Early career On leaving Cambridge in July 1965, Whiteley served three years as a trainee at
ITN but left to join the newly created
Yorkshire Television in July 1968. In 1973, Whiteley and
Woodrow Wyatt presented the
Anglia Television documentary
The Red Under the Bed, about the trial of
the Shrewsbury Two (
Des Warren and
Ricky Tomlinson) which was broadcast on the day that the trial jury retired to consider their verdict. The programme, which was heavily critical of the trade union movement, is now considered to have swayed jurors into returning a guilty verdict and was later cited by the
Criminal Cases Review Commission as evidence that the verdicts were unsound. Warren and Tomlinson's convictions were overturned in 2021. Speaking in 2017 about the documentary, Tomlinson claimed to be in possession of confidential documents proving that it had been funded and written by British intelligence services and that Whiteley had been employed by
MI5 at the time of broadcast. Whiteley was bitten by a
ferret on an edition of
Calendar in 1977. The animal bit his finger for half a minute before its owner,
Brian Plummer, prised it free. The clip is often repeated on programmes showing television outtakes and Whiteley once joked that when he died, the headlines would read,
"Ferret man dies". He said, "It's made a lot of people laugh and it's been shown all over the world. It's 30-odd years since it happened and I think I've been a great PR man for the ferret industry. Ferrets have a lot to be grateful for; to me, you see, they've become acceptable because one of them bit me."
Countdown In 1982,
Yorkshire Television began to produce
Countdown, copying a French quiz show format,
Des chiffres et des lettres. Whiteley was chosen as host and continued with the show when
Jeremy Isaacs brought it to
Channel 4 as the first programme broadcast by the new station. Its first broadcast received over 3.5 million viewers, but the programme lost 3 million viewers for its second show. However, it gradually rebuilt its audience over the following weeks. It was as the host of
Countdown that Whiteley became known to a wider audience in the United Kingdom outside the Yorkshire region. He was nicknamed "Twice Nightly Whiteley", in reference to the time when he would present the
Calendar news programme and
Countdown in the same evening, from 1982 to 1995. (In a self-deprecating joke, he often countered this with "Once Yearly, Nearly".) As the presenter of
Countdown, Whiteley developed a reputation for wearing garish suits and ties, and it was common for
Carol Vorderman to comment on this. Whiteley also told many anecdotes and puns, which were often met by groans from other presenters and audience members. He was granted the honorary title of "Mayor of
Wetwang" in 1998 and was known for his amusement at the village's name.
Countdown was not intended to be a long-lasting format. Still, it quickly became a durable programme for Channel 4, at its peak enjoying a sizeable afternoon audience of almost five million. At the time of Whiteley's death, it still regularly attracted over a million viewers. From series 54, broadcast in 2005–06, the series champion has received the "Richard Whiteley Memorial Trophy" in his honour. Following his death, Whiteley was replaced by
Des Lynam.
Other work Whiteley also had his own chatshow,
Richard Whiteley Unbriefed, on the BBC. His guests were unknown to him beforehand, so before he could interview them, he had to guess who they were. Whiteley was one of the first people to report on the 1984
Brighton hotel bombing, as he was staying in the hotel at the time. On 15 June 2003, Whiteley appeared on the
BBC show,
Top Gear and set the slowest time in the
Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car segment with a time of 2:06. ==Illness and death==