I was studying Law at Leeds and I’d scraped through my first year and hated it. My brother was a solicitor, that’s why I went into it. I didn’t know what the hell to do, so they nudged me that way, hoped I might make a barrister. I absolutely hated being a student. And I absolutely hated Law and I scraped through but I knew I couldn’t see myself doing two more years by any chance.
So I decided to leave, which my parents were very hostile to. We only got a television when I was 14 at home, so I was very new to telly, seeing it, and I just decided I wanted to work in television. So I wrote very naively to every TV station seeking a career, and Granada gave me an interview. I was working at the time up in Scotland for British Petroleum doing road safety for schools, going round schools with a microphone and little show. And so the police who were running these weeks – we were assigned to a police force each week in a different area to do these shows – they were so nice, and I was getting on so well with them that they covered for me completely, didn’t tell BP I was skiving off.
And I went down to Manchester for the interview, which was for an assistant transmission controller, of which I had no idea what it was, or anything. I did the interview and lied my way through lots of things, as we all do. Manual dexterity: I claimed I mended my own car, and built my own stereo and all this sort of crap that was total rubbish, and could type – rubbish! But I had a good interview and got the job. So I moved up to Granada to be an assistant transmission controller as a trainee.
