John North: Last pint at 'Studio Six'

TYNE Tees Television had been in the same converted furniture warehouse on City Road, Newcastle, since the station first piped up on January 15, 1959. Up and down the City Road, in and out of the Egypt...

The Egypt Cottage, its name something to do with the Tyne's spice trade and the quinqueremes of Ninevah, was the pub next door - so much part of the Tyne Tees scenery that everyone knew it as Studio Six, there being five elsewhere.

Then they were Channel 8 and sometimes, just sometimes, they were one over. It was thus altogether appropriate that, as City Road transmissions ended last Friday evening, Tyne Tees people past and present should gather in the Egypt to drink to a broadcasting phenomenon. A lot of water had flowed beneath the bridges.

There was the charming Bob Langley, who became a familiar Pebble Miller; Stuart McNeill, in the newsroom for 23 years; George Romaines, part of the pioneering success story that was the One O'Clock Show - live for 1,098 hickory dickory performances - and Malcolm Geery who, just as improbably, had made a major hit out of The Tube.

Now, as Tyne Tees ups sticks to a £6m new place on the Gateshead bank, there are those who fear that regional independent television is going down the tubes as well.

At its peak there were around 700 employees, the narrow City Road corridors so crowded they'd almost to have a polliss on point duty.

These days there are around 170: the old hands call it downsizing, the modernists upgrading. Thinking outside of the box.

"What has been achieved over the past 46 years is amazing, but the future is every bit as exciting," said Graham Marples, head of news and current affairs. "We will still serve and reflect the region very well."

Stuart McNeill demurred, as the retired may. "The new place is a broom cupboard by comparison - a palatial broom cupboard, maybe, but a broom cupboard, nonetheless.

"We've had brass bands, male voice choirs, all sorts in City Road. How will they ever get them in there?"

Chiefly, however, they were there to remember the good old days - a wonderful night overflowing with old news and nostalgia, and with a fair amount of Deuchars IPA, an' all.

They spilled merrily out into the July evening and onto the pavement. Had it been raining they'd have had to take the roof off the Cottage, in order to accommodate them all.

They'd been the days of Adrian Cairns and Tom Coyne, of Ug and Og and North East Roundabout, of caramel wafers simply heaven (12 for only 1/7d) and of 1001, which cleaned a big, big carpet for less than half a crown.

They were the days, too, when the poor first night weather girl was given "magnetic" symbols to place on the map and watched, deep depression, as one by one they fell off again.

"The early days could be a bit catastrophic, a real string and sealing wax job," said Bob Langley. "There weren't too many of us who really knew what we were doing. We didn't even have an autocue, and when we had it was like a giant toilet roll, but we had an awful lot of fun."

He also recalled walking the newly opened Pennine Way for the nightly news programme, the trail going cold when he arrived at High Cup Nick, top end of Teesdale, and they'd no way of reaching him to get the film.

"Unfortunately," said Bob, "no-one had thought of that."

Newcastle lad, he'd worked as an insurance clerk, "bummed around" America for three years, joined TTT as a scriptwriter.

"I hadn't been there very long when Mike Neville was offered a much better deal by the BBC and asked me to write his resignation letter, nice and polite, like. They offered me his job. I suppose I must have made an impression."

He became a national newsreader, fronted Pebble Mill - another one o'clock show - made a name as an outdoor programme presenter and has written 19 books, including novels.

After 30 years in the Lake District, however, he and his wife returned last year to Whitley Bay, still best foot forward.

"I just felt I wanted to be home," he said. "I know I should be writing another book, but I keep on putting it off until tomorrow."

He'd arrived at Tyne Tees just as the original One O'Clock Show was being timed out. George Romaines, the wagon works welder who became known as Shildon's Singing Son, remembered it affectionately. Of those 1,098 shows, he missed just two.

"It was never easy. We'd start at ten to nine each morning, difficult enough with three new songs every day but then I started getting more involved with sketches."

Though alcohol was frowned upon beforehand, he also recalled how accompanist Colin Prince - known as Tiny on account of his 6ft 9ins - kept a bottle of dandelion and burdock at the side of the set. "I tried it one day, rum and coke."

Tyne Tees also produced The Big Show, a variety extravaganza involving some of the biggest names in showbusiness - and afterwards at the Egypt. Howard Keal, the opera singer, was so impressed with Tyne Tees musical director Billy Hutchinson ("the only genius I ever knew," said George) that he offered him a lucrative job in America.

Billy declined. "I've a regular booking at Crawcrook British Legion Club. I don't want to let them down," he said.

On another occasion, the ventriloquist Dennis Spicer was on The Big Show, alongside comedian Ted Ray. "Dennis came into the dressing room, took his dummy out of the case, hung it on a peg and went out," recalls George.

"Ted Ray urged us to look inside his case. There were spiders, creepy crawlies, all sorts of things.

"Spicer came back in and didn't say a word. Then the dummy on the peg said 'They've been looking in your case, Dennis.'"

Stuart McNeill had watched the One O'Clock Show as a youngster. "I was a reporter years later and thought I was quite important, but all people wanted to know was what happened to Wacky Jacky, and how George Romaines was."

"Wacky" Jack Haig is dead, Austin Steele long in Australia and now unwell, singer Ethna Campbell lives in a home in Darlington. Fellow singers Shirley Wilson and Christine Langford weren't there.

Organised by retired cameraman Keith McWhirter, who'd rung Tyne Tees to ask what they were doing and been told they weren't doing anything at all, the evening marked the end of an epoch. Could you imagine, wondered Stuart McNeill, the impact on the region all those years ago of its first television station?

"There've been problems, as there are in any organisation, but I think Tyne Tees Telly has done the North-East pretty proud."

Things having changed as if by remote control, the old furniture warehouse is now advertised for sale as a "Mixed use development opportunity".

Probably they said much the same about the One O'Clock show. Like TV, time and Tyne Tees roll on.

Flying the flag

for wartime women

PERI Langdale, a Tyne Tees Television producer, really got the whiff of battle when she heard of a campaign to erect a memorial to the seven million women of the Second World War.

At first it was just another job; now she's one of four trustees of the £1m memorial, to be unveiled by the Queen - a wartime ATS ambulance driver - tomorrow.

"I'll be about three seats away, next to Dame Vera Lynn," she says.

The following day her programme Sisters in Arms, about wartime women and the fight to gain them greater recognition, will be screened at 6pm - including an interview with the Princess Royal, the appeal's vice-patron.

"Wartime women are so often regarded as doing little more than sitting round knitting socks and baking victory pie," says Peri, a former Northern Echo reporter in Durham and sub-editor here.

Like many more, however, s he knew little of it until attending a reunion seven years ago of Ack-Ack Command, a women's gunnery unit. "Women were allowed to aim the gun but not to pull the trigger. Winston Churchill thought it would upset them."

The reunion was at Imphal Barracks, York, whose former chief of staff Major David Robertson has spearheaded the memorial campaign - its patron Betty Boothroyd, the former House of Commons Speaker, who won £8,000 towards its costs on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

The 22ft high bronze sculpture near the Cenotaph, more substantially funded from the Heritage Lottery Fund, shows 17 different women's wartime uniforms, and hats.

"It depicts the women's working clothes and how they quietly took them off at the end of the day, hung them up and let the men take the credit," says Lady Boothroyd. Among those taking part in tomorrow's programme - 26 hours of film reduced to 23 minutes of television - is 84-year-old Marjorie Atkinson, a firewatcher in Sunderland.

"You were given a broom handle, a bucket of sand and a tin hat and were supposed to use the stick to knock the bombs off the roof, or else throw the bucket of sand at them," she recalls.

The programme's narrated by actress Susan Penhaligon, now 56 but still capable, it's said, of stopping most of Tyne Tees Television's men in their tracks.

Peri's delighted that, as the end of the war is again remembered, they can also celebrate victory. "Our women were courageous, patriotic, and stood alongside their men even when they weren't there.

"The memorial's magnificent, it can only help gain them the credit they so greatly deserve."