Our friend in the North

WHEN Mike Neville complained that his watch gained five seconds, nobody could understand the fuss about such a small amount of time. "What's five seconds?," they asked. "Fifteen words," came the reply from the man dubbed The North-East's Mr TV.

He lives by the clock, a legacy of his early days at Tyne Tees Television as a continuity announcer, when he was seen on camera, filling in the gaps between programmes.

His timing is usually immaculate, although the precise date this month when he joined the station remains a mystery as his original contract is missing.

We're talking at the station's Newcastle studios, where he returned six years ago after being "poached" from the BBC where he presented Look North for 32 years.

As befits a valuable TV property, the move was conducted with cloak and dagger secrecy. An enigmatic telephone message from someone announcing himself as cousin Phil was the opening gambit. Neville went to return the call and, without dialling the number, mysteriously found his "relative" - in reality, a BBC executive - already on the line to tell him that Bruce Gyngell, Yorkshire-Tyne Tees Television chief executive, wanted a chat with him.

Neville took the coincidence as a sign that the move was ordained. Secret meetings followed in a suite at the Copthorne Hotel on the Quayside as the deal was hammered out. "I thought about it for about three months, but I was ready for a change. I was 59-and-a-half and had been at the BBC for 32 years," he says.

"I liked Bruce Gyngell and his ideas of television. He was interested in the viewer, which a lot of suits aren't. You are performing for the viewer, not people in suits in ivory towers."

The offer was well-timed. He didn't like the way things had developed at the BBC. As reporters became specialised correspondents, he was left with little to do. "I was just introducing people. I couldn't do interviews, the correspondents did them. Tyne Tees came along at just the right time," he says.

The ITV nightly regional magazine show was revamped around Neville with his name receiving star billing in the title. "We won the Royal Television Society six weeks after we went on the air, which was a great accolade for everybody," he says.

"It was much nicer coming back that I thought it would be. I had a horrible feeling everyone else in the nightly programme would be up in arms about me coming. They may have been, but never showed it."

The people of the North-East have remained as loyal to him as he has to them. Even when presenting BBC1's Nationwide he never wanted to move South permanently. "It was nice to work down there. I was getting the best of both worlds. I always made a point of starting and ending the week with Look North, going down to London Tuesday and coming back Thursday night," he explains.

"It comes back to the same corny thing about teamwork and family, if you like - the one end being the programme and working towards that. In London, everyone was looking after number one. If you were talking to someone, they were looking over your shoulder to see if there was someone more important."

He was an actor (successful, working in rep and on tour for five years) and insurance agent (unsuccessful, due to an unwillingness to go out collecting premiums when it was raining) before entering TV. Now he clearly enjoys his interaction with the public. He maintains he's still shy, although would never be rude to his audience in person. His policy is to smile back if someone looks like they're going to smile at him.

"The public are smashing. In the earlier days people would stare at you if you went into a restaurant. That was almost uncomfortable. If they came across and said, 'it's you', that's fine. They're very nice. They say you're shorter than I thought, or fatter than I thought. I tell them I'm 6ft 6ins, but so broad-shouldered I look shorter."

Few would have recognised him from his first work at Tyne Tees as an actor. As a summer season in Bridlington drew to a close, he wrote to the TV station asking for work. Controller Bill Lyon-Shaw gave him a part in children's programme Happy Go Lucky with Jack Haig. That led to a meeting with producer David Croft, who later co-wrote Dad's Army, and was planning a new series for Tyne Tees.

"He said there was only one part available, for a policeman, and I didn't look much like a policeman. I did this unashamed impersonation of Kenneth Williams and he wrote me in the series," recalls Neville.

'This was 1959, not long after the station opened, and I met my heroes each week. People like Arthur English, Cardew Robinson, Jack Douglas, Hugh Lloyd and Graham Stark. I was thrilled to be in the same show."

Eventually, he returned to City Road as a continuity announcer, despite his usually-spot on timing letting him down for once. "I thought I'd blown the audition because I didn't know what I was doing. I hadn't seen a TV camera before," he recalls. "They gave me a copy of the TV Times, called Viewer then, and told me to talk to the camera for 45 seconds. I spoke for 55 seconds because I didn't look at the clock as I wasn't used to doing it.

"Then I had to interview the floor manager. Again, that was alien to me. I got through it amazingly. There had been about 150 at the start and it got down to the final eight. They said they wanted to see me in the office, and I thought they were going to tell me off for wasting their time, and they offered me a job."

He could fill several programmes with tales of his time as a continuity announcer, in a small studio filling in between programmes as the on-screen face of Tyne Tees. He was on his own and making it up as he went along. Not quite why he'd gone into performing - "from the age of eight I wanted to be Alan Ladd".

Much of what he said was ad-libbed as programmes didn't always run according to schedule, like the time Frankie Vaughan appeared on Sunday Night At The London Palladium and the show finished early, leaving Neville five minutes to fill. That's when things got conversational as he chattered away, plugging the time before the next programme. One ploy was to tell viewers of forthcoming programmes, although he once read out a pile of handouts for shows that had already been screened.

He moved to the BBC to present the nightly regional programme Look North. "The news editor asked to meet me. We sat and chatted and had a drink for an hour-and-a-half before I was forced to say, 'what's the purpose of this meeting?'," he says. "He said Frank Bough was leaving and would I be interested in taking over? I remember saying it was a splendid programme, but I'd never seen it."

His conversation is peppered with the names of those he's met over the years - from Michael Parkinson, Billy Eckstine and Prince Edward to Baby Doll actress Carroll Baker, Kenneth Williams and the Queen (who presented him with his MBE). He must be one of the few people who has a story about Only Fools star David Jason and North-East comedy legend Bobby Thompson in pantomime together.

Retirement isn't a subject he'll discuss and he's seemingly oblivous to his influence on other TV presenters and reporters. People like ITN's Nicholas Owen, who worked with him at Look North and presents a tribute programme tomorrow.

"All the wonderful things people say about Mike are true," he says. "I very quickly realised he was among the best presenters I'd ever encountered. He was in a class of his own. He taught me many valuable lessons - keep talking, keep going and keep the viewer on your side. It looks easy but it isn't."

So, is Neville aware of his influence? "I don't think I have really but, if I have, I hope it's good," he says. "I've been fortunate to work with very nice people on the whole".

l Mike Neville - A Life In Television: Tyne Tees, tomorrow, 5.15pm.

l Steve Pratt's new weekday TV review column starts on Monday