Gordon Firth, artist and headteacher

His collaborator on the series, which was filmed at Brimham Rocks near Harrogate, was Tim Firth, who wrote Calendar Girls, the movie, play and musical based on the Women’s Institute members in the Yorkshire Dales who posed without their clothes for a charity calendar.

Borne in Thorne near Doncaster, Gordon Firth attended the local Grammar and trained as a teacher in Leeds, meeting his future wife, Kathy, and moving to Cheshire to become the youngest headteacher in the county’s history.

He took every opportunity to bring his children, grandchildren and his pupils back to Yorkshire, the source, he said, of his inspiration. In an age before risk assessment, he sweet-talked the council in Grassington into letting him turn up with a coach load of schoolchildren to sleep in the community centre on crashmats from their PE classes. He then turfed everyone out of bed at 5am to paint dawn rising on the Wharfe.

Tim said the memory had flashed back to him 30 years later, as the filming Calendar Girls took place along a stretch of the same river. But while it may have given the pupils a shock, it was, Tim said, normal behaviour for his father – to whom when it came to painting, nothing was off limits and no time too early.

At the height of the Cold War, whilst leading a trip to Russia and watching the Bolshoi Ballet perform, he pulled out an art board and began sketching. It took less than 10 minutes for him to be hauled out backwards by state security. Playing the “Yorkshire innocent” card, he succeeded in avoiding detention, but not in getting his painting back. It was presented to the prima ballerina after the show. During 40 years as an artist in oils, watercolours and later ceramics he held exhibitions in Manchester, Warrington and Liverpool. Very few of his works went unsold and in latter years he donated all the proceeds to charity.

His muse remained the landscape of Wharfedale – and the years spent camping in the shadow of Simon’s Seat, the gritstone-capped summit of Barden Fell, inspired his tales of the trolls of Troller’s Ghyll near Appletreewick. These in turn begat the puppets of Roger and The Rottentrolls, which, with voices by Martin Clunes, John Thomson and Holliday Grainger, ran for four years on ITV.

In a later series, Ripley and Scuff, he appeared on screen as Grandad Gordon, a resident artist with an endless stream of ideas. The programme won him a nationwide audience and another Bafta.

He was said to be unimpressed, though, when his son and his collaborator, the musician Gary Barlow, were declared “honorary Yorkshiremen” for having composed the musical version of Calendar Girls.

Tim recalled: “Being genuinely Yorkshire was deeply important to him and indeed his credentials both as a man of Yorkshire and an artist were impeccable – he adored straight talking, discouraged pomposity, saw beauty in all things and encouraged others to see it in themselves.

A celebration of Mr Firth’s life and art will take place in Warrington on October 20. Information for former pupils and others is at [email protected].