Westward ho

The Great Boot of History, which he "awarded" to architectural monstrosities, has itself been given the boot now that his series is covering the ITV Granada region in addition to ITV Tyne Tees.

The boot had to go, says the man who teaches A-level English at South Tyneside College, for fear of confusing new viewers. "It's a dilemma - you have an audience who know what to expect and an audience who have no expectations, so the programme needed to be something that's new to both sides," he explains.

There's no doubt that the presenter of Grundy's Northern Pride will be exhibiting the same enthusiasm and humour that have made him popular with viewers who wouldn't normally watch a show about buildings.

"It's exciting to go somewhere new," says Grundy. "I come from the Lake District so the Northern bit of the patch is something I've been aware of and I've always wanted to film in that area. It's been an exciting process of discovery."

He's keen to be fair to both the Granada and Tyne Tees regions, while recognising that some buildings "shout for themselves", saying that "if you're dealing with the greatest buildings then you're talking about Durham Cathedral".

The cathedral features in the first programme, which also shows less familiar buildings. In the North Tyne Valley, Grundy shows a relatively unaltered and complete bastle, a fortified farmhouse peculiar to the border territory between England and Scotland and built to withstand the onslaught of border reivers.

In Lancashire, he visits the 17th century Astley Hall in Chorley, now a local museum and art gallery. In Liverpool, he ignores the more famous buildings to show Oriel Chambers, built in 1864 and a Victorian building he describes as "unbelievably ahead of its time".

Because the North-West and the North-East have different landscapes and therefore buildings, he feels the series will offer a broader range of things to view than his previous, exclusively North-East programmes.

"Programmes in the past have been passionately North-East, but that doesn't mean I'm not a Northerner in the broader sense. There's an equally passionate sense of belonging to a broader environment," he says.

As for the boot's absence, he points out that he's made other changes in the past. He used, for example, to dress up in period costume for programmes.

Local series like Grundy's Northern Wonders are an endangered species on the leaner ITV network. He obviously regrets that some regional stations have abandoned non-political, non-serious stuff from their schedules. "The whole essence of my programmes and others that Tyne Tees does is they try to reflect the region in a very broad sense," he says.

Heritage was a private passion until a career switch in the 1980s. With his wife Judi's support, he gave up a permanent job teaching for a post as a listed buildings field worker.

He eventually returned to teaching but not before getting into TV. Grundy says he "was just looking for something to do to feed the children" when he wrote into the BBC with his ideas for a programme about landscape and buildings. His suggestions tied in with those of producer Roger Burgess - and the Townscape series was born.

"I wasn't really concerned about being on it, I was just trying to sell an idea," he says.

"He told me they'd started to write to amenity groups asking for people to be presenters. I said bye-bye and walked out of the building, then went back in and said 'Can I be auditioned?'. It was very much a spur of the moment idea."

He can see similarities between addressing a TV audience and a classroom of students. "The only thing is you have to look the camera in the eye and you wouldn't dare do that with schoolchildren, they're too frightening by half," he says.

"But you're talking in a very similar way. I seem to have taken to it very quickly and easily, but I'm still learning. I'm getting more natural than I used to be.

"People like having attention drawn to things they don't normally notice and we're all hugely committed to that in the team. They love enthusiasm, they like lightness of touch. There are lots of people in the same sort of area who don't joke."

He's achieving his aim of attracting as broad an audience as possible. "I like it when people in shops, as young as five years old, tell me they like the programme, and when people come out of rough pubs and say 'You're the fellow that went round that garden'."

* Grundy's Northern Pride: Tuesday, ITV Tyne Tees, 7.30pm.