Never mind Lennon: imagine a pop-up Yorkshire channel – David Bahrens

Not many people are worthy of a channel to themselves, even a temporary one. Ringo Starr didn’t get one for his 80th. It made me wonder why there aren’t more devoted to a single person or place – until I turned on Channel 5 and discovered it has become more or less exactly that.

Its controller, Ben Frow, was telling the Edinburgh TV Festival this week that its revival of late had been due almost entirely to filling its schedules with programmes about Yorkshire.

Extolling the county’s “wholesome values”, he said, had allowed the station to rid itself of the downmarket reputation it acquired when his predecessor proclaimed it to be the home of films, football and some other alliterative word that escapes me.

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There seem to be almost as many Channel 5 lenses trained on Yorkshire these days as there are CCTV cameras. Quite apart from the revival of All Creatures Great and Small, which has been its biggest hit for four years and will be seen in the US from January, there have been series on Clive and Amanda Owen’s upland sheep farm in the Dales, Julian Norton’s veterinary practice in Thirsk, and the workings of the steam railway in the North York Moors. There have also been broadcasts from the Great Yorkshire Show and various vehicles for Wakefield’s Jane McDonald to belt out a song every time a light goes on.

These programmes are the televisual equivalent of comfort food, mined from a rich seam of goodness that runs through the county like gravy. They’re also marketing gold, a soft-sell that implants an impression of Yorkshire as the sort of place one might aspire to visit, or even settle. It’s in stark contrast to the long-standing predisposition among TV producers that it was somewhere to be made fun of.

This was never more true than seven years ago, when Channel 4 launched Educating Yorkshire, a fly-on-the-wall account of life inside a secondary school in Dewsbury. It had many merits but its title was predicated on contradiction – a feeble joke about the perceived impossibility of doing any such thing. Like Draining Venice. Or Shutting Up President Trump.

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It was not the only offender. Yorkshire has all too often been presented as a novelty act on television’s bill of variety. Despite many honourable exceptions, it is an image that has stuck, and it’s refreshing to see Channel 5 finding success by bucking the trend – especially in the costly area of period drama.

It is also something of an own goal for the BBC, which had first dibs on reviving James Herriot’s stories about the life of a country vet in the 1930s. Their response to the idea was lukewarm, said Mr Frow. It would not appeal, they feared, to the cherished “youth market” at which so much of television is now targeted.

There are many anomalies here, not the least of which is the affront to over-75s of taking away their free TV licences in order to finance programmes for viewers a quarter of their age. It’s hardly surprising that so much of that audience is drifting away and finding its entertainment elsewhere.

The beneficiaries are Channel 5 and a few niche networks like the one tucked away on channel 81 of the Freeview menu, two places above the pop-up John Lennon network.

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This is Talking Pictures TV, a station that specialises in black-and-white films and TV series from the 1930s to the 1970s. Its audience has trebled in the last few months to around 6m regular viewers, a figure that dwarfs many BBC offerings and turns on its head the misconceived notions about the value of older audiences.

The BBC does not license its programmes to Talking Pictures but ITV does, and there are some corkers: Callan, Rumpole and A Family At War are just a few gems from a time when popularity and quality were not mutually exclusive. Save for some footage of Scarborough in the 1930s, I could find little Yorkshire content there, so for the moment Channel 5 can plough that furrow by itself.

As for the BBC, the only over 75-year-old in which it is showing any interest right now is John Lennon.

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James Mitchinson