Luke Casey

Luke Casey is a broadcaster and journalist whose career has spanned four decades. During that time he has covered stories of national and international note. He began his professional life in newspapers and progressed through local television as a reporter on Look North for the BBC in Newcastle, to network exposure on Nationwide and the Money Programme before returning home to the North of England to work for Tyne Tees Television covering Teesside and North Yorkshire.

It was during that time that he discovered the magic that is The Dales. One of his greatest achievements was that he was the first journalist to persuade James Herriot (Thirsk vet Alf Wight ) to appear on the small screen.

Before television, Luke trained as a reporter on the Northern Echo under the editorship of that great journalistic icon Harold Evans. He was one of the original John North columnists – finding much of his inspiration from the people who lived in the villages of the Dales and the North York Moors.

In the early 1970s, he went to work for BBC’s Nationwide – joining the team that included Michael Barratt, Frank Bough, Sue Lawley, Valerie Singleton and Bernard Falk.
Luke was known mainly as an ‘out and about’ reporter, travelling the length and breadth of the country, often to the most remote areas. In fact, one of his Nationwide series was called ‘Remote Britain’ – remote but not removed…that was a theme he would return to in his later years.

Luke is a countryman at heart and many of his family still farm in the West of Ireland. He lives on Teesside and when he worked in London, he resisted all temptation to move his family from the North East of England.

‘The constant travelling was tough sometimes, but I succeeded in bringing my family up in the best bit of Britain by far,’ he says.
He came home in the 1980s and since then has won a number of major awards. He was voted Britain’s Television Reporter of the Year in 1987 by the Royal Television Society and in 1988 scooped the RTS national award for Best Home Documentary – for Crying In The Dark, Tyne Tees Television’s documentary about the Cleveland child sex abuse crisis.

Recently both Luke and The Dales Diary have received significant regional and national industry awards which mean a great deal to him personally and the team which supports him.

He and the production team are proud to bring The Dales Diary to you – it is a celebration of the Northern Hill Country and we should all rejoice in what is great about our region.