks the end of another Ewen Fields era. He’ll be sadly missed by those he made chuckle. I can’t think of him without smiling. In fact, whenever I think of him he had that big, daft grin on his face.

The funeral is on Tuesday, at Dukinfield Crematorium at 11.30am. Family flowers only but donations, if desired, to Cancer Research. Massey’s have the arrangements.

The last words have to go to former Tigers boss Les Sutton: “He made a lovely cup of tea.” Not the greatest epitaph but it shows how small task can make people special.