THE winner was never in in doubt: All Creatures Great and Small. Taking last place, the 50th, was a series rather less well known: How We Used to Live. A mixture of acting and archive film, this daytime Yorkshire TV offering explored the lives of families in a fictional Yorkshire town.

The cast of All Creatures Great and Small - from left, Peter Davison, Carol Drinkwater, Christopher Timothy and Robert Hardy The cast of All Creatures Great and Small - from left, Peter Davison, Carol Drinkwater, Christopher Timothy and Robert Hardy

The original cast of All Creatures Great and Small

Just one place ahead though still fondly remembered was Farmhouse Kitchen. Ryedale farmer’s wife Dorothy Sleightholme presided warmly over the pots and pan. Mary Berry and Rick Stein, yet to rise to baking heights, stirred a guest’s bowl or two.

Between the all-conquering All Creatures and the tail-enders, in the Dalesman magazine’s recent poll to find the favourite programmes made or set in Yorkshire since the advent of Yorkshire TV and Look North 50 years ago, appears a striking range of programmes. The gameshow Countdown (27); the regional news magazines, with the BBC’s Look North (14) easily outstripping ITV’s Calendar (44). There are documentaries galore, from Too Long a Winter, that stirring hymn to Hannah Hauxwell (13), to Educating Yorkshire (22).

Hannah Hauxwell in her meadow in Baldersdale Hannah Hauxwell in her meadow in Baldersdale

Hannah Hauxwell

It is particularly pleasing to see Luke Casey’s lovely Dales Diary (20), crassly axed ten years ago, holding off its current, much inferior counterpart, The Yorkshire Dales and The Lakes (25).

But most of the “favourite 50” were dramas. Perhaps you knew there was a First of the Summer Wine(34). I didn’t. Its writer, Roy Clarke, was also responsible for not only its record-breaking successor, the world’s longest-running sitcom (2), but also Open All Hours (4), its sequel (29) and Selwyn Froggitt (32).

But a name conspicuously absent among the elite 50 is – wait for it – Alan Bennett. As a Yorkshireman Bennett is to drama what Geoff Boycott is to cricket and David Hockney to art. And yet Dalesman readers appear to have overlooked his very first TV play. Screened in 1972, A Day Out follows a cycling club’s ride to Fountains Abbey on the eve of the First World War. A BBC editor rejected it, arguing “it doesn’t go anywhere”. Overruling him, a more percipient colleague remarked: “Well, it goes as far as Fountains Abbey and back, and that’s far enough for me.”

Atmospheric shots show the cyclists’ early-morning departure, from Halifax. The abbey, where some of the cyclists play cricket, is grandly featured. The action drifts over to Fountains Hall, where a couple of lads flirt with two girls. A character played by Brian (Tetley Tea Bags) Glover has some of the best lines – eg on the monks: “Allus getting down on their knees. It’s no sort of life…You want to get out and get something done…”

The party cycles home, during which their elderly chairman experiences “a funny turn”. But they arrive safely, at dusk – and that’s about that. So does it “go anywhere”? Yes, and the clue is the advancing dark. For the closing scene, postwar at the war memorial, shows the outing’s only four survivors, most notably that dicky-tickered chairman and a young man with a club foot, standing near a wreath laid for the club. Did no Dalesman reader remember this understated yet affecting masterpiece and/or consider it worth voting for? Good grief – Downton Abbey is No.7 though its only Yorkshire link is place names.