John Crosse: One of Yorkshire Television's most recognisable voices dies at 83

For 26 years he was one of the announcers who ushered in the programmes on Yorkshire TV, having arrived at the station after a colourful career on the pirate radio ships.

YTV’s announcers, unlike those on most of the rest of the network, were disembodied voices who spoke from a darkened booth, in the manner of most TV stations today.

Thus, Crosse and his colleagues Redvers Kyle and Graham Roberts became known only for the distinctive inflection with which they cued up the next items.

In Crosse’s case, immaculate received pronunciation was his hallmark and he was one of the longest-serving broadcasters on the station.

He was born in February 1941 in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, the son of Major William AF Crosse, a 6th Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles officer posted there for training during the war, and Jean Penwill, born in Liverpool from a family with a long tradition in merchant shipping.

His parents divorced and his mother remarried a US naval officer shortly after the war, and at 13 John was sent to join her in New York, despite having a place at Pangbourne College in Berkshire.

The third-class passage from Southampton saw him looked after by the purser and stewards in the first class bar and he attributed the joie de vivre that he carried through life to this early experience of convivial bonhomie.

At 18, after a brief stint with his father who ran a repatriation camp for German prisoners of war in Austria – where he learnt to ski with the Army and trained with Britain’s Olympic team – he returned to the UK and quickly developed a taste for the sea.

It was his sailing prowess that gave him his first break in broadcasting. An opportunity arose as crew on the ship that hosted the pirate station Radio London and after a particularly heavy storm delayed the arrival of the supply ship he was asked, as one of the few characters onboard with sea-legs and a good voice, to stand in for the ailing Kenny Everett.

He was then trained to assume the position of newsreader, for which he adopted the stage name John Sedd.

After leaving the station, he worked for the sales organisation RadioVision selling airtime for other pirate ships, and then for the English language radio station in Cyprus as a newsreader, presenter and producer. It was there that he met his wife Mary Bedson and they married in October 1970 in Nicosia.

Back in Britain he had a short stint as a newsreader on BBC Radio 4 and six months at Southern Television in Southampton as a continuity announcer.

He joined Yorkshire Television in October 1972 when the start of afternoon TV extended the station’s broadcasting hours, and stayed until 1998, narrating the long-running schools series How We Used To Live, as well as cueing up the programmes.

In retirement he spent a few years in Virginia looking after his mother before returning with Mary to Nidderdale and the former youth hostel they had converted into a family home. He is survived by Mary, his three children Yolanda, Benjamin and Halcyon, and eight grandchildren.