WATCH: Whitby Museum to screen 1967 BBC film documenting a week in the life of the Whitby Gazette

In the first in a series of special 2023 events as Whitby Museum celebrates its 200th anniversary, people can look back at daily life in Whitby in the 1960s, seen through the eyes of local newspaper reporters, and captured on film for the TV documentary.

The Gazette in those days was a broadsheet, owned and printed in Whitby, and the programme title was chosen to reflect the optimism of the editorial staff as they contemplated blank pages at the start of another week, knowing that by the time the paper went to press, another week of local news would fill the pages.

Reporter’s copy, all taken from pocket notebooks, was written up on little portable typewriters and set into type on linotype machines, and people’s lives duly recorded - their births, marriages and deaths, successes and their misdemeanours.

The BBC cameraman Peter Dearden filmed shots on the moors, when a sheep stepped aside to reveal the Fylingdales early-warning station radomes, better known at the time as ‘golf balls’, as well as dramatic shots of a Robin Hood’s Bay cottage collapsing down the cliff.

Contrast that with the more leisurely daily chin wagging down on the harbour, the trials and tribulations of missing speakers at the Women’s Institute, and local characters.

Taking place on Thursday February 23, screening will be introduced by Sue Howard for the Yorkshire Film Archive, who first acquired the film from Malcolm Barker some 20 years ago.

Following the screening there will be the opportunity for first-hand reflections and insight into the workings of the paper from former editor Jon Stokoe, who now oversees a number of Newsquest’s Yorkshire weeklies, and will no doubt reflect on the changes to the industry since the making of Something’ll Happen by Friday, back in 1967.

Screenings are on at 3pm and 6.30pm.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite – see link on the museum website www.whitbymuseum.org.uk – £5 for non-members, free to members.

The Something’ll Happen by Friday trailer can also be viewed on the museum website.