As 2023 draws to a close it’s time to look back with our annual rundown of the most popular stories of the last year on the Prolific North site, and there’s been no shortage of activity for followers of the North’s media and digital sectors this year.
It’s certainly been a challenging year, and while energy bills have at least come down marginally for most, individuals and businesses alike, inflation has remained stubbornly high and the cost-of-living crisis shows little sign of abating in the immediate term.
It’s no surprise then that budgets have been squeezed, and unfortunately redundancies make up an unpalatable portion of the most-read pieces of 2023.
Thankfully, there’s been plenty of better news too, including an impressive, multi-million valuation for a six-year-old Leeds data firm, some notable TV successes for the region, and a tsunami of investments from the podcast-hosting, Dragon’s Den-starring, one-man economy that is Steven Bartlett.
10) Job losses at dentsu as agency network to ‘prepare for what’s next’
Bleak job news in the run up to Christmas as global marketing and advertising giant dentsu confirmed job losses across its UK operation, which includes offices in Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle.
There was still no confirmation of numbers or locations at the time of writing, but a dentsu spokesperson told Prolific North: “There will be some existing roles affected as we reshape and right size our business to prepare for what’s next. Building on the solid momentum we have as One dentsu across the UK, we will continue to focus on client outcomes underpinned by great end-to-end experiences.”
9 Cervical cancer campaign urges North West Women ‘Don’t Keep ‘Em Crossed’
Influential’s November campaign with North West Cancer Research was designed to encourage women to attend their cervical screening appointments with the cheeky slogan ‘Don’t Keep ‘Em Crossed’ and an OOH campaign including disembodied female legs hovering above passengers at Manchester Piccadilly Station.
The campaign aimed to shine a spotlight on how cervical cancer rates across the North West are 19% higher than the rest of England, so we can only hope the campaign itself resonated with women in the region as much as our story did with readers.
8) Pete Waterman to star in Workerbee and More 4’s Little Trains & Big Names
2023 may have been marked by seemingly never-ending bad news on the real-life railways with strikes, delays and the HS2 cancellation dominating the headlines, but Workerbee and Channel 4 hit the sweet spot with Pete Waterman’s new show.
Big Names and Little Trains combined the pop supremo with a smattering of celebrity guests who shared his love of model railways. It landed in the all-too-rarely explored Venn Diagram intersection between fans of 80s pop, Eddie Izzard and model trains and was a hit with railway enthusiasts, TV reviewers, and the general public alike. Our story announcing the show was on the right tracks with readers too.
7) ‘We could easily do another series’: Phil Mealey on bringing back Early Doors
Fans of cult Manchester comedy Early Doors were in for a treat at the turn of the year when repeats of the show’s two seasons landed on BBC4 and iPlayer after 14 years offscreen. Like all classic, two-series sitcoms (We’re looking at you Fawlty Towers, Spaced and The Young Ones) fans were quickly clamouring for a third series and a petition quickly gained 10,000 signatures.
Phil Mealey, who co-wrote and co-starred in the show with Craig Cash, told Prolific North: “We could easily do another series. When we did the live shows, myself and Craig started writing it for six months before we told anybody about it, because we were really aware of the standard that we’ve set and the expectation of the really loyal fans…Every night, everywhere, we had a standing ovation. For them, it was like stepping back into [fictional Stockport pub The Grapes].”
6) Behind the scars of Ryan Connor’s Coronation Street prosthetics
We went behind the scenes of the world’s longest-running soap in April to learn how Gillian Walsh, Head of Hair & Makeup and SFX at Coronation Street, and her team had approached the challenge of depicting the aftermath of an acid attack on longstanding character Ryan Connor.
Award-winning prosthetics designers and a specialist burns nurse were enlisted, and Walsh revealed: “It’s the most ambitious task that we, the Coronation Street makeup team, have taken on due to the longevity and the fact that the character will be on the show for a long time but I feel like we have really risen to the occasion and I am really proud of what we have created.”
5 “Good riddance to bad rubbish”: Reaction from tech community as rapist Lawrence Jones jailed
A drawn-out legal process had included reporting restrictions being in place for almost a year on the case of UKFast founder Lawrence Jones, since he was found guilty of an initial sexual assault charge in January. His case finally came to a close at the end of November when he was found guilty of a further two cases of raping and drugging women in his Salford flat in crimes dating back to the 1990s.
Jones was sentenced to 15 years on December 1, and reactions from within the Manchester tech community suggested there was little love lost for the one-time poster boy of North West tech start ups.
Alongside accusations of a ‘cult-like’ toxic empire around Jones and rampant sexism throughout his business, our headline was one of the more printable responses to his eventual undoing.
4) Redundancies at And Digital
Neither the first nor last redundancy story in what has undoubtedly been a challenging year economically, but sadly one of the biggest with around 240 staff reported to be losing their jobs as And Digital confirmed it would be making 15-19 people redundant in half of its 25 offices, or ‘clubs.’
“In the light of the economic slowdown and the effect it’s having on the tech sector, it’s with a heavy heart that, for the first time in our history, we’ll be going through a consultation process to make a number of redundancies from around half our Clubs (our local business units) and our supporting teams in the UK,” the agency, which has operations in Leeds and Manchester, confirmed.
3) £10m valuation for The Data City as it lands ‘six-figure’ sum for global AI platform rollout
There was big news at Leeds-based The Data City in September when a new funding round led by Yorkshire-based venture capital firm Venturian landed the company with a hefty £10m valuation after just six years trading. The Data City planned to use the funding to help with the rollout of its new AI-driven data platform, offering access to 94 million companies, including the USA and Europe, underpinned by CreditSafe’s global financial company data.
2) The Times: Steven Bartlett is not the tycoon he claims
Back in February The Times published a far-from-complimentary assessment of Social Chain and Flight Story co-founder, Dragon, and Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett’s credentials as a ‘tycoon’ following social media speculation over the sale of Social Chain – a company he had not been involved with for several years – for a relatively meagre £7.7m.
Our own analysis found the Times’ assessment to be somewhat harsh given the overwhelming evidence of Bartlett’s success, not to mention the immense changes that had taken place at Social Chain and parent Social Chain AG in the circa-four-years since his departure, and we weren’t alone.
Our story won plenty of support from commentators on social media, while Wanja Oberhof, who worked with Bartlett to form Social Chain AG and was CEO during its most successful, £600m+ valuation times, described the conversation over Bartlett’s role in the company’s success as ‘gaga.’
Bartlett evidently agreed with us too – he made a legal complaint about the paper’s story on the same day it was published, although there’s still no word on the result. A slightly passive/aggressive Twitter exchange between Prolific North’s humble scribe (passive) and the Times journalist behind the original story (less so) added a little extra drama too, just for good measure.
The profusely active Dragon’s Den star was no stranger to the upper echelons of Prolific North’s most-read charts over the course of 2023, with stories covering his own comments on the Social Chain sale, his joining health and wellness start up UNTIL, and Flight Fund’s $2.5m investment in nutrition platform Zoe among other Bartlett-related news to prove popular with readers this year.
1) BBC presenter salaries: This year’s top earners
Every year, as a publicly funded company, the BBC publishes its annual report in which it details the renumeration of its highest-paid presenters, and every year Prolific North dutifully presents a rundown of the top earners.
The story always proves fairly popular, whether with fans seeking inspiration from their favourite celebs’ success or angry social media users keen to rant about *insert star here* (but usually Gary Lineker)’s extortionate salary.
This year was a little different, however.
In the early summer, rumours began circulating in the tabloid press and on social media about an unnamed ‘household name’ who was one of the BBC’s ‘best-paid’ presenters, and an explicit photos scandal that was looming.
The story experienced a spike that suggested we’d become the go-to BBC salary source of the nation’s amateur sleuths.
The whole affair was rather unseemly, to be honest, with various BBC presenters falsely named on Twitter (technically X by then), scurrilous rumours, and legal action all rearing their ugly heads before the wife of BBC news anchor Huw Edwards finally named her husband as the source of the rumours in July, adding that he was currently in hospital being treated for “serious mental health issues.”
A senior BBC source told The Guardian in September that “no one expects him back.”
