YORKSHIRE’S HOLLYWOOD WITH A MAVERICK SPIRIT
AT LUNCHTIME on Sunday, old-timers will gather in a pub in Guiseley, north of Leeds, to regale each other with tales of what they had been doing exactly half a century earlier.
They are the survivors of the first day of television in Yorkshire. There had been transmissions to the county since the beginning of the 1950s, but until 1968 the programmes were all made elsewhere.
That changed when Bob Monkhouse stepped out on a makeshift stage in the un-showbusinesslike setting of the canteen at Leeds University and welcomed viewers to the first entertainment show made especially for them.
He shared top billing with the singer Frankie Vaughan, and a supporting cast included the Leeds husband-and-wife vocalists David and Marianne Dalmour and an Australian cabaret singer called Toni Lamond – all backed by an orchestra and chorus. Monkhouse, then the star of ITV’s
and already a veteran of the entertainment industry, had been an appropriate choice for Yorkshire Television’s first night – 12 years earlier he had appeared on the ITV entertainment spectacle that followed the opening of the transmitter at Emley Moor, on the hills above Huddersfield. The comedian Albert Modley and the singer Dickie Valentine were his co-stars back then.
But the 1968 show was different. For the first time, Yorkshire had been designated a TV region in its own right; no longer just the eastern portion of what was still referred to as “the North”.
The new Yorkshire Television consortium was building Europe’s first purpose-built colour TV studios on a clearance site at Kirkstall Road, just outside the centre of Leeds. Its biggest studio was not ready for the opening night on July 29 and neither were the dressing rooms or wardrobe block. So it was that the cast and crew of decamped to the university refectory, to which an outside broadcast unit had been hooked up.
A smaller studio had been made ready earlier that evening for the first edition of It did not, said one viewer, bode well. “It was awful – just awful,” remembers Terry Ricketts, one of the station’s new recruits. “I watched it with my head in my hands and thought, ‘Where have I come?’”
first presenter, the future MP Jonathan Aitken, had not seen his cue, and when the director cut to him, and he was caught on screen adjusting his nose. Worse was to befall him later in life when he was convicted of perjury and sent to jail for 18 months.
“I hear he’s a prison chaplain now – who’d have thought?” says Ricketts, who became one of YTV’s pre-eminent sound men, correctly summing up the later career of first star. After its first week of transmission,
was floundering, recalls Graham Ironside, one of its first journalists, who was eventually to head up the department.
“The technical errors, quality of presentation and inconsistent quality of content earned it the dreaded description, Amateur Night,” he recalls in his book on YTV’s anniversary.
“At the end of the first week of live transmission, the Head of News, although experienced and able, just could not cope with the volatile demands of the job. He went home to the North-East that Friday night and simply never reappeared, leaving the chicken apparently headless.”
Among the other obstacles the programme makers had to navigate was a technicians’ strike, almost immediately after going on air, which halted production across ITV.
One of its consequences was a spat between YTV and Jimmy Corrigan, owner of the flourishing Batley Variety Club in the West Riding.
It had arisen after a test recording had been made there with the intention of discovering whether it could become the North’s answer to the London Palladium as a venue for televised variety.
The recording had been made with untried acts, and YTV’s first head of entertainment, the veteran gag writer Sid Colin, sent out a memo stipulating that it was “not suitable for public viewing – not even on a regional basis”.
But as one of the few programmes to have been completed before the strike, it went out to the nation on August 8. Considering that his club’s reputation had been undermined, Mr Corrigan never worked with YTV again.
Nevertheless, the Kirkstall Road production base soon became a production line for ITV’s voracious diet of drama, comedy, documentary and education. The output also included a raft of shows that would help establish YTV’s on-screen identity. Among them was a sort of children’s whose regular company included the eight-year-old Kathryn Apanowicz.
“My bus used to drop me outside and I’d step into this world of glamour,” she says. “The receptionists, even the security guards were glamorous.
“I loved walking in there, getting new costumes on, rehearsing. And the great treat was going to the ice cream bar they had there and having chocolate ice cream with coconut sauce.”
The producer of was the prolific Jess Yates, who became a household name in his own right as presenter of the hugely popular religious programme,
“The place was run by mavericks,” says Kathryn, who later became the partner of YTV’s best-known presenter, the late Richard Whiteley. “Jess was an end of the pier turn but he was one of the great producers. He put things on screen for no money – that’s the mark of a good producer. I mean, he got stars