CASTAWAY 2000-PRESS GANG SINKS!!

WHAT ELSE IS AT GARDENCROFT??

The day I sank the Castaway press gang

Weekly newspaper editor Peter Urpeth tells how his team scooped Fleet Street's finest when BBC TV's notorious runaway ran straight into their arms

A dishevelled figure walked into the offices of the Stornoway Gazette last Thursday and declared: 'I'm the one that escaped.'

'Escaped from where?' asked our bemused receptionist.

And so began a week of farce as the escapee turned out to be infamous castaway Ray Bowyer whose arrival gave us a scoop, leaving the tabloids reeling in our wake.

Earlier that morning Bowyer had been plucked off the tiny island of Taransay by reporters from the Mirror . With their castaway safely sitting in the inflatable boat they had hired at great expense, they must have been thinking their audacious scoop was secure. But as soon as they got their man into town, he picked up a copy of the Mirror and didn't like what he saw.

Declaring he'd talk to no paper but the Stornoway Gazette , he made his second great escape of the day, leaving Mirror reporters standing. The canny castaway hid from the pursuing pack in the toilets of a supermarket where he tried to disguise himself by hacking off his beard with a disposable razor.

Bleeding from his wounds, Bowyer bolted through the back entrance, clambered over the security wall and emerged on a quiet road next to a butcher's shop. Concerned for his well-being, the butcher, bizarrely, gave him an orange and then called a taxi. Bowyer made for the Gazette , where reporters Katie Smith and Iain MacSween, alert to the opportunity that had presented itself, paid his taxi fare and took him into hiding.

Then the Mirror reporters arrived, as did those of a quality broadsheet. The intrepid Smith and MacSween managed to keep all our guests blissfully unaware that their quarry was sitting next door, completing his interview. The Mirror had, apparently, offered Bowyer Ł5,000 for an exclusive. The same exclusive cost the Gazette a fiver, if you include the costs of a taxi ride, a ham roll and a lift to the ferry terminal.

Luck had, of course, played its part in bringing the hapless Bowyer to us, but sometimes in this game you make your own luck and, as the editor of a weekly newspaper, it's good to know your reporters can capitalise on any situation that presents itself.

The Gazette is the only paper in Scotland to have given the BBC's Castaway 2000 project a positive write-up. The castaways on Taransay have subsequently taken us to their hearts, so maybe karma plays a bigger part in securing a scoop than the chequebook tabloids would like to admit. Bowyer wanted the Gazette to have his story as a way of saying thank you to the people of Lewis and Harris for the kindness they had shown him during his brief stay in these parts.

Those who haven't read the Gazette recently will be unaware that the Bowyer scoop is our second great Castaway exclusive. Only two months ago, Gazette photographer Rod Huckbody and I sat in a helicopter on Horgabost Beach, waving goodbye to the assembled hacks as the BBC flew us to Taransay for exclusive access.

Having met Bowyer then, I was surprised he was the first to leave the project. He looked comfortable in the surroundings, a big, affable man who seemed to like the evolving communal existence of the island. He looked happy washing large soup pans, a tea towel flung over his shoulder, and little put out by the pink lacy butterfly wings one castaway had made for herself. The image of an intolerant ranter simply doesn't fit the bill. But, then, three months on an island in a force 10 gale in cramped conditions with a few insufferable, upper-class twits at your side is probably enough to turn the best of men into a savage.

The domestic idyll obviously came to a premature end. When he came to our offices he looked half the man he was. But he was stone cold sober, and is not, as the tabloids have portrayed him, a drunken misfit.

Castaway 2000 has turned into a maddening media circus but the people of Harris are loving it. Winter is normally a quiet time but this year there have been times when every available room on the island has been occupied by a hack and his or her entourage.

Slowly, the people are growing to like the Castaway series, but the castaways themselves remain the centre of considerable local ridicule. According to some locals, they are nothing but a bunch of soft Southern lunatics who jump ship and head for the comfort of a Tarbert hotel room at every opportunity. Yet many local lassies secretly fancy Ben, the affable pin-up from Tatler magazine, and a few have been spotted in the lobby of the Harris Hotel, hoping for a glimpse of him.

Looking like Father Christmas fallen from grace, Bowyer entered our offices bearing gifts for all - and all the media helped themselves to a share. Even the fact that the Daily Telegraph tagged our story a 'world exclusive' cannot spoil our triumph.

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