Tall tales of Fred Dibnah, TV’s first celebrity tradesman

In the days before reality TV, it was almost unheard of for anyone who was not in showbusiness and already very well known to be given a series; let alone a tradesman from Bolton who was little known even there. But Dibnah was a personality in every sense. Within a shot time, his Lancastrian drawl was one of the most familiar voices in the country – and as these archive pictures show, those first programmes launched him on a media career that would last the rest of his life.

Fred Dibnah: Steeplejack, which began on BBC2 in the early autumn of 1979, opened with a series of epic shots of its subject scaling a vertical ladder which ran the height of the vast mill chimney he was being paid £7,000 to take down, one brick at a time.

“This year it’s been windy nearly every day,” he said as he climbed skywards, without a safety net or visible means of support. The film went on that year’s Bafta award for best documentary.

Dibnah was 41 when he became a star but he had been a steeplejack much longer. It was the only job he had ever wanted, and as a boy he had watched “little men in flat caps” working up in the sky. At 15, for a bet, he scaled the tallest chimney in Bolton, and two years later he built his own, on top of his mother’s home.

His occasional mistakes had scattered crowds, wrecked a car and a building, yet he had been injured only once – falling off a stepladder while decorating a bedroom. He died in 2004, at 66.