Matt Clark meets York cameraman Keith Massey

THICK plumes of acrid smoke billow across the new housing development as explosion follows explosion. Guests at the grand opening duck for cover while shards of glass rain over the marquee.

Windows implode, flames leap and Patsy Kensit runs for her life in one of the biggest and most costly stunts ever attempted on Emmerdale.

There will be no second take and Keith Massey has the unenviable task of filming the scene.

He’s been given eight cameras, but it’s not enough. To cover all the action he says he needs twice as many.

Fortunately, the director listens, Keith gets his way and the amazing footage is now playing on his Blue Ray DVD player.

He turns away from the screen and with a wry grin, says: “Well, you wouldn’t want to miss all that, would you? It had to be right first time and the last thing I wanted was to be remembered as the man who missed the action.”

It’s just one of the highlights in a career that has seen Keith, from Acaster Malbis, south of York, rise to prominence as one of the country’s best cameramen. Now he has been given a lifetime achievement award by the Royal Television Society. “At the ceremony I was told that Harry Gration was getting the award,” says Keith.

“But he went up on the stage and I thought, ‘Why is he going up there for his own award?’ Then he started reading the citation and I thought hang on, that’s me. It was quite a shock.”

Keith began his career as a photographer with this newspaper when it was the Yorkshire Evening Press, after falling in love with pictures as a small boy.

It was the colour transparencies taken in Europe by his cousin that really impressed. And the one taken in Scarborough of a stormy sea with waves crashing 200 feet into the air.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s impressive’,” he says. “And it really inspired me.

“It was a moment in time preserved for posterity and I wanted to be a press photographer.

“I was lucky to have that fire at such a young age and it’s never left me.”

Keith’s application to The Press was initially turned down, but then he received a letter out of the blue saying a vacancy had come up unexpectedly.

So began six years that he says were some of the happiest of his life.

First as a darkroom technician, where at the age of 16 he was put in charge of developing negatives from a Royal wedding at the Minster. They were not only for the Evening Press, but many nationals as well.

“It was a great thing for me and I didn’t want to mess it up in any way. I think by and large they were all right. One or two plates were over-developed, but they were all printable.”

Then he went on the road and was given a major assignment to Malaya and Borneo with the army which was fighting in Indonesia.

As a 19-year-old it was Keith’s first big adventure, flying between the longhouses in a helicopter, and even getting a chance to take the controls.

“It was a magic time at The Press in the Sixties and during my time there I turned from a boy into a man.”

Eventually Keith decided he wanted to see his work published in national papers so he joined the John Pick news agency based in York. It was to prove a hard school of journalism.

“I learned a lot from John. I was frightened of him in many ways, but he was very charismatic and knew what worked instantly.

“He was quite brutal if you brought something back that he didn’t approve of, but I think it was a good grounding.”

In 1966, Keith was the first at Pick’s to begin filming for TV. But he was given a clockwork camera which could only film for 25 seconds.

One day he was told to film the St Leger for national TV. The year before, a full outside broadcast crew had been used at a cost of £100,000. That was considered too much. So now it was just him.

“There I was at this big race with my little hand-held, wind-up camera and I was terrified because I could only use it for half a minute.”

So he went to watch two races before the main one and timed how long it took the horses between the final furlongs and the winning post because he didn’t want to start filming too early and miss them crossing the finishing line. “Thank God, I did get it, and instead of the huge cost of the previous year they got it for just eight guineas.”

Keith’s love of television dates back to the Coronation in 1953. His family was one of the few in his street to own a set and he recalls about a dozen relatives and neighbours trying to sneak a glimpse at the tiny nine-inch screen.

His big break came when Arthur Ogelsby, who had a fishing spot on Tyne Tees TV, offered him a filming job. That’s when the bug hit and Keith finally made the move to television when he secured a couple of shifts a week at the BBC.

But it was not ideal for a newlywed, so Keith decided to become a freelance and has been since 1970.

Then it was difficult to get a staff job at the BBC and although he tried to get in at Yorkshire TV, the unions were too strong and would only let him work there as an assistant cameraman.

But work began to come in and he was employed on everything from news to features and drama.

“Back then the presenter spent ten minutes signing autographs when we arrived somewhere, because it was a real occasion when the BBC turned up. It was like mini-royalty, really.”

But the equipment was slow and it took almost an hour to feed footage into the editing suite, so crews had to stagger their arrival back at the studio.

If he was shooting a national news story, Keith says they would often set the piece up and film it the day before.

It’s not something they would get away with now.

These days as a freelance, technology has made things a lot more efficient for him, but the downside is that Keith has to change all his gear every few years because it goes out of date so quickly and in a competitive market, he has to stay at the cutting edge.

But he says what doesn’t change are the people behind the lens.

“Cameras don’t make good photographs and computers can’t make good articles, so we must get back to putting people at the forefront.

“TV has been directed by accountants for the last 20 years and I think it’s time that changed; it needs to be led creatively.

“Sadly, there are all these people being trained and I do wonder where they will go because in these days of the internet, papers and TV are struggling.”

Looks like Keith Massey was born at the precisely the right time.