ANYONE who has ever sunk a few in the local boozers must have heard him singing and joking his way through some gig or other.

It’s been a riotous and fun-packed life and he’s known to most folk simply by his first name: “Jamie”.

I’ve known Jamie Mac for as long as I can remember and I’ve always reckoned he could have come straight out of a Raymond Chandler crime novel.

It would have needed Chandler’s masterly style to come up with someone as hard and as smooth; as colourful and as mad as Jamie.

How about this from Trouble Is My Business: Some woman wants to hire private eye Philip Marlowe.

She tells him: “I need a man good-looking enough to pick up a dame who has a sense of class, but he’s got to be tough enough to swap punches with a power shovel.

"I need a guy who can act like a bar lizard and backchat with the best and get hit on the head with a beer truck and think some cutie in the leg-line topped him with a breadstick.”

Marlowe tells her: “It’s a cinch. You need the New York Yankees, Robert Donat and the Yacht Club boys.”

Or perhaps just Jamie, especially as he could also wow ’em with a few songs.

Some years back Jamie could have stepped out of Chandler’s The King In Yellow in which private eye Steve Grayce describes himself as “the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.”

Not these days. And now he and his wife Gail are going into business together – running the George Hotel at Hollins Grove.

Gail, whose parents used to have the Brookside, told me: “We are hoping to create a real family atmosphere at the George.

"Folk might think we are mad but we are confident we can make a success of it.”

Jamie says: “The pub trade in Darwen isn’t what it was and we are planning to bring back some of the fun as well as entertainment for the whole family.”

Gail is an experienced counsellor and she has done a lot of support work for social services.

“You could say I’ve been Jamie’s personal counsellor for over 20 years.

"He’s been my homework,” she smiled.

She will be firmly in charge, she assured me.

Jamie? “He can do his usual posing around.”

At 61, he’s an expert. Here he is again popping up in Chandler’s Playback.

“A big, handsome character with gray in his hair...

"He wore a dark dinner jacket and he looked like a nice guy if you didn’t crowd him.

"At that distance and in that light I couldn’t tell much more, except that if you did crowd him, you had better be big, fast, tough and in top condition.”

“Leave it out,” laughs Jamie. “I’m just a big pussycat these days.”

Jamie and Gail open for business on November 4. Fireworks Night will be a day early at the bottom George this year.