IF Fleet Street was still filled with the sound of clacking typewriter keys and the industrial whirr of print-rooms, they would have fell silent this week for a moment.

That ink-smudged world is long gone of course and this week another wonderful anachronism was lost to the newspaper world.

Peter Batt was an East End boy of Irish extraction who laid down a shovel in a 1970s building site for the last time, blagged his way onto a newsroom floor and made a name for himself: Peter the Poet.

In the most vivid of colourful lives he would develop a famous alcohol problem that would ultimately scar his life, go through jobs quicker than ring notebooks and write the first episodes of a TV a series that became Eastenders – before losing that job too.

When his former colleagues, friends and family fill the pews of the church in Molton on Monday week for Batt’s funeral, a former workmate will offer the eulogy.

I interrupt Norman Giller, who is working on his 89th book when I ring him this week. A London journalism legend in his own right, ‘Uncle Norman’ – as he signs an email to me – reported an countless top-flight English football games, proudly compiled the celebrated annual Times Sports Jumbo Crossword for ‘27 consecutive years’ and wrote the scripts on This is Your Life for over a decade.

If anyone’s going to deliver an oration at your graveside, it might as well be the man who filled Michael Aspel’s famous red book.

“Peter won’t mind me telling you about all this,” he says generously, “he loved being known as a character.”And he was.

“Everybody has a Peter Batt story,” Giller continues. “the difference being that I was there as a disbelieving eyewitness. I first came across him when I was a copyboy on the [now defunct] London Evening News in the mid-1950s. One of the copytakers used to berate the reporters with: ‘Is there much more of this f****** crap …?” Meet ‘Batty’.

Giller says his friend literally couldn’t utter a sentence without a ribbon of obscenities. ‘But he got away with it’.

“His reputation arrived ahead of him, and Peter did not disappoint us with his behaviour,” he remembers, “Once around then Peter was late for the umpteenth time, he was called into an editor’s office for a final yellow card warning. He proceeded to explain that he had been to hospital because ‘I cut me old John Thomas while with a bird last night’.”

The editor and those watching through the glass panes from the floor outside were agog when Batt dropped his trousers as evidence. End of argument.

The pair’s paths crossed again in London’s swinging sixties.

“I was sitting subbing on the Daily Herald sports desk when, waving to me with a huge grin, was none other than Batty.” When a plane crashed in the Pysenees the new reporter was dispatched.

“He got to the foothills in an inebriated condition, and when the taxi-driver dropped him as close as possible to the scene of the crash, he managed to fall over in the snow while attempting to walk up the mountain.

“Rescuers coming down from the wrecked plane found him, picked him up and carried him to a nearby convent where he was put into bed and nursed by nuns, who did not help his condition by giving him copious shots of brandy to warm him up. Word got back to other reporters covering the story that a survivor had been found. They dashed to the convent to discover a pissed-as-a-pudding Batty sitting up in bed toasting their arrival, saying: “Thought I’d died and woken up in ‘eaven.”

By now crippled by drink (though Giller says Batty couldn’t get going without one) he made a name for himself as a wonderful sports writer. Colleagues said his balletic turn of phrase was testament to his Irish blood.

He needed the poetic licence when filing expenses claims as well as columns.

While working at The Sun, Batt charged for a hospitality meal with racing trainer Vincent O’Brien. An accountant noticed that the receipt that was pinned to his expenses sheet was for four people, including two children’s meals. When the sports editor queried him, Batt ad-libbed: ’Well, boss, Vincent turned up with two jockeys and they were both making weight, so I ordered from the kids menu’.”

Giller says his old friend was estranged from his long-suffering, German-born wife Heidi of 30 years when she at last grew weary of his alcohol-sparked mood swings. He eventually, thankfully, clambered aboard the wagon and was reunited with his family – including now some grandkids – before his death aged 77 in recent days.

His old sportsdesk colleague said that friends from the old beat tried to help him with his drink problem but failed everytime. They eventually decided to stop socialising with him as ‘socialising meant drinking’ to Batt. They’ll have one in his absence one more time however.

Giller recalled this week many episodes of a career riding shotgun with Batt which could fill a best-seller.
But Uncle Norman laughs quietly down the phone at the recollection of one night out many years ago: World cup hero Geoff Hurst’s testimonial dinner.

“Peter was a Dean Martin soundalike who and the memory is clear in my head of him falling blind drunk off the stage at at the London Hilton while singing “My Way”.

“He got as far as ‘And now the end is near…”

“He bashed his head on landing and had no recollection of it happening.” The police were called and the night ended in a brawl.

Yes, he did it his way.

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

Go to your local bookstore. Beat the familiar path past the graphic novels, travel guides and cooking manuals to the sports section. Trace your finger along the shelf’s edge until you alight at the Js. There, with a bit of luck, you’ll find BS Johnson’s The Unforgettables.

His by-line is unfamiliar now, but Johnson was once a football reporter with the Observer newspaper in England in the 1960s. But not really.

No, really he was a novelist.

At weekends he was perched in draughty press boxes watching blue-collar football with the working men of Britain after a long week. But while on Monday morning they clocked back in on the Tyne dockyard or Sheffield steelworks, Bryan Stanley Johnson wrote experimental novels.

And if he was quite different to his readers, he wasn’t too similar to his colleagues in the gantry either; he once famously rang the Observer sports desk on a busy Saturday afternoon and shouted to a bemused colleague, “I’ve just thought of an idea for a novel. Will you take the report from agency?”

Very much influenced by the likes of our own James Joyce (not a football fan, really) and Samuel Beckett (a renowned cricket enthusiast) he was also hamstrung by the cliché of an artist’s tortured soul. He ultimately took his own life at the age of 40 – but not before writing his much-loved book-in-a-box ‘The Unfortunates‘ which centred on Saturday afternoon soccer match in Nottingham, as he remembers a friend who died from cancer.

The novel comes in 27 unbound parts in a little book-shaped box, and is be read randomly apart from the first and last chapters. The inventive device of delivering the chapters arbitrarily is probably supposed to reflect the randomness of his friend’s disease but also, maybe, the nature of a sport. The game has a beginning and an end; the rest is random.

The unconventional work came to mind this week as I listened to Rupert Murdoch’s words, desperately hailing Apple’s new iPad as the saviour of newspapers. It’s clear, where once the Aussie media mogul was a visionary in his industry, now he seems completely out of touch, as he tilts at idle windmills.

But though the iPad – Apple’s latest gadget which offers users a slick way of browsing online – won’t save newspapers, it is certainly a game-changer – and with it sports writing.

When cinema screens were first blotted with technicolour, Hollywood gave us the Wizard of Oz. Phil Spector was able to produce his signature wall of sound because of changes in stereo technology. So too sports writing will be shoe-horned to fit this new newspaper-in-a-box. But how?

Alex Higgins once fell out of a window – presumably with the familiar taste of alcohol on his lips. When he came to in the hospital and a doctor asked exactly how far he had fallen, he answered: “about three snooker tables”. Like a sailor whose progress is measured in knots or a physicist who builds his work on the atom, the billiard table, amazingly, was his basic unit of measurement. Ours is still the column inch.

In the future however, (when I’m wearing the hover sneakers I’m waiting on since Back to the Future II) we’ll instruct correspondents to file “two gigs of a report from Semple Stadium and a few bites of a quotes piece.”

The demarcation lines within the media are being smudged too. Like Steve McQueen said in Bullitt, once it was a case of: “You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.” Not so soon, as print and broadcast walk the same beat. Where Con Houlihan wrote his famous columns in long-hand – at his relative leisure in a Dublin pub – on chip paper, soon one will expect video and audio content to complement good writing. You have to admit, Houlihan would’ve nailed a podcast too.

All-Ireland winning teams will no longer be photographed on the train journey home holding up the 68-point back-page headline that screams of their Croke Park win. A snapper might be compelled to ask Colm Cooper to “flash your Kindle there with the sports page up ‘til I get a shot, Gooch”, as the footballer peruses the blogosphere on the way through Limerick Junction.

And as they wend their way towards a homecoming, those at their breakfast tables will not spread the paper wide, one corner held down by a hot teapot while an argument rages about Niall Cahalane’s column. He’ll still spark debate no doubt, but Kerry men will hop smartphones off the wall rather than rip up a sports page.

But sport is to journalism what Flann O’Brien’s policeman was to his bicycle; they cannot be parted. And though no ink will be spilled soon in the telling of famous victories and defeats, still people will look for the few lines of analysis and comment about what happened between the white lines. Though the headline won’t be scarred by a ring of milky tea, it will be back-lit, almost instant and new. No harm.

Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in this morning’s Irish Examiner newspaper

I should have done this last week maybe, but with the dawn of the new football year there’s been plenty of great stuff to read:

‘Tipperary teen sensation’ Kevin Coleman has started a really impressive website called Back Page Football. This year I’ll not be embarrassed in my Fantasy Football leagues thanks, largely, to this article.

The spirit of David Peace is channelled for this inspired Premier League preview at Sport is a TV Show.

Darren Norris loves Arsenal so much, he wears Perry Groves pyjamas to bed. On the Examiner sportsdesk blog he reflects on the Gunners’ spanking of Everton this weekend.

While south London’s Andy Fifield went west to peer through the gates at Stamford Bridge before posting this blog by standing outside a fashionable Fulham Road cafe to steal the wi-fi. Probably.

ESPN ‘Sports Guy’ Bill Simmons has his view of the world game redefined by a trip south of the border for the Mexico-USA game last week. Check it out here.

And in other news, Eoin Butler meets Traveller bareknuckle boxing champion, turned Evangelical Christian preacher Dan Rooney.

Dog fighting enthusiast Michael Vick is out of the Big House and now playing for the Philadelphia Eagles. Plenty of Sports Illustrated coverage here.

Finally, how does Usain Bolt compare with other 100m legends, you ask? Have a look at this then.

Rick Reilly sets the rules for top athletes’ hangers-on this week here.

I collect all cell-phone cams!
This is Rule No. 1. Ask Michael Phelps. You go to the party, find a back room, put The Man in it and nobody gets in with a cell-phone camera. I don’t care if Phelps was smoking oregano in that bong, how does a photo end up in News of the World? How does Matt Leinart in a hot tub with four hot girls get out there? My God, Ben Roethlisberger has more party photos in cyberspace than Kappa Alpha Theta. I don’t care if Penélope Cruz wants an autograph, she’s not getting in with a camera phone!

I always drive!
Who drives in Entourage? Turtle. Do you know why? Because Turtle doesn’t have an $80 million contract with a morals clause. So why, then, one night last year, after a really bad game, was Carmelo Anthony driving by himself, over the legal limit, at four in the morning, when he was arrested and charged with DUI?

What would be the rule-book here? Ring ahead to Coppers on a Thursday? Kill off another granny? Make sure the sliothars – All Star only – are in the car when I get out of the bank every evening? Maybe we don’t do entourages as well as the NBA.