Richard Whiteley - Television Presenter Aged 61
Phil Wilson
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Phil
http://philip.fotoblog.me.uk
Mainly Old Photos with an Edinburgh Connection
(More added recently).
Mike Cawood, HND BIT
news:42bf1e16$0$18637$1472...@news.sunsite.dk...
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4625119.stm
>
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> --
> Phil
He always gave the appearance of being a genuinely nice person and he
will be greatly missed from our TV screens.
Regards Mike.
Michael Rhodes
(Daily Telegraph Filed: 28/06/2005)
Richard Whiteley, who died on Sunday aged 61, was best known as the
host of Countdown, the popular teatime television quiz devoted to
anagrams and arithmetic.
The programme was the first to appear when Channel 4 began broadcasting
on November 2 1982, and the bespectacled Whiteley greeted viewers with
the words: "As the countdown to the launch of a new channel ends, a new
Countdown begins." Thereafter, his mildly eccentric brand of humour and
thoroughly individual dress sense became inextricably linked with the
show, and he eventually proved as popular as its characteristic numbers
and letters games.
The loud, stripey suits and large colourful ties (he was said to have
more than 500) which were his trademarks had been known to viewers of
Yorkshire Television's news output for several years. But when his
bumbling charm and inability to refrain from feeble wordplay were
unleashed on national television he developed a substantial, if ironic,
personal following, particularly among students and pensioners. The
Queen was also said to be a fan of Countdown, a detail which Whiteley
said was revealed to him by Princess Margaret.
John Richard Whiteley, always known as Richard, was born in Bradford on
December 28 1943. He had one sister. His father was the third and last
generation to own and run the family mill in the city. A sickly child,
Richard was initially extremely thin and suffered from asthma, a
condition which persisted and may have contributed to his final
illness. Aged seven he worked as a newspaper delivery boy; at eight he
decided he wanted to work for the BBC.
He won a minor scholarship to Giggleswick School in North Yorkshire,
where he commentated on cross-country fixtures and was taught English
by Russell Harty, before going up to Christ's College, Cambridge. In
his final year he proved a shy editor of Varsity, capturing attention
only when the paper became the first publication outside Fleet Street
to produce a colour supplement.
That innovation generated sufficient interest for Whiteley to be
interviewed by Cambridge's local television station, Anglia, and this
experience led to his application for an ITN traineeship, despite his
having been set on working for the BBC. He was offered one of the two
places available before sitting his Finals (he took a Third) in 1965.
Whiteley's time with ITN was unremarkable during a golden era for the
organisation, when Reginald Bosanquet and Sandy Gall were in their
primes. Whiteley was known for his competence, but did not stray far
from the newsroom and rarely appeared in front of the camera.
After three years he was approached to work as a reporter for the
newly-founded Yorkshire Television's evening news programme, Calendar.
Eager to make progress, and having been offered a salary of £2,600, he
accepted the job. In 1968 he relocated to Leeds, where he soon
established himself. Prior to their political careers, Jonathan Aitken
and Austin Mitchell were colleagues.
Over the next decade Whiteley rose from general reporting duties to
become political editor and presenter of the main evening programme, a
position he held until leaving in 1995. As well as reading the news, he
chaired discussions and interviewed every Prime Minister from Harold
Macmillan to Tony Blair (before he took office).
However, the best-known encounter from Whiteley's days at Calendar was
far less illustrious. In 1977, while handling a ferret during a live
studio interview with its owner, the animal abruptly turned on
Whiteley, sinking its teeth into his hand. He endured half a minute of
agony before the pair could be prised apart. During the ensuing
commercial break, a YTV nurse rushed to the studio and told Whiteley to
take his trousers down for a tetanus injection. He complied.
Whiteley had more weighty reporting to do when he was one of the first
on the scene of the Brighton bombing in 1984. Having attended the Tory
party conference, he and a friend were standing outside the dining-room
near the entrance of the Grand Hotel debating whether to have another
glass of Champagne when the explosion took place, at around 3 o'clock
in the morning.
Despite his shock, Whiteley "borrowed" a camera crew from a rival
television station and gave a coherent eyewitness account of the scene
inside the hotel. His first thought on being floored by the blast was
for the safety of Margaret Thatcher.
Despite 27 years in regional journalism, it was Countdown with which
Whiteley was most closely associated. The programme began in France,
where the blueprint, Des Chiffres et des lettres, was popular. It was a
live crossword-based programme with a mental arithmetic element, and
the head of factual programmes at YTV, Frank Smith, proposed an English
version of it in 1982.
Whiteley was unimpressed by the Gallic effort; but, after some
tweaking, a pilot called Calendar Countdown was recorded for YTV, with
Whiteley at the helm. Its appeal in Yorkshire was gradual, but, liking
its educational element, Channel 4 commissioned a version a few months
later.
After a shaky start, ratings soon stabilised. Its initial five-week run
was extended, with Whiteley kept on as host because he was the cheapest
presenter available at the time; he was initally paid £200 per show.
Although known for his appreciation of the opposite sex, he claimed
that the tag "Twice Nightly Whitely" was bestowed on him during this
phase in his career. He had a double programme slot - Calendar news and
Countdown -each weekday evening on YTV for more than a decade. With
well over 10,000 appearances on British television, Whiteley was
thought to have set a record.
The unexpected success of Countdown was thought to lie in the fact that
it remained practically unchanged since 1982. Its plain set, catchy
theme tune and regular celebrity guests proved the ideal formula for
the channel's gentle afternoon schedules - though Whiteley had an
embarrassing moment when both contestents offered the word "wankers" as
their solution to one round. The clip became a regular feature on shows
such as TV's Naughtiest Blunders.
But along with his co-host, Carol Vorderman, with whom he enjoyed good
on-screen chemistry, Whiteley's wheezy chuckle and friendly banter
played as much of a role as Countdown's format. The show became very
lucrative for both of them. In 2004 they signed a contract for a
reported £6 million to present the show until 2009.
Gregarious and proud of his Yorkshire roots, Richard Whiteley lived at
Wensleydale and on Ilkley Moor. He was made honorary Mayor of Wetwang,
a village of 300 inhabitants near Hull, in 1998. His autobiography,
Himoff! The Memoirs Of A TV Matinee Idle, appeared in 2000. He was
appointed OBE in 2004.
Richard Whiteley married in 1971 (the marriage was dissolved after 18
months). Another relationship, with Lesley Ebbetts, resulted in the
birth of his son, James, in 1987. Whiteley is survived by his long-term
girlfriend, the actress and presenter Kathryn Apanowicz.
Michael Rhodes
Michael Rhodes
<<December 28, 1943 - June 26, 2005>>
<<Presenter of Countdown whose faltering, avuncular style made him a
tea-time favourite for almost a quarter of a century>>
FOR 23 years Richard Whiteley was the host of the TV game show
Countdown.
Renowned for his garish ties and jackets, for fluffing his lines,
dropping atrocious puns and for trading light innuendo with his
co-presenter Carol Vorderman, Whiteley became loved by millions as the
anti-presenter: seemingly incompetent but brimming with avuncular
enthusiasm, astonishingly slow on the uptake and wonderfully guileless.
The first face seen on Channel 4 when it hit the airwaves at 4.45pm on
November 2, 1982, Whiteley became a doughty anchor for the only
original Channel 4 show still on air. For any programme to survive so
long, with its original presenters, is remarkable.
The beginnings of Countdown were not promising. Whiteley, stiffer in
the early days, tried hard to give the programme a professional air,
doing anguished retakes when lines were muddled and becoming riled when
anyone made fun of his jacket.
Initially the show, planned to run for five episodes, was rubbished by
critics as dull, but in just two weeks it was pulling in 3.7 million
viewers. A year later Whiteley had become the darling of an army of
keen pensioners and students and, confident that he was there to stay,
he started to be himself. According to Vorderman: "The thing then
fell into place."
Countdown was inspired by the French show, Des Chiffres et des Lettres,
which began in 1970 and featured longest-word and number rounds, with a
dry format and a high-tech studio. The French version, still running,
relies on computers rather than lexicographers to find the longest
word. The format was appended to Yorkshire Television's
current-affairs programme, Calendar, which had begun in 1968. Calendar
Countdown ended when Channel 4 came on air, and reappeared as
Countdown; dependable padding beside the new channel's more
ground-breaking fare such as Brookside and The Comic Strip.
Nonetheless, The Times was told that the show would feature "two
pretty hostesses and two women mathematics examiners billed as 'vital
statisticians'."
As the programme found its feet, superfluous letter-pickers were
dropped and such tasks fell to Carol Mather (who reverted to her maiden
name of Vorderman). The chemistry intensified; Vorderman slimmed down
and turned herself from a maths frump into a vamp seen at film
premieres, while Whiteley became more Bunteresque, drawing frequent
attention to Vorderman's tan, hair and posterior. The early mainstays
in dictionary corner, Giles Brandreth and Dennis Norden, were replaced
by edgier guests and, by July 2004, when the duo signed yet another
five-year contract, the programme had a lived-in appeal. Susie Dent in
dictionary corner had become the third star as the wordsmith ready to
conjure the longest words from the chosen letters.
Viewers protested when the set was changed from tangerine to violet in
2003, no doubt encouraged by the storm that had forced Channel 4 to
reinstate Alan Hawkshaw's original 30-second countdown music, which
Whiteley always admitted to finding "too strident". The greatest
fury came in July 1990, when the word "millennium" appeared, with a
letter missing, as a winning nine-letter word. Fans railed against
every change of time slot, from 4.45pm to 5pm, back to 4.30 and then
- to the sound of MPs being begged to raise it in Parliament - to
3.15, meaning that children could no longer watch it after school.
Countdown became a national treasure. In Nick Hornby's novel About a
Boy, it is the after-school sessions in front of Richard and Carol that
bond the profligate Will and the unhappy boy Marcus.
John Richard Whiteley was born in Bradford in 1943. His father worked
in the family textile business, which suffered a decline after the war.
He showed prodigious talents at prep school and moved to Giggleswick
School in Settle, North Yorkshire, entering a class two years his
senior. He won a scholarship and passed his A levels at 16. He read
English at Christ's College, Cambridge, and edited the Varsity
newspaper in his final year.
>From 1965 he served three years as a trainee at ITN, leaving to join
the ranks of Yorkshire Television as it prepared for launch. He was
given the job of anchorman on its main regional programmes. He
interviewed every Prime Minister from Macmillan to Major, and he was
among the first journalists on the scene after the IRA bomb attack on
the Conservative leadership at Brighton in 1984.
In 1976, during an afternoon edition of Calendar, he famously found
himself attached to a ferret. His 30 seconds of agony became a
favourite on "blooper" programmes all over the world, made
priceless by the handler's morose declaration: "If she'd meant
business she would have been through to the bone. She was playing with
you." Later Whiteley interviewed the comedian Kenny Everett, who
said: "I've always wanted to work with you - you're famous".
He then clamped his teeth on Whiteley's finger and hung on with
ferretlike tenacity.
When Calendar Countdown began, Whiteley hosted that too, earning
himself the title "twice nightly Whiteley" - a phrase the press
invoked with smuttier connotations when he was accused of philandering
in January this year. Whiteley shrugged it off with a laugh. When
designated the "wet leek of the year" for bad broadcasting by a
group campaigning for the reinstatement of University Challenge, he
said: "I'm thrilled to have the recognition I deserve." When the
tabloids gossiped that he had turned into an unlikely womaniser, he
appeared in Heat magazine, posing as the free-loving spoof hero Austin
Powers.
He revelled in the honorary title of Mayor of Wetwang, Yorkshire, and
he served as a deputy lieutenant of West Yorkshire from 2003. He was a
keen supporter of the British Watercolour Society, and enjoyed
discussions with fans. His favourite word, he said, was "moonset".
Whiteley had a short marriage in the mid-1970s to a woman he would
identify only as Candy. He is survived by his partner of 11 years, the
actress and radio presenter Kathryn Apanowicz, and by his son from an
earlier relationship with the TV presenter Lesley Ebbetts. He died from
complications after a heart operation.
Richard Whiteley, television presenter, was born on December 28, 1943.
He died on June 26, 2005, aged 61.
(c) The Times, 28 June 2005
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