Product all of his own making

Phil Chalk

Martyn meets... PHIL CHALK — the local man behind a host of children’s TV shows
ANY man who can sincerely and seriously, without a hint of irony or the semblance of self-deprecating smile, describe himself as “professionally unemployable” has got to be worth knowing.

Especially as the man in question is only in his early-40s, yet has a raft of experience from travelling the world with a brass band to running his own consultancy business with the nuclear industry at the age of 23.

And he’s one of us, born in Abbeyhills but now living in Delph.

Phil Chalk will be known to a great many people in Oldham, but there will many, many more who will be asking ‘Phil Who?’

Well, if you have young children and you watch television with them, doubtless you will have seen some of the shows he has produced.

Or if you love brass band music you may have heard him playing for Fairey Engineering — he was their principal cornet player during the halcyon days of the early 1990s when the Stockport works band racked up the treble of European Champions, British Open winners and national champions.

Not bad for a lad whose dad was a butcher in Abbeyhills Road and who, by his own chortling admission, went to Breeze Hill School and left to take an engineering apprenticeship.

He didn’t actually admit to being a duffer at exams, but when I confessed that my days at Clarksfield ended on a less-than-high note in the purest academic sense, we knew we were kindred spirits.

Yet there is no denying he has been a success, in life, in business.

Phil is undoubtedly one of life’s achievers and I suspect there is yet much more to come as the creative juices, forged at Alexandra Junior School in Glodwick by music teacher Albert Hall — what a splendid name — continue to flow.

Phil’s early travails with the violin, which found a home under his parents’ bed, and the recorder were the platform on which he found his musical heaven, the cornet.

From the school band he graduated to Mossley St John’s — where a school pal was a member — and he was then “poached” by Boarshurst when the Greenfield band was setting up a youth section.

As his skills and prowess grew, he put himself forward for an audition with Fairey Engineering and this led to a 25-year association with one of the land’s most famous and successful brass bands.

Phil went on to become principal and cornet player and, after gaining a Master of Arts in Music at Salford, he took up conducting and led Fairey for three years. And all the while, Phil matched his musical career stride for stride with his engineering studies on day release and evening classes, emerging as a fully qualified mechanical engineer.

“Yes, I suppose life was hectic, but it always has been,” he conceded with a shrug and a smile and a general air of genuine bonhomie which, I suspect, has endeared this charming man to a host of colleagues.

On leaving Fairey Engineering, he worked on technical pneumatic sales for a Swiss company based in Tewkesbury but was soon headhunted by another engineering business and moved to work in Glasgow.

For a while his brass band career was on hold but his self -confidence certainly wasn’t.

By the age of 23 he was self-employed, setting up Lintran Ltd, a consultancy offering services to the nuclear industry, initially based in space above his father’s butcher’s shop at the junction of Abbeyhills Road and Glodwick Road.

He was offering high-tech linear solutions to the automotive, aerospace and nuclear industries and he also used his acknowledged and expertise of engineering to set up a components’ distribution division.

As the business grew he rented space at the Zetex building in Chadderton and his projects included roof vents in the Millennium Dome, work on handling systems for Nissan in Sunderland and a contract from Rolls-Royce.

“But I made mistakes, in fact I made a lot of them,” he recalled without an ounce of rancour or regret for without Lintran he would never have found his current career — making children’s television programmes.

“The components side of Lintran handled an inquiry from the team making the props for the television show ‘Gladiators’. We talked to them about other services we could offer and eventually I was able to sell Lintran and got out of the business debt-free,” he recalled with, I suspect, a deep inward sigh of relief. Phil’s musical creative talents, allied to his innate sense of worth, fostered a belief that he could break into the world of animation and he conceived an idea to use graphic imagery to teach the language of music.

Cosgrove Hall Films took up his challenge and the rest, as they say, is almost history. Within 18 months he was head of business development with the company but his restless nature was still not sated, despite pulling in work from Manchester United.

Phil began to develop a myriad of global contacts and backed by Keith Chapman, the entrepreneurial genius behind “Bob the Builder”, the man I cheerily described as a maverick — he didn’t demur — was up and running.

It was during this time he met Tim Harper, who was directing “Andy Pandy” and “Little Robots”, to name but two iconic children’s programmes, and now the pair own Factory Transmedia.

“I’m basically, technically unemployable... I need to work for myself, to be my own boss, I need creative freedom.

“In this business I can combine my two passions — music and creativity,” says Phil, who is now happily ensconced in Delph with his wife Claire — a superb musician herself — and their three children.

As we chatted in the vast production studios ahead of a whirlwind tour of the facilities, Phil was conscious of the time as he was heading for an appointment at Media City in Salford Quays.

Will you ever head off to the holy grail of creative space, I enquired. The answer was a categoric “No”.

“We don’t need to... we have everything we need here in Altrincham, and our overheads are way below anything on offer at Media City.”

A businessman to the last and a patient one, too. As I stared goggle-eyed at one of the production suites where a modeller was painstakingly moving hand-made creations around to make animation — imagine ‘Wallace and Gromit’ and you get the idea — I accidentally kicked one of the lighting stands.

Given that minute’s worth of action takes a working day to create, I probably ruined a whole day’s shoot, for which I apologise profusely, guys.

I promise to watch the show on the telly and all the other projects — “Roary the Racing Car”, “Raa Raa the Noisy Lion”, “Muddle Earth” and “Fifi and the Flowertots”... to name a few.