Tell me about the relationship between the camera person and the producer/director. Very important. Most of the producers I ever worked with I’ve always – again, it’s a story I’ve mentioned a few times, but not today – when you meet a producer at Los Angeles airport, he’s maybe been over there for two weeks,…
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George Turner sums up his work on World In Action
I probably worked on about 800 World in Actions out of the 1500 they made, of which I think I can honestly say I did in excess of 600 of them all myself. That doesn’t sounds much over 30 years but you know, it’s kind of 20 every year out of a run of 40.…
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George Turner on the importance of Granada being in Manchester
I think it’s well-known that the Bernsteins were looking to have a television station in the north of England. I know for a fact they looked in Liverpool as well as in Manchester. And in fact they looked in Manchester out towards the Toast Rack site, but think it’s been documented that they realised, the…
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George Turner talks about how long World In Action filming took
And when you were doing a World in Action programme, how long on average would you film for? About seven days. Certainly the World in Action period for the first four or five years, maybe ten, but say when I started in 1969. The first programme I did was a programme in Northern Ireland called…
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George Turner on some of the memorable World in Action programmes he worked on
There’s no one favourite programme, and that sounds slightly glib because, you know, the variety of the programmes was so varied from, you know, spending time with ministers through to spending it with people who’d got illnesses, thalidomide being one of the cases, but, you know, people that had struggles in life, I’m thinking mainly…
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Don Jones describes how he joined Granada TV
In 1980 I was a sports reporter on the Lancashire Evening Post. I’d been there six years. I’d joined them as a junior reporter, straight from school as an 18-year-old. So I had six years under my belt as a journalist on a local paper, and I’d got to a point where I thought I…
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Don Jones on his first impressions of the sports department
The first day was really amazing because I was given a desk, and I was told that me and another guy had been taken on at the same time, and one of the lads in the office said I’d been described as the hardworking journalist who would bring some kind of proper sports reporting to…
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Don Jones talks about how Granada and ITV covered football
The way ITV worked at the time was that each region covered its own match and then there was a massive exchange of footage on the Saturday night. When I first started the footage was going out on a Sunday afternoon. It was called different things in different regions, but it was The Big Match.…
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Don Jones remembers Paul Doherty, head of sport at Granada TV
Doherty would just not accept anything that was mundane. The great example of his need to make it different was that, I remember one week on a Thursday one of the items for the following day’s programme had fallen down for some reason – somebody couldn’t do something – and he walked into the office…
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Don Jones describes the range of sports covered by Granada
You were expected to work on the full range of programmes. If there was a lot going on, there were certain things you wouldn’t work on. So there might be a couple of researchers working on darts and someone else working on snooker, and then we started doing crown green bowls. We even did…
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Claudia Milne on World In Action’s macho culture
I can remember for instance when I was Manchester based. Everybody on World in Action was invited to this Christmas party, and I went along, and suddenly this strip dancer appeared and started stripping. I was just absolutely appalled. All these what I thought were nice men were standing round leering, jeering and laughing. I…
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George Turner on the team work on World In Action
You have to remember that in the World in Action days we always had a director/producer, and there was nearly always a researcher. World in Action of course didn’t have presenters. It was one of the things that we didn’t have, not until much later on, but in the period that I remember with most…
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George Turner on his work on the Up series
We’ve obviously just been talking about the World in Action series, which I’m obviously very proud to have been involved with for as long as I was; ’66 to 1998 was a long time. Alright, there were a few little diversions off it for different programmes, one of which was the Up series. It started…
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Don Jones recalls working with Peter Carr, the director of City
Before I went into LE and worked for Steve Leahy, I had a spell working for Rob Caird in the features department as a researcher. I worked on network documentaries, the main one being Robert Millar – The High Life, which was a documentary about a Tour de France cyclist from Scotland who had been…
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George Turner comments on changing technology
I wondered how the changes in technology have affected your role. Has it made it easier? I think it’s a journey that’s taken place over very nearly fifty years. So when I embarked, and talking about cameras that weighed over 42 lbs. and were powered by 12 volt car batteries and things like that, and…
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Don Jones on Scramble and Granada’s links with the North West
Granada was important to the North of England? Yeah. People I knew used to think it was fantastic that I worked at Granada. People thought it was exciting. And it was an exciting place to be, but I think people kind of knew it was quite a fantastic place and it had a certain mystery…
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Don Jones on the special atmosphere of Granada in Liverpool
Let me just ask you something about the Liverpool Manchester thing, since we ought to touch on it. Am I right, it was set up by Plowright as a franchise-winning idea – it looked good to have not just Manchester but Liverpool also contributing to the output of Granada. I don’t really know about that.…
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George Turner on filming distressing scenes
You were talking about filming in war zones and seeing very traumatic events. Did that take an emotional toll on you? Because obviously, it was probably physically tiring during that, but you recover from that, but seeing those kind of things and having to film them? Well I think that it’s interesting now when you…
Read MoreDon Jones talks about the difficulties union rules sometimes presented
The downside, I suppose… the union situation was difficult because I understand why a lot of the things were put in place, things like the ten-hour break and the rules about when people ate and the hours that people worked, I understood why all that was there. But it was bloody difficult at times, and…
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Don Jones’s memories of working with Tony Wilson
One of the first people I worked with was Tony Wilson, who I just thought was a fascinating character from day one. I knew who he was, obviously, before I joined Granada, but one of the first times I went out with a crew was with Tony Wilson. I learnt more from him that day…
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Don Jones on the characters and the best things about Granada
Looking back at it, which characters there impressed you and would you single out as really having made an impression? You talked about Doherty, obviously. Yeah, Doherty, Tony Wilson, Sue Woodward, and then I suppose a whole host of other people that I met and worked with at various times – people like Tim Sullivan,…
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George Turner’s memories of Sir Denis Forman and David Plowright
David (Plowright) I got to know moderately well. I mean he knew more of me than I probably did about him. But that’s only because of course in my early days he was actually the editor of World in Action. And like Denis (Forman), these were people at the top of the company that even…
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Don Jones on working on ‘a dream come true’!
In the summer sometimes we were loaned out to regional programmes, so you got to work on other types of programmes. And also at this time, Steve Hawes and Bruce Macdonald had decided to make a series called Rod and Line, which was a dramatisation of Arthur Ransome’s angling essays. Arthur Ransome is famous for…
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Don Jones remembers his mum’s and dad’s work as extras
Almost from when I first started at Granada, both my parents were working as extras on Coronation Street and other shows, so I used to meet my mum and dad, or one or the other – sometimes they were both there together – either in the canteen or in the old school, for lunch. And…
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Tony Drinkle describes how he joined Granada
Well, I left school at Christmas in ’55, and I started working at an advertising agency just off Peter Street, you know, brew boy, errands, things like that. And one lunchtime – I used to walk around town, as you do, have a wander around – and this particular day I was walking down Quay…
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Tony Drinkle on working in the post room and film dispatch
Yes. Do you know the names Bill Leather and Graham Wild? Graham Wild I knew, yes. Well, he was already in the post room, he started before I did. And Bill Leather, I think he went to production manager or along those lines. They were both there when I started. Jack, Jack Dardis, who goes…
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Tony Drinkle’s memories of Granada in 1956
Well, we started off in what was called Granada House in Water Street, you know the building in Water Street? It’s now the Royal Bank of Scotland, opposite the college. Because the offices were there, the first studio like where they are now, across from Quay Street, but the next one was the main entrance…
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Tony Drinkle on moving into Quay Street – and his life there
Into the big building? I couldn’t say for certain. It was probably… it was a good four or five years later, as I say, I started in 1956 and I had roughly two years in the post room, so going up to 1958. While I was in film dispatch, all the film was done in…
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Tony Drinkle remembers a few cock-ups!
Alan Ringland, he dropped one of the biggest clangers before I started doing it, on 42nd Street, he cut the song out! The… the biggest mistake I might have made, and it was my own fault, was… where the films… you’d have a running time for the film, and especially at weekends or on a…
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Tony Warren obituary
Tony Warren is a name that will forever be synonymous with Granada Television and, of course, with Coronation Street. Tony’s death, earlier this month at the age of 79, ended a career that spanned Granada from 1960 through to the present time. He will be sorely missed by all those who knew him and worked…
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