THE nation of Yorkshire is gripped by a paroxysm of grief. Think that’s hyperbole? Then try Christa Ackroyd, presenter of BBC’s Look North news programme. She cried: “We lose our county on a global scale.” Labour MP Austin Mitchell wailed: “I could have cried.” Emmerdale actor Chris Chittell bemoans “a terrible, terrible shame.”
They can’t be talking about the Yorkshire cricket team, because the season hasn’t started yet, although they would be the prime suspects for such emotional venting. No, they’re talking about ITV’s decision to close down Yorkshire TV studios in Leeds and, effectively, film-making this side of the Pennines. Countdown goes to Manchester. Richard Whiteley will be revolving in his grave. Heartbeat is on hold, missing a beat.
ITV boss Sir Michael Grade wisely chose not to make the announcement in person, otherwise there would have been a Heartbeat special on inner-city lynching. YTV’s Kirkstall Road studio has nurtured a phenomenal range of talent over the past 40 years, from Alan Bennett through David Jason to the stars of Follyfoot.
But culture has no clout when advertising revenues fall through the studio floor. ITV expects to make up to £600 million savings over the next three years from the Leeds closure and 600 sackings nationwide. Those who remain face wage cuts, except perhaps for the preposterous pair, Ant and Dec, and the infinitely self-satisfied Simon Cowell. Forget about high-quality drama. ITV will concentrate on cheap entertainment and talent shows.
Austin Mitchell ruled out Government intervention, because this is a commercial decision. He hopes the studio could be kept going as a centre for independent programme producers, also available for use by BBC and ITV. This seems a forlorn hope, but Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency, and Screen Yorkshire (of which I hadn’t before heard) promise a package of measures to aid the industry. “This does not mark the end of production in the region”, they insist. I hope they’re right.
What intrigues me about this episode is what it tells us about the nature of Yorkshireness. One after another, presenters, actors, producers, politicians and trade union officials queued up to stress the particularly local qualities of the work that came out of Leeds. Yorkshire grit. Yorkshire humour. Yorkshire stories. Yorkshire the place to be creative – you don’t have to go to London. Yorkshire skills. Yorkshire talent – there are practically no qualities with which folk up ’ere are not blessed in manifold quantities.
ITV’s decision was, au fond, a national insult – a mean snub to a great nation. And delivered, moreover by a businessman whose family founded Granada in Manchester, and is probably engaged in some deeply duplicitous red rose trick. Yorkshire people can be touchy, thin-skinned and suspicious. The grit soon turns to sand when things don’t go the right way. Arthur Scargill is the supreme example of this dimension.
By the same token, outrageous flattery is welcome. I well remember Dennis Skinner addressing a Yorkshire Miners’ Gala in Wakefield during the great strike. “It isn’t the red rose that will win this strike”, he told the thousands in Thornes Park. “It’ll be the white rose!” Quite what his logic might be was unclear. But the multitudes roared their approval. As I wrote in The Times at the time: “He touched the sacred hem of Yorkshire nationalism.” It worked. It always does. I once appealed to some fellow partygoers on a frightening council estate in Leeds to come to my aid against an assailant. “He’s doin’ down Yorkshire”, I cried. They put down their pints and turned on him with such ferocity that he fled.
So there are two sides to my regional inheritance. When it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s bad it’s a pain in the moleskins. What other county calls itself “God’s own?” Or boasts that it has more acres than there are words in the Bible? Indeed, has anyone counted? Probably – some miserable Tyke sitting, “by the Tide of Humber complaining”, (in the words of Andrew Marvell, Yorkshire’s greatest poet).
None of this is any help, alas, to the 192 YTV workers, mostly members of screen union BECTU, who are losing their jobs. No doubt, some will find work in the BBC media town rising by the Irwell in Salford Quays, which is not particularly attractive to the Beeb’s metropolitan elite, despite lucrative relocation packages. Yorkshire men and women have always trod the road out of the county in search of work, and sometimes fame. Think Sir Michael Parkinson. Mostly, they don’t come back. Think Sir Michael again.
I have come back, but 45 years of being away makes you look at Yorkshire differently, like a foreign correspondent returning home. YTV is a crying shame, but it’s not on the scale of the destruction of the mining industry.
