On the Aire went to air on 6 November 2014, the opening night of Made in Leeds, promising city-centred journalism at a time when regional bulletins still treated Leeds as one node in a Yorkshire patch. Presenter Jason Thornton fronted the first editions from the Leeds Media Centre in Chapeltown; later Mark Kielesz-Levine took the chair and became the face most viewers associated with the strand. The half-hour programme fielded reporters including Peter McNerney, Matt Millington and Joe Robinson, all ordered to find stories inside the LS postcode rather than defaulting to county-wide round-ups.
The team built a reputation for live outside broadcasts when most start-up local channels could barely leave the building: they anchored from the city’s Olympic and Paralympic parade in 2016, reported through the night after the murder of MP Jo Cox in nearby Birstall, and shifted operations to Manchester the morning after the Arena bombing to follow Leeds families caught in the blast. The coverage of Christmas 2015 flooding that swamped Kirkstall Road earned the programme the Royal Television Society Yorkshire award for Best News Report in 2016, and the Jo Cox specials brought further nominations for both programme and reporters in 2017, with Kielesz-Levine winning Reporter of the Year.
November 2017 brought a sudden end: Made Television centralised all news output in Leeds, replacing the city-specific bulletin with the generic Made TV News. That hybrid national-local strand itself vanished three months later, leaving Yorkshire Live, a loop of pre-recorded packages, to occupy the schedule. The Chapeltown studio now sits dark for most of the day, and the only trace of the short-lived Leeds experiment is a shelf of Royal Television Society trophies.
Production Details
BS-TBS / 1 Season / 12 Episodes / 2005
Writer(s): Fumihiko Shimo
Producer(s): Shinichi Nakamura, Kozue Kananiwa
Main Cast
Tomoko Kawakami as Misuzu Kamio (voice)
Daisuke Ono as Yukito Kunisaki (voice)
Aya Hisakawa as Haruko Kamio (voice)
Hiromi Konno as Potato (voice)
Ryoka Yuzuki as Minagi Tohno (voice)
Yukari Tamura as Michiru (voice)
Asami Okamoto as Kano Kirishima (voice)
Yumi Touma as Hijiri Kirishima (voice)
Kaori Tanaka as Younger Sisters (voice)
Kenjiro Tsuda as Keisuke Tachibana (voice)
Yuuki Kodaira as Boy (voice)
Atsuko Bungo as Boy (voice)
