Richard Whiteley

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.