I TALKED briefly about Gregg Fray (@GreggFray) on Twitter last night. When he was News Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, he was among a group of us watching one of the newsroom TVs.

We share a building with a large insurance firm and it was in the national news for some reason or other.

On the television was what our broadcasting friends call a “two-way,” I think, a reporter on the street being interviewed by the newsreader in the studio. And the reporter was outside our building.

Gregg said: “Is this live?”

“Yes,” somebody replied. A monosyllabic response, admittedly, but justified in the circumstances.

Gregg rushed to his desk and grabbed something, then raced out of the office.

Thirty seconds later we watched Gregg appear through the revolving doors behind the TV reporter. He stopped.

Then he took a banana out of his inside pocket, and began to speak into it as if it were a mobile phone.

It was funny.

He works in Dubai now. That’s not a reflection on his work here. He did many other things apart from pretending a banana was a telephone, but I can’t remember them.