Although for nearly 30 years he worked as a journalist for ITN and Yorkshire Television, Richard Whiteley, who has died aged 61 after a heart operation, will be most remembered as the co-host, with Carol Vorderman, of the words-and-numbers television parlour game, Countdown.
The programme began in 1982 as Calendar Countdown, part of Yorkshire TV's daily news programme Calendar, and was scheduled to run for five weeks. It was based on a French television programme, Numbers And Letters, but was given more polish and a host, in Whiteley, who could make contestants secure in the knowledge that his bonhomie would survive all mistakes and crises.
The recorded shows, bought from Yorkshire TV by the embryonic Channel 4, were still running when he died, and Whiteley claimed to have been the first face seen on the new channel when it launched on November 2nd, 1982. The programme, which attracted an audience of five million, was nominated eight times as Daytime Show of the Year in national TV awards, although it was always beaten by Richard and Judy. In 2000 Whiteley and Vorderman were listed in the top 10 of most watched television faces.
The fact that individual Countdown shows cost only £13,000 to make was an incidental advantage to its producers; the affection in which its hosts were held was fundamental. One elderly fan wanted the famous theme tune to be played at her cremation.
"I am a child of TV," Whiteley said once. "I have been watching it since 1952. Although I am not a great TV historian, I'm a news junkie." His emollient skills were, however, better suited to the television game show, to which he brought his conspicuous smiles and striped jackets.
Raised in Baildon, near Shipley, Yorkshire, Whiteley sprang from the comfortably off, northern middle classes. His father, the third generation of a family of worsted cloth mill owners, was a director of the family firm, Thomas Whiteley & Co, of Bradford, and drove a Daimler. Whiteley snr was unusual in not wanting his son to go into the business, and inadvertently introduced him to the BBC when they both saw an outside broadcasts van from their car. Richard, full of excitement, looked over it: he was already mad about the popular radio shows, The Billy Cotton Band Show, Children's Hour and Workers' Playtime.
At Giggleswick school, which he attended on a £105-a-year scholarship, Whiteley edited the school magazine, became head boy and decided to become a television cameraman. He also helped one of the then masters, Russell Harty, with productions of The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, and worked on a production of Arnold Wesker's Roots at the Bradford civic theatre.
Academically, Whiteley was bright, taking his O-levels at 14 and his A-levels at 16. In 1962 he went to Christ's College, Cambridge, to read English, after a gap year spent teaching at Bingley primary school. He had toyed with thoughts of becoming either a drama director or a BBC trainee, and because the drama crowd all seemed to be bearded and necktie-less, leaned towards the BBC.
He wrote for the university magazine Varsity and spent a holiday working for the deputy editor of the Yorkshire Post. When Varsity planned an ambitious colour magazine, Whiteley was asked to talk about it on Anglia Television's local news show.
The executive who interviewed him told him that ITN took on two trainees a year. He jumped at the chance, got selected and started with ITN in July 1965.
Within a year, however, he was dissatisfied with dealing with football results and traffic jams. A piece on a Hyde Park spring event, which he scripted without dialogue, was hailed as original by the press, but he decided to look outside London for his future and joined the new Yorkshire TV station in 1968, just before it went on air. He was taken on by the legendary Donald Baverstock, at £2,600 a year, to work on Calendar.
Highlights of Whiteley's time on the programme included an incident when a ferret sank its teeth into his index finger while he was interviewing its owner in 1977. A nurse rushed in and asked Whiteley to drop his trousers so that she could give him a tetanus injection, and the episode earned a place on Dick Clark's US blooper show as "one of the world's top five greatest-ever bloopers".
Countdown was originally conceived by the Yorkshire TV bosses as a light, summer filler. And even with memories of the ferret, Whiteley found it "bottom-achingly slow, technically crude in the extreme, but especially in production values".
But by introducing livelier elements into the production - such as the big clock ticking away through the game's nine rounds, as the contestants played with six letters, two numbers and a conundrum - the programme rapidly took off. It made Whiteley into a popular television icon, even among his critics.
In fact, during his days as a journalist, Whiteley had established himself as a good-naturedly cheeky interviewer of politicians. He had interviewed every prime minister from Harold Wilson onwards, and came nearest to provoking an explosion when he talked to the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, who was very touchy on the subject of her husband Denis's first wife.
Whiteley asked her: "Why wasn't it revealed until recently that you are, in fact, the second Mrs Thatcher?" Her steel was in her smile: "Oh, quite simply, because no one had asked." Some executives wanted the recording halted, but were overruled by others, who thought it good television. After the show, Whiteley saw Thatcher leave the hospitality room in double quick time, but the incident did not make him revise his technique.
Whiteley's first wife, a designer he met in Harrogate and married at 29, left him after 18 months. He is survived by his partner, the actor and radio presenter Kathryn Apanowicz, and a son by a previous relationship.
Richard Whiteley: born December 28th, 1943; died June 26th, 2005