How Heartbeat began: Pictures of TV classic in its heyday

These pictures from the archive recall the heyday of a nostalgic drama that had its roots in the village of Oswaldkirk, where the Moors meet the Howardian Hills. It was there that Peter Walker was posted as a young police constable in 1964. He began writing down what he saw, and took the name of the Catholic church, St Aidan’s, for his fictional village of Aidensfield. By the time he made inspector and transferred to North Yorkshire Police’s public relations department, his series of Country Constable novels, written under the pseudonym of Nicholas Rhea, was already in reprints.

But it was the Yorkshire TV adaptation, rebranded as Heartbeat, that was to make it an institution.

The station’s programme controller recalled in a book marking YTV’s half-century that the show had been conceived in a hotel jacuzzi in Los Angeles.

“We had the rights to Nicholas Rhea’s books but what stimulated us was the knowledge that we could get the slots in the weekend schedule,” said John Fairley, who negotiated the deal for Heartbeat on a US trip with Greg Dyke from London Weekend Television.

“So we made the PC’s wife a doctor and threw everything in including the kitchen sink to make it as popular as possible.”

It was also his idea that the cameras “should see a little more” of the co-star, Niamh Cusack, he added.

The show nearly didn’t work at all – the first episodes were considered too slow and were ordered to be re-shot before the public saw them.

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