For 23 years Richard Whiteley was host of the television game show Countdown.
Renowned for his wearing 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 yet wonderfully guileless.
The first face ever 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 so promising. Whiteley was much stiffer in the early days, when he tried to give the programme a slick, professional air, doing anguished retakes whenever lines were muddled and becoming riled when anyone made fun of his jacket.
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Initially, the show, planned to run for five episodes, was rubbished by critics as dull and turgid, 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 pensioners 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 had begun in 1970 and featured longest-word and number rounds, with a very 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, aired as dependable padding beside the new channel’s more groundbreaking 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 all such tasks fell to Carol Mather (who later reverted back 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, drawing frequent attention to her tan, hair and posterior.
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The early mainstays in Dictionary Corner, Giles Brandreth and Dennis Norden, were replaced with edgier guests and, by July 2004, when the duo signed yet another five-year contract, the programme had a cosy, lived-in appeal that none of its stalwarts wanted to lose.
By this time, Susie Dent in Dictionary Corner had become the programme’s third star as its resident wordsmith, ready to conjure up 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 count-down 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 take it into Parliament — to 3.15, meaning that children could no longer watch it after school.
Countdown is undoubtedly a national treasure. In Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy, it is the catatonic, after-school sessions in front of Richard and Carol that bond the profligate Will and the unhappy schoolboy Marcus. In the film, Hugh Grant looks particularly worried when his young charge laughs aloud at Whiteley’s tortuous puns.
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John Richard Whiteley was born in Bradford in 1943. His father worked in the family textile business, which suffered a sharp decline after the war. He showed prodigious talents at prep school and he moved to Giggleswick School in Settle, North Yorkshire, where he entered a class two years his senior.
He won a scholarship to help with the fees and passed his A levels at 16. After failing the entrance exam for Oxford he went on, with his teachers’ assistance, to read English at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he 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. Whiteley 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 he interviewed the comedian Kenny Everett, who said: “I’ve always wanted to work with you — you’re famous” and, Everett then clamped his teeth on around Whiteley’s finger and hung on with similar tenacity.
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When Calendar Countdown began, Whiteley hosted that too, earning himself the title “twice nightly Whiteley” — a phrase the press re-invoked with smuttier connotations when scorned women accused him of philandering in January this year, 2005.
Whiteley laughed off all the attention off with a shrug. When designated the “wet leek of the year” for bad broadcasting by a group campaigning for the reinstatement of University Challenge, he responded: “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 deputy lieutenant of West Yorkshire from 2003.
He was a keen supporter of local events and of the British Watercolour Society, and enjoyed discussions with fans. His favourite word, he once told them, was “moonset”.
He is survived by his partner of 11 years, the actress and radio presenter Kathryn Apanowicz. and by his son, James, from an earlier relationship with the television presenter and journalist Lesley Ebbetts. He died yesterday after he suffered complications from an emergency heart operation.