Part 2 coming next week.

More info can be found here http://www.creativemasham.com/

Yorkshire's two air ambulances in action over The White Horse on Sutton Bank

It costs £7,200 a day to run the Yorkshire Air Ambulance service – a small price to pay to keep its two life-saving rapid-response helicopters in the air.

Yorkshire Air Ambulance (YAA) was founded in 2000 and serves a population of five million people living across almost 6,000 square miles. So far it has rescued 4,170 patients, often from remote rural areas. It’s ability to avoid traffic jams and uneven road surfaces is vital in cases of major trauma such as head or spinal injuries.

Surprisingly, this invaluable public service isn’t actually funded by public money. The YAA is an independent charity, relying on donations and fundraising efforts from individuals and organisations to survive. The latest of these takes place tomorrow (Saturday), as part of Huddersfield Town football club’s ongoing Keep It Up Campaign, which has raised £200,000 for the YAA since 2009. The only form of Government funding the charity receives comes indirectly, through the secondment of paramedics from the NHS.

It seems incredible, then, that the YAA is forced to pay the Government £5,800 a year in VAT duty on the 170,000 litres of fuel needed to keep its two helicopters airborne. Apparently, this is because of EU tax legislation. Yet the equally essential, charity-run Lifeboat Service has long been exempt from VAT duty.

Last month, a cross-party delegation of Yorkshire MPs tabled a motion in Parliament calling on the Government to bypass the red tape and return these VAT payments to the YAA in the form of grants. There seems to be no decent reason why the Coalition couldn’t do this for all 20 of the UK’s air ambulance services. You can sign an e-petition by clicking HERE if you so wish.

A patient is transferred from a YAA helicopter after it lands on a helipad at Leeds General Infirmary

I knew next to nothing about the work of the YAA until my dad was airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary from Ripon Racecourse in October 2010. He had suffered a heart attack while out on his weekly bike ride. The winding 18-mile journey would have taken a good 40 minutes by road, even in an ambulance. According to his surgeon, by this time the damage to my old man’s ticker would probably have been irreversible. As it happened, he was on the operating table in 10 minutes flat and – thanks to the YAA – is still here to tell the tale.

Given the day-to-day running costs of the YAA, a saving of £5,800 a year might not seem much in the grand scheme of things. But it could mean the difference between life and death – maybe even for somebody you know.

- Walk For Pounds, a 28-mile sponsored walk from The Galpharm Stadium, in Huddersfield, to Gigg Lane, in Bury, takes place tomorrow. A sponsored 10k run around Huddersfield town centre takes place on Sunday March 18th. To find out more about Yorkshire Air Ambulance and the Keep It Up Campaign, or to make a donation, visit www.yorkshireairambulance.org.uk/kiucampaign/

Debian Blak and Ikestra perform ‘Tantalise’ in a secret location deep underground in the capital of the north.

In the words of his label..

Debian Blak is the latest graduate of the vibrant Leeds music scene which has produced the likes of Ramadanman, Submotion Orchestra, kidkanevil and Nightmares On Wax. Debian Blak has been honing his skills as a produced since the age of 16. His passion for music began long before this, when at the tender age of 6 he first picked up the violin and began to tap away on the piano (not with the violin, mind).

Fast forward to 2011 and Debian Blak is at the forefront of a generation of emerging creative artists in the UK. We first came across him when he remixed kidkanevil’s Tokyorkshire track alongside Airhead back in 2009 – since then he’s been developing his sound as a producer, both with his solo material and working with various bands and artists across the UK, most recently producing another new First Word act, East Park Reggae Collective (he is also the band’s drummer).

A Hint Of Menace is Debian Blak’s debut release and is just a taster of what’s to come from this promising artist in the coming months. Drawing on influences including Mount Kimbie, James Blake and Jai Paul, as well as bringing his considerable musicianship to the fore, he has crafted a haunting, delicate EP that marks him out as one to watch.

Image used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

“Hi dad, is mum in? Apparently it’s British Yorkshire Pudding Day on Sunday, I want to write a blog about it tomorrow.”

Dad (on the phone): “Well I’m not sure you’ve come to right place. She had a bit of a disaster on Sunday. They didn’t rise at all. We had to throw ‘em all out.”

Far be it from me to question my mother’s considerable cooking prowess in public, but when it comes to Yorkshire puddings, she’s got lazy. She openly admits it, having made a frank confession over Sunday dinner at my house two weeks ago.

Mum’s homemade Yorkies were the stuff of legend as a child, but she’s been using a well-known brand of frozen packet puds for several months now. “There’s only two of us to cook for these days, it’s not worth the effort,” she protested.

Mum is not alone. Baking the perfect Yorkshire pudding is a high-wire balancing act not for the feint of heart. The slightest, imperceptible misjudgment can lead to deflated disaster and a semi-naked, ruined roast.

This versatile dish – equally delicious doused in gravy as a starter in it’s own right – is without doubt Yorkshire’s most famous food export. The evolution of the modern-day Yorkie dates back to the mid-1700s, and is today enjoyed the world over. But I fear the timeless culinary craftsmanship of this great county is under grave threat.

copyright recipes4us.co.uk

The UK’s leading manufacturer of shop-bought frozen Yorkshire puddings enjoyed a whopping 60 per cent share of the market in 2011, with year-on-year sales growing by an estimated 6%. Next time you’re at your local all-you-can-eat Sunday carvery, just ask yourself one question: were this pub’s puds baked fresh on the premises today, or unloaded from the refrigeration unit of a Mercedes Benz Sprinter a week last Tuesday?

Well, believe it or not, Sunday is officially British Yorkshire Pudding Day 2012 (right). This is your chance to help preserve a vital cornerstone of our nation’s homemaking heritage in the labour-saving, corner-cutting kitchens of the early 21st Century. There’s even a dedicated website to visit, full of useful tips on throwing your own Yorkshire Pudding Party.

As Florence Sandeman, founder of British Yorkshire Pudding Day (BYPD), quite rightly says: “BYPD is not meant to be some sort of serious nationalistic statement with sinister undertones. It is merely a day set aside when everyone, be they British or not, can remember, enjoy and celebrate the joys of an age-old recipe.”

Recognition and acceptance is always the first step in overcoming any problem. If my mum can see the error of her ways, then you can too. Last week’s attempted revival may have ended in bitter disappointment, but this weekend I’m backing mum to snatch batter-based victory from the jaws of defeat.

Here’s mum’s classic timeworn Yorkshire pudding recipe, care of Mrs Beeton, along with a few helpful hints of her own that are guaranteed to give you golden-brown glory (almost) every time. I can’t vouch for it myself though – I’ve never cooked a proper Yorkshire pud in my life…

Ingredients:
100g of plain flour
1 egg
250ml of milk
1 tbsp of salt

Method:
1. Sieve the flour and salt in a bowl. Make a well in the centre and break your egg in.
2. Stir in half the milk, gently working in the flour. Beat vigorously until mixture is smooth and bubbly then stir in the rest of the milk.
3. Put a tiny bit of fat, preferably lard, in the bottom of each well in a Yorkshire pudding tray. Put the tray in a hot, pre-heated oven until the fat is almost smoking.
4. Half fill each tin with batter and bake in the oven until the mixture has risen and is golden brown. Serve with roast beef and all the trimmings.

(Makes 8 individual puddings)

Hints:
1. Some people prefer to use a mixture made with half milk and half water for a supposedly lighter batter.
2. Leave the mixed batter to rest in the fridge for an hour before baking.
3. Making the perfect puds involves a great deal of trial and error, so be patient.
4. Whatever you do, don’t open the oven door too early to see how they are doing!

Debra Robson sings ‘Sunflower’ in Holbeck, Leeds, accompanied by a lovely old piano.

"Woldgate Woods,21, 23 & 29 November 2006" Oil on 6 Canvasess (Copyright David Hockney/photo: Richard Schmidt)

I don’t know much about art, as they say, but I know what I like.

Tomorrow (Saturday) sees the opening of a major new exhibition of David Hockney landscapes at The Royal Academy of Arts in London. Bradford-born Hockney is undoubtedly one of the most influential British artists of the last – and indeed this – century.

The exhibition is called A Bigger Picture, a reference to Hockney’s accidentally invented trademark medium of “joiners” – vast widescreen works made up of multiple canvasses or photographic images such as Bigger Trees Near Warter, donated to the Tate in 2008.

Like the artworks themselves, A Bigger Picture is highly unusual in its size and scope, taking over the entire Royal Academy. It features not just collated Hockney landscapes from the last 50 years, but a swathe of vivid, vibrant new works created during a staggeringly prolific purple patch enjoyed by the artist since 2005. Ever the innovator, many of Hockney’s latest works were realised using an iPad and iPhone, much like his groundbreaking 1970s and early ‘80s portraits made from Polaroid photocollages.

And the inspiration for this recent outpouring of new work? Hockney’s latter-day relocation from Los Angeles – his permanent home since 1978 – to the somewhat less glamorous seaside town of Bridlington, on Yorkshire’s east coast.

"Nov 7th, Nov 26th 2010 Woldgate Wood 11:30am & 9:30am" Still from 18 screen video (Copyright David Hockney)

Hockney, now 74, has swapped the sun-drenched Californian swimming pools of iconic works such as A Bigger Splash (1967) for the undulating beauty of the surrounding Yorkshire Wolds, home to his beloved mother until her death in 1999. It says much for the sheer scale and dramatic variety of landscape in Yorkshire that, alas, I am less than familiar with this largely unsung corner of my home county. I’m not the only one, though.

Stretching from the Vale of York in the west to the plain of Holderness in the east, and bordered by the Vale of Pickering to the north, the low hills of the Wolds play third fiddle to the internationally renowned North Yorkshire Moors and Yorkshire Dales. Both were made National Parks in the 1950s, while today the lowly Wolds do not even merit the status of being an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

"The Big Hawthorne" 2008 Oil on 9 Canvasses (Copyright David Hockney/photo: Robert Schmidt)

But all that might be about to change. A Bigger Picture is undoubtedly one of the most significant global art events of the year, and tourism agency Welcome To Yorkshire is working with Hockney to create a tourist trail based around his recent work.

Dorothy Fairburn, Yorkshire Regional Director of the Country Land & Business Association (CLA), says: “David Hockney is widely known as the godfather of modern British art and it is expected that this new exhibition will result in an influx of people to the Wolds. Tourism businesses operating in and around sites that feature in the new exhibition, such as Garrowby Hill, Sledmere, Warter, Thixendale and Kilham, would be well advised to make sure they are prepared for a surge of interest this summer.”

It seems that no matter how far in the world we wander, the tractor beam of God’s Own County never quite loses its gravitational pull for us native Yorkshire folk – even acclaimed multi-millionaire artists.

As Hockney told the Guardian Review last weekend: “When my friends in LA ask me what I am doing, I say I’m on location. Monet stayed out at Giverny, Cezanne stayed in Arles. You might need a big city when you are young, but there comes a point when you need somewhere else. I’ve found it here.”

Hockney is a long-standing patron of Salts Mill, in Saltaire, home to a considerable collection of his work just down the road from his birthplace, while Bigger Trees Near Warter was exhibited in both York and Hull last year. It would be fitting, however, if some more of Hockney’s recent works from what is sure to be a blockbusting new exhibition find their way up north at some point later in the year.

Trains to London don’t come cheap, and this beguiling journey through Hockney’s living world would surely take on an added dimension if displayed in the context of the often overlooked natural wonders that inspired it.

- David Hockney: A Bigger Picture runs from January 21 to April 9 at The Royal Academy, London. Images courtesy of the artist and The Royal Academy (via PA/PicSelect). www.royalacademy.org.uk

London-based songwriter Katy Haymer sings ‘The Right Way’ on the Swallow’s Nest narrow-boat in Kildwick, North Yorkshire.

www.facebook.com/katyhaymermusic

‘An 8-piece band, all of whom sing and play strings’. I knew instantly that this was something I must see! I enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek name and, approaching their old chapel building just outside Huddersfield, I wondered – is this going to be terribly brilliant or brilliantly terrible?!

Inside was chaos. Junk was strewn all over the floor. A toy car, plastic flowers, reels of wire, boxes. Stuff of all kinds. In the middle of the mayhem were 8 stringed instruments waiting to be played. We gathered all the lamps we could find amongst the dust and they launched into a crescendo of percussion (on found items – gas canister, tool box, whatever) and raw, earthy folk of the Northern kind, with lots of harmonies, a double-bass, ukulele, banjo, snare-drum, 12-string and 6-string guitars and a lung-full of philosophical ponderings.

The acoustics of the disused chapel, in the midst of renovations, were phenomenal, helping to blend the voices beautifully, and if you pick up reverb on the recording it’s all from the room, none was added in post-production.

A talented bunch who will no doubt see their audiences soar in numbers as word about them propagates. Terribly brilliant!

The String Fellows film marks a cracking start to 2012 for us, and with loads of great content in the pipe-line for the very near future such as Debian Blak, Katy Haymer, and the Masham Arts Festival, not to mention the return of Yorkshire Telly Live, I sincerely hope you will enjoy the films as much as we do!

If you’d like to be featured on the site or have a suggestion of an artist or act we could/should be giving some exposure to, please drop us a line on lewis@yorkshiretelly.com or on Twitter @YorkshireTelly

We were invited onto Russell Walker’s show at BBC Radio York today to talk about Yorkshire Telly, where it came from and our plans for 2012. If you missed the glorious liveness here it is again for your listening pleasure. Thanks.

Huddersfield band String Fellows perform their song ‘Round and Round’

http://www.string-fellows.co.uk

Photo by Bitboy

Hello loyal readers and viewers of Yorkshire Telly. We’ve been hearing rumblings about the advertising on the website recently. Rumblings along the lines of “you must be making some serious cash from those adverts playing around the artist videos”, “Isn’t that a little unfair on the artist if they are not getting any of it”, “You must be making a fortune!”.

In short, for the duration of time the ads have been running we’ve made less than a fiver.

As the producer of Yorkshire Telly Live and one that takes care of these sorts of things, I feel I should lay this out clearly for anyone with any concerns.

This entire venture started out as a labour of love and continues so. We don’t charge the artists to film a video for them, we built the website for nothing, pay all the hosting costs and provide exposure, willingly and happily for those wanting a video. It is a platform for exposing the talent in the region to a global audience outside the mainstream broadcasters.

There are no official sponsors of the website, we hold 100% editorial control over the content we produce and these adverts are inserted automatically based on the content. The advertising all started when we switched systems from Vimeo to Blip. Both very good services but I chose Blip because they provide better RSS and playlist functionality for free. They also give you the option to insert adverts which we decided to trial.

So since making that switch, Blip has recorded just shy of 10,000 views across all our videos and the ads have generated $6.58 as you can see below. Thats dollars, so lets convert that to pounds, thats £4.19 before a fee for currency conversion! You begin to see that we really aren’t making the thousands that some believe us to be. In fact, we have just left it in the account. It’s quite a rubbish system really, I mean for 10,000 views we get less than a fiver, it’s a cruel world in online video and we’re still learning about it.

So when you see some global brand promoting their latest shaving products we haven’t struck a big deal for thousands of pounds for that to be there, it’s an automated process that if you click through we get a couple of peanuts in the post by pigeon mail.

In light of people’s concerns and the ridiculously poor payouts we have decided to turn the ads off for now. This doesn’t mean that we are closing the door to advertising at all. In fact quite the opposite. This boat isn’t going to float on its own forever and taking a labour of love to the next level and turning it into a business that is sustainable and profitable inevitably means that we will be selling advertising space on the site and sometimes in the video. But in the future this will most likely be far more relative to individual videos and more apparent in the live show.

As with most startups we are constantly working things out as we go along, including how to cover costs and pay ourselves for the time put in. The last thing we want to do is exploit those contributing their talents to the site and I hope that this post explains where we are coming from and clears the air for those with concerns.

On a future note, we have some exciting plans for 2012. Lots more artists to come, a new season of live shows, new venue and broadcasting platforms all of which will be revealed very soon.

Stay tuned and thanks for watching.

I once wrote a heartfelt letter to Jimmy Savile asking him to “fix it” for me to appear in an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard – that other staple of mid-1980s Saturday night family TV. Being only seven, I didn’t quite appreciate the insurmountable logistics involved in such a request. Jim’ll Fix It received around 20,000 letters a week from kids like me, and I’m not sure US entertainment giant Warner Bros would have taken kindly to a small blond Yorkshire lad incongruously sliding across the orange bonnet of the General Lee.

My disappointment at the deafening silence that followed from BBC TV Centre returned to haunt me many years later. Having formed a slightly shambolic indie band in my early twenties, it transpired that three of the four members (myself included) had all written in to Jim’ll Fix It with this self same earnest plea. A strange coincidence for sure, but not as unlikely as it seems. The Dukes of Hazzard was about as cool and exotic as it got in West Yorkshire in 1984.

Tellingly, it says more about the universal likability of Savile, his “jingly jangly jewelry” and brilliantly banal catchphrases. It’s easy to forget just what a behemoth of popular culture the Radio1 DJ and Top of the Pops presenter was back then – a household name for generations of grown-ups and a childhood icon for thousands of youngsters like myself.

Recently my mum told me how she and her mates used to go out dancing in Leeds as teenagers in the early 1960s. First to Peter Stringfellow’s nightclub Cinderella’s, in the shiny new Merrion Centre, and later to the more male-dominated spin-off Rockafella’s which opened upstairs. Savile, who claimed to be the first person to play two records simultaneously back to back without a gap, was the city’s star DJ and on the cusp of nationwide fame. Mum vividly remembers sneaking in underage to one of his regular nights at an underground “spit and sawdust” joint in what is now a branch of swanky clothes shop Reiss, in the refurbished Victoria Quarter.

Savile’s primetime TV success came in more innocent times, of course. News of the star’s macabre vigil by his mother’s coffin, Louis Theroux’s infamous 1999 documentary and cynical tabloid prying into Savile’s (apparent lack of) sex life had yet to dent the unimpeachable self-generated media image of the eccentric do-gooder raising millions for charity.

But the huge public turnout for a typically extravagant three-day funeral in Leeds and Scarborough this week (see helpful Daily Mail graphic, left) highlights the fact that – beyond the odd vaguely snooty obituary in the London-centric national press – Jimmy Savile remained a deeply popular local hero for many people in these parts.

A proud Yorkshireman to the last, he was a proper TV personality in the days when “personality” had yet to be confused with the vacuous 21st Century concept of “celebrity”. Whatever his alleged faults and foibles, Jimmy Savile was a real person and a genuine one-off character. I know because I met him once.

I was eight-and-a-half, and Savile was the star attraction at a charity fun run around Wetherby Racecourse. I queued up for his autograph afterwards and, true to form, there sat the man himself – resplendent with trademark track suit, unruly blond thatch and aforementioned jewelry. Cigar smoke mixed with the smell of Deep Heat from his run. He was the first famous person off the telly I had ever met in real life. He swished out his signature, drawing a little smiley face in the looping ‘J’ of his name (right). “How’s about that, then?”

Mr Savile admitted that he couldn’t quite remember my Dukes of Hazzard letter, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter to me anymore. He got a lot of letters, he said.