One step ahead of the crowd as ever, I’ve been researching the incredible story of **** Millican and **** Nesbitt (forenames withheld to protect miners). What I've found isn't just alarming; it's sickening — a ruthless conspiracy to erase the duo from history.

For the first stop on my journey, I applied the hardcore investigative journalist’s most incisive instrument: I had a shufti in Wikipedia. Huh? No, there must be some mistake. Nothing at all about the North East’s answer to Sam & Dave? Well, no. Not even a measly stub. (To give you an idea of how eerie this is, Flintlock vocalist Derek Pascoe gets his own entry, while Lieutenant Pigeon warrant a five-section job including footnotes and a full discography.)

After weeks of searching, scouring and snooping in the popup-riddled underbelly of the Internet, I had managed to glean just one fact. I learned that **** and **** hailed from the small Northumberland pit village of West Sleekburn. Although I had admittedly been hoping for a little more information, I was greatly encouraged by this discovery. Surely a local-heritage portal linking to the full story of West Sleekburn's most famous sons could only be a click or two away. But no. Zero. Not even a full search of the website of the local newspaper, the Blyth Valley and Wansbeck News Post Leader (presumably so called to avoid confusion with the Chicago and Wansbeck News Post Leader), yielded any results at all. The black helicopters had beaten me to it.

Even YouTube has been got at. What was presumably once an extensive M&N collection has been reduced to just one video of “I Want Our World To Be Like A Beautiful Garden” (the original B-side of “Vaya Con Dios”, as you no doubt remember) spinning plaintively on a turntable for three magical minutes.

Sadly, the sum total of my findings after many weeks of hard research can be reduced to a paltry couple of paragraphs.

After winning Opportunity Knocks for what seemed like 112 weeks running, M&N released three albums: Millican & Nesbitt and Everybody Knows Millican & Nesbitt in 1974, and Millican & Nesbitt III (an ultimately unsuccessful bid to attract the Led Zeppelin market) the following year. They had two hit singles over this 18-month period of heady fame: the anthemic “Vaya Con Dios” and the follow-up smash (well, more a blip, to be honest) “For Old Time’s Sake”. And that was it.

As for their live work, the only mentions I’ve been able to find have been a handful of variety bills from the mid-Seventies (opening for Bobby Davro in Great Yarmouth – you know, only the high-end gigs). But after the 1975 panto season and a tie-in Greatest Hits compilation, nary a word.

Fast forward 30-odd years to last September, when a TV production company was researching a documentary about old talent-show acts. They made an urgent appeal via the pages of The Stage for any information about the whereabouts (or, gulp, the fate) of our heroes, so that they could be contacted and invited to tell their incredible story on air.

I was, understandably, very excited by this development. Excited but ultimately thwarted, because the black helicopters evidently monitor The Stage too. When the programme was broadcast in January, Millican & Nesbitt weren’t even mentioned.

(Note: None of the above is made up, honest. Well, just the bit about withholding their first names. I had no choice because I couldn’t find any mention anywhere of what their first names actually were. Yes, that’s just how savage and merciless this conspiracy is.)