From The QT: When Tyne Tees Television was Super-charged
In May 2024, Sam Wonfor looked back on the TV gems that her Mum Andrea unearthed as head of children's TV at Tyne Tees after the passing of Super Gran star Gudrun Ure
Some background before you begin reading this. Sam, who I worked with at The Journal and who was features editor of The QT, was born into TV royalty. Her late mum Andrea was a TV executive with an unerring ability to identify and nurture talent and a willingness to take risks.
Her legacy continues to influence television today. She commissioned Byker Grove, Super Gran, The Big Breakfast, Eurotrash, The Word and Hillsborough. And she co-created The Tube.
Sam’s dad Geoff was a director of that iconic music show which was hosted by Jools Holland and Paula Yates and broadcast live from Newcastle every Friday evening between November 1982 and April 1987.
Her dad Geoff passed away in 2022 and his contributions to music and television have left a lasting impact. He worked with so many big names in the music industry and he won several prestigious awards, most notably a Grammy for The Beatles Anthology in 1997.
If you want to read more quality stories like this, then like and share with as many people as possible - Brian Aitken, Editor
After a couple of recent diversions, I had planned to circle back to Studio Five and The Tube for the latest instalment of stories from the Wonfor telly vaults.
But following the sad news that Super Gran herself, Gudrun Ure had passed away last week at the impressively super age of 98, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kids programmes my Mum presided over as head of children’s and then director of programmes at Tyne Tees Television in the 1980s.
(I’ve also been non-stop singing Billy Connolly’s earworm of a theme tune for the show, much to my household’s frustration - even when I told them I had a picture disk version and it got to number two in the charts when the charts MEANT something.)
Shows like Razzmatazz, Saturday Shake Up, Lyn’s Look-In and Get Fresh all came out of the City Road studios stable in Newcastle during my Mum’s tenure.
But it’s fair to say that Super Gran was the one whose impact was particularly supercharged.
As someone who was 10 when the show first hit the nation’s screens (remember, this was back in the days when Tyne Tees made proper telly programmes which were shown all over the shop), I was smack in the middle of the show’s demographic and thought it was absolutely smashing,
Built around the books of Forrest Wilson and the associated superpowers of a grandmother who made the likes of Batman, Superman, Spiderman and The A Team’s B.A. Baracus look like a bunch of fairies, (thanks to her having more bottle than United Dairies*), the show was sold to 60 countries worldwide and picked up an International Emmy award for its trouble.
*This will make sense to those who remember the theme tune and those who have had it rammed down their ears for the past week.
Filmed predominantly in Tynemouth, but also on location all over the North East, the show attracted a string of fantastically eighties cameo appearances from stars including the aforementioned Billy Connolly, Spike Milligan, George Best, Lulu, Geoff Capes, Roy Kinnear and Irene Handle.
But while the net was cast UK-wide for guest stars and its leading lady, the army of kids who appeared in the show were from all from the North East… including 11-year-old Holly English who played Edison, Inventor Black’s assistant and the best friend of Super Gran’s grandson Willard, in the first series.
I tracked Holly down via a combination of IMDB, JustGiving, Facebook and a sprinkle of sheer journalistic tenacity (the internet makes the last bit a lot easier than it used to be) at the weekend and found she was more than happy to talk about her time on the hit show - and even share some entries from her Super Gran scrapbook.
Holly - now sporting the surname Mapletoft - was a pupil at Benfield School in Newcastle when the producers held auditions at the drama school she had just joined.
“My sister wanted to go, and I only went because my sister was going,” she says. “I never really expected to do the audition, I was just going along for a bit of fun.
“I didn’t really think any more of it until they phoned my parents.”
Following a table read at the City Road studios, Holly spent the next six months with Gudrun and co-stars Iain Cuthbertson as (booooo!) Granny Smith’s nemesis, The Scunner Campbell, Iam Towell as Willard and Lee Marshall as Tubs on the Super Gran set.
“I don’t think I knew what to expect, but everyone was really kind and nice. We had a tutor and chaperone who looked after us who was lovely. I was a bit of a swot so I liked doing the lessons with her,” she laughs.
“But everyone from the crew to makeup, hair, costume… they quickly became like my film family. I really liked one of the stunt Super Grans who was called Tina - she did the handstand on the skateboard, I think!”
Holly remembers “huge wadges of scripts” and that the filming schedules could be pretty punishing - getting picked up at 4.30am from her Wallsend home in the production minibus wasn’t unusual.
“It was usually the driver Jim who knocked for me, and my mum would be in her housecoat waving me off… and then one day we opened the door and it was Billy Connolly standing there, which was quite a surprise! I talked to him all the way to filming.”
Judging by a page in Holly’s scrapbook, he must have made quite the impression. Below a polaroid of Billy, she wrote:
The man is Billy Connolly. He is playing Angus McSporran in Super Gran
He’s funny and spectacular
Then she adds in reference to the other glued-in photo on the page:
The same about Roy Kinnear… but he is playing football manager.
Another scrapbook entry reads:
Supergran is perfect
Not too old not too young
… up to now, she only has told me off once and is really like a gran.
“During the series, I met lots of famous people, but being 11, I didn’t really know who any of them were,” she admits.
“I knew who Geoff Capes was because he lived in the same town as my great aunt and uncle and they used to talk about him… and I knew Irene Handle because I used to like Metal Mickey. I remember she never went anywhere without her chihuahua!”
Meanwhile Gudrun - who Holly says (see scrapbook exhibit B) was really like a grandma to the kids on the show - apparently always had a toothbrush on her person.
“She was lovely… and always liked to clean her teeth after meals!”
While Holly has nothing but good memories of the making of the series, once it hit the screens, things weren’t as straightforward.
“There were two sides to it really. When I saw it, I was excited to see myself on there, and obviously my grandparents and family were really proud, but I was teased quite a bit at school, which wasn’t fun - people singing the theme to me down the corridors and being quite nasty about it.
“Thankfully I had a group of friends who were lovely and supportive, but in the end, the bullying was why I didn’t do the second series. Looking back I kind of wish I’d done it and got my equity card, but that was the decision we made at the time.”
There was a happy ending though.
As well as having the DVDs of the series to show her own children - she has two now grown up sons with her husband of 31 years, Rob - Holly credits her role in Super Gran (along with her parents’ sensible financial planning) with a major life moment.
“We used the money I made from Super Gran to put the deposit down on our first house,” she says.
“When I was on the show, I was allowed to buy a sewing machine and a pair of roller skates… and after that, my parents put everything else away, so that was a wonderful thing which came out of it as well as the fun we had making it.”
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