Televised football in the regions, part 4: Yorkshire - The Golden Chevron

The home region of one of English football's powerhouses in the 1960s and 1970s, its local television company had a complicated relationship with the game.

It is, some might say, appropriate that the Yorkshire Television region’s football coverage should have been occasionally dotted with controversy. From Scarborough and Middlesbrough in the north down to the outer reaches of Norfolk and Humberside, the Yorkshire region was vast in its scope, covering a vast range of internecine grumbles of varying natures, some of which go back for hundreds of years.

But in the first place, the Yorkshire television region didn’t exist. Coverage of that part of the world was part of “The North” region when that service first went on the air in May 1956, served during the week by Granada Television and at weekends by ABC Television, both of whom based their regional centres on the other side of the Pennines, in Manchester.

It’s easy to see how distrust could fester against that sort of arrangement, and after the Pilkington Report of 1964 savaged the network over its lacklustre programming, the decision was taken to put greater focus on the regional dimension of Independent Television. “The North”, as a region, would cease to exist.