JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: As Jim and Betty's story proves, the web isn't just for the dark things in life - it can also deliver pure joy

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One of the most inspired television adverts ever made concerned an elderly chap seeking a long out of print book about fly fishing. 

It was so beloved that you can probably instantly recall the name of the fictional tome’s author.

It was, of course, J.R. Hartley. The ad has the angling enthusiast wandering from bookstore to bookstore in a fruitless search and then, at last, turning to the Yellow Pages for more stockists to try.

‘You do!?’ he says delightedly to one of them on the phone moments later. ‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’

It’s already an uplifting piece of work before the heart-melting pay-off where the pensioner asks to reserve a copy.

‘My name? Oh yes, it’s J. R. Hartley.’

‘Good old Yellow Pages,’ went the tagline. ‘We don’t just help with the nasty things in life like a blocked drain. We’re there for the nice things too.’

Poor old Yellow Pages. A relic from bygone days, rendered obsolete – like so much else – by the electronic devices we carry everywhere. 

Childhood sweethearts Jim Dougal and Betty Davidson have been reunited after more than 85 years thanks to an old school photograph

Jim and Betty, (front of pic) as schoolchildren during the 1930s

The kindly daughter who puts the business directory in her father’s hands in the advert would today be telling him: ‘Google it on your phone, you daft old sod.’

But I wonder if there may be life in that old tagline yet. Perhaps Google should revive it.

These days, it’s easy to forget the online world doesn’t just help with the dark things in life like phishing scams, toxic social media posts and blackmailing vulnerable teenagers.

It’s there for the nice things too – in ways that, in the last century, we never dreamed possible.

Back in 1939, when 11-year-old Jim Dougal’s family moved away from Eyemouth in Berwickshire he likely never expected to clap eyes on childhood sweetheart Betty Davidson ever again.

Yes, they used to walk hand in hand to primary school, but life moves on. We are carried on its river through currents we cannot always swim against.

That was the story of Jim and Betty – a friendship alive only in their most distant memories as they pursued their own narratives many miles apart all the way into their nineties.

And that is how, in any other age, their story would surely have ended.

Yet there they were, the two 96-year-olds, beaming out of a page in yesterday’s Daily Mail, their arms around each other’s shoulders, echoing a picture of them adopting a similar pose when they were eight back in 1936.

‘She has still got that glint in her eye, and a touch of the fair hair that I remember her by,’ remarks Mr Dougal, who now lives in Essex.

What brings the nonagenarians into the same room to catch up on the last 85 years? The tool which replaced the Yellow Pages. And the phone book. That technology which, when deployed adroitly, can deliver pure joy.

It was Mr Dougal’s son Alistair who did the internet research when he set out to discover what became of his father’s fellow pupils in an old class photograph from Eyemouth Primary.

He posted the picture on the Eyemouth Past Facebook group and, sure enough, one member recognised her aunt Betty – still alive and well and living in North Yorkshire.

Well, the rest was easy. Soon his father and Mrs Davidson were chatting on the phone and planning a meet-up.

Stories like this seem to matter more and more as we get older, as we lose people and realise that we are here together in concurrent lifetimes for such a little while.

When these thoughts crowd in, the internet is the invaluable ally, the silver bullet in our arsenal which makes the hitherto impossible doable in a few clicks.

And perhaps it is those of us who experienced a good chunk of life before this resource came in but were still young enough to learn the ropes when it did who appreciate it the most.

It is little surprise that Friends Reunited was one of the early successes of the internet era – or that online dating soon rendered obsolete newspaper personal ads on its way to becoming the standard method by which partners meet today.

At its simplest and best, this incredible apparatus is a finder of the things we seek. It is, naturally, the tool I used to recall the dialogue in that old Yellow Pages ad. I don’t suppose it is the internet’s fault if the things we seek are not always for the best.

But, contrary to popular myth, good intentions online do not normally take us anywhere in the vicinity of hell. It was a magical feeling a few years ago when, out of the blue, I received a message on my phone from a primary school classmate.

He was sending me our class photograph from primary two, perhaps wondering whatever became of the six-year-old in short trousers standing beside him.

My story, you see, is rather similar to Mr Dougal’s. My family moved from Aberdeen when I was 10 and I haven’t seen any of my old school friends from that day to this. The river’s currents carried me elsewhere and, in these days, what was I going to do? Write them letters?

No, we are unsentimental in youth. Much less so in middle age – especially when armed with technology which allows full explorations of memory lane.

Thanks to that message, I’m now in occasional touch with several of my classmates from my earliest schooling days. It’s a joy to see what they’re doing with their lives on Facebook, a comfort to know people I first met when I was four are now just a text message away.

And then, last week, a squeal of delight from the kitchen table. It was my partner, who had just discovered there is a Facebook page run by fans of Molls Myre (CORR), the Glasgow band in which her late father played in the 1970s.

It has pictures of him which she had never seen before. There are reminiscences about him. Soon she got chatting there to the daughter of the band’s only surviving member. She now plans to meet her father’s old bandmate in the coming weeks.

Who knows, perhaps he’ll have recordings of their songs – something she has sought for years – squirreled away in the attic.

None of this could happen in any other age. The 1930s childhood sweethearts’ story would have had no 2020s coda; my classmates and I would have remained forever estranged; Molls Myre would be trampled underfoot in the march of Glasgow musical history and the keyboard player’s daughter would be the poorer for it.

If you are moved to wonder, then, what the internet ever did for us, watch that old advert again on YouTube. 

Marvel, first, that you can actually do so. There was a time when the only way you could see your favourite advert was to watch lots of TV and hope for the best.

Then consider the palaver that Mr Hartley goes through to locate his own published work, even with the Yellow Pages on his lap.

We are blessed with the most powerful mass production tool known to man in our hip pockets and, just occasionally, we find better things to do with it than Candy Crush Saga and selfies.