“AS THE countdown to the start of a brand-new channel ends, a brand-new Countdown begins.” The first words spoken on the first programme transmitted on the first day of Channel 4 on November 2, 1982. These days the opening of a new channel is something of a “so what” event. Can anyone remember who opened Channel Five? Actually, I desperately wanted to, and Dawn Airey, the director of programmes, got so fed up with me pestering her about coming on and doing it, which would have been a unique double for me, that she left a tart message with her faithful PA, Elspeth: “Tell him that not only is he not opening it, but he will never, ever even appear on it.”
But Channel 4 was big news in the 1980s. It was Britain’s first new channel for 16 years, preceded by as much debate as there was about the opening of the BBC television service in 1936, and certainly as much as that which set up Independent Television in 1955.
There were great expectations of a new channel which, like any media start-up, was going to be all things to all people. When we were proposing a commercial radio station in York in the 1990s, I heard myself, as putative chairman, standing up at a public meeting and committing the station to a regular programme on 15th and 16th-century music, for which York is rightly famed in certain charmed circles. As far as I know, Top of the Pops 1556 has yet to be transmitted on Minster FM. But as with many openings, there were problems.
For a start, Channel 4 transmitters didn’t cover the whole country, and a dispute with Equity kept most adverts off the air, resulting in long captions for minute after minute where commercials should have been. This did not add viewer appeal to the mix. However, for me that opening night was a great thrill and perhaps the one achievement of which I am most proud in my television career. After all, it’s one thing they can never take away from me. Even if the series had bombed and been axed after the first few weeks, I would still have been for ever the first face on Channel 4. Long forgotten and completely unknown, perhaps, but still the first face on Channel 4. Indeed, I am now a well-known trivia question, casually coupled with: “What was the first advert on commercial television?” Well, luckily, Gibbs SR after 45 years and I, Whiteley J.R., after 18 years, are still gleaming!
We had, as I said, recorded the first edition of Countdown some weeks previously. Apart from the majesty of the Neil Armstrong-like words, the programme was cringe-worthy in the extreme. As is the practice these days when several editions are prerecorded, we could have started with a later edition, which would have been a little more honed. But the very nature of Countdown denied this. You end each show with a winner and the winner goes on to the next show, so you have to progress sequentially and, obviously, show the first one.
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Countdown, of course, like any programme, did not just happen, and there are some key players in the whole saga. The first element is the game itself. It is, of course, a devilishly simple game, and one that every one of us thinks we could have invented. It perhaps is the most obvious of all parlour games. Just choose nine letters and make a word: the longest correct word wins. Do a similar thing with the numbers and there you have it. Absolutely nothing to it. We all could have invented it. I remember playing a game in the 1960s called the Dictionary Game. Someone chose a long word from the dictionary and we sat around composing definitions. It kept us quiet and amused for ages. Surely there is a TV series in that. Oh, yes, of course there is — it’s called Call my Bluff. So there we are.
On many occasions in the early days, we had to stop recordings in mid-take owing to some technical fault, or indeed a fault with the very lifeline of Countdown, the big clock. These interruptions, which would often last up to an hour and a half, did nothing for my frame of mind.
On more than one occasion I was in the full flow of verbal activity when the floor manger would order us to stop. “Oh, why have we stopped this time?” I would flounce dramatically. “Not bloody sound again, is it?” “No,” said the floor manager. “Only because you welcomed us back to part two of Calendar, not Countdown.” What a dumb-dumb. I also used to get the letters mixed up with the numbers, seemingly unable to tell one from the other. On one blessed occasion I said, “Well, now, let’s move on to ‘choose your letters’ ” when I meant numbers. I said in frustration: “Oh, why do I always get the numbers mixed up with the letters?’ Straight away came this thick Yorkshire monotone down my earpiece, and indeed down the headsets of all the camera crew: “Because you’re a pillock.” Though I don’t think the word he used was pillock.
“As the countdown to the start of a brand-new channel ends, a brand-new Countdown begins.” Come on now, it’s not that bad. We thought we were doing 20 little teatime programmes, and anyway, Countdown wasn’t our main job, we all had proper ones. We certainly didn’t envisage it going on for 20 years. The first night got more than three and a half million viewers. Encouraged by this, we had high hopes for the second programme, which turned out to be just 800,000. And the third — well, don’t ask me. Carol has worked out that the ratings slide over those first three nights was the biggest recorded in the history of television in the Western world. It wasn’t just us, we comforted ourselves. The whole of Channel 4 got off to a pretty bad start, didn’t it?
Luckily, most reviewers had more important things to say about the rest of the evening’s output than to worry about us. I was upset, though, to be branded “Wally of the Week” by Nina Myskov in one of the tabloids. Mind you, I don’t blame her, as we had disallowed the word “wally” on the Thursday edition. I’m glad to say that that word is now in The Oxford Dictionary.
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The first two contestants were a young chap from London, Geoff Andrews, and an accountant from London, Michael Goldman, who went on to win six editions. Our lexicographer from Oxford was a lady of a certain age, slim if you like, nervy if you like, intellectual certainly. And therefore finding it rather difficult to fit in with us unashamed showbiz types. But unbeknown to us she certainly set a trend. When I referred to Dictionary Corner, she came out with a word that would better those offered by the contestants. “So what have you got, Alice?” I cheerfully said.
“I have an eight,” she said. “Rogering.” Gasps all round. This, of course, is exactly the sort of tittering word that so many people tune in for these days, but at the time we weren’t to know, and I have feeling that particular contributions ended up in the video graveyard.
Well, perhaps those early shows weren’t the greatest, although we really wanted them to be and tried our best. On that first November evening I sat at home and waited for the phone to ring. It did indeed ring. My mother thought that Ted Moult was such a nice man, and why didn’t I have a haircut? Then the Bradford Telegraph & Argus rang to ask what I had thought of Brookside. Well, not encouraging, but so what? Besides, no one in Ilkley, where I lived, could even get Channel 4, so I could still walk down the grove unmolested.
But truth to tell, I wanted it to work. Really I did. I was proud, proud, proud of being that first face and, naively perhaps, thought that it could lead to other big things. Just as when getting one of my Calendar news reports networked on News at Ten, I thought that I was bound to be spotted. “And were you?” I hear you ask.