Farewell Then, Richard Whiteley

"I don't normally do requests, unless I'm asked."

Ah, the paradoxical witticisms of daytime TV's favourite son. Richard Whiteley may not have received the grand send-off reserved for our elder statesmen but he damned well deserved it. As the befuddled face of an infant Channel 4 on its launch show, Countdown, he came to represent the station's embarrassed attempts to contend with the Beeb's tyrannical televisual rule. Then, bizarrely, the oddest thing happened: he got to keep his job. Twenty years passed and he settled into the rather comfortable role of the British eccentric: a little too odd to be truly loved, but you'd have him round for tea in a snap.


















"Get off me woman, I have a job to do."

That Richard Whiteley got to preside over Countdown for two decades says something about the British sensibility. There was always an element of cruelty about his daily release onto our screens; like the simple kid you knew when you were young who could always be pusuaded to plunge head-first into a bed of nettles, it was terribly compelling to watch a grown man fluff all of his lines, flirt ineptly with anything female and get horribly trapped down the path of his own rambling digressions. It was precisely this that the BBC exploited when they made Richard Whitely Unbriefed, one of the most jaw-droppingly embarrassing hours of TV that they ever commissioned. Good old Whiteley, thoroughly pleased with himself for finally getting his own show on BBC1, would sit contentedly in his chair before a live audience and ask a limited number of questions in order to guess the identity of his interviewee. The fact that he always failed spectactularly to work out who his hidden guests were was painful enough (kind of like continually goading a hungry midget with an out-of-reach sausage), but more often than not the revealed celebrity would elicit little more than a bemused look of panic from Whiteley, leaving him to squirm in front of them for 15 torturous minutes whilst he tried to work out who on earth they were.

And yet, just as he should have been torn apart by our feverish pranks, he rose, lifted aloft onto the public's shoulders and was paraded around as something of a hero; the man who didn't seem to notice we were poking fun at him the whole time and would carry on being Richard Whiteley if he could thankyou very much. So there he went, bumbling eccentrically away into the sunset and off of our screens, which is a great shame for something as gently cerebral as Countdown. For a programme that urged you to think quickly, only the British could choose a presenter who never burdened himself with doing anything in a hurry.