When Granada when on the air in May of ’56, was it, one outside broadcast unit went to Liverpool to do boxing, and ours was stripped and put into what was then Studio 1, which became Studio 2, as set dressing, where myself and Eric Prytherch and what have you sat by the side of…
Read More
Eric Harrison on his director’s training in 1959
The way of training, all they needed to say was the fact that you went… it was like learning to swim – you went in the deep end. My “trainer” – in inverted commas – was a man called Eric Price, who came from New Zealand. He allowed me to do two rehearsals for a…
Read More
Eric Harrison on directing The Beatles, with his wife as vision mixer
We were scheduled to do, in the hour, two Beatle numbers and an interview with Ken Dodd. So needless to say, I don’t know if you know anything about Ken Dodd, apart from the fact he overruns like crazy in the theatre, his idea of timekeeping is ridiculous. So if you wanted him for 12…
Read More
Kim Horton describes how he joined Granada TV
I think I should start by saying that I grew up in Australia, and probably had not much of an idea about what Granada stood for and what sort of country it was, although growing up, which was just even scooting back before that, we went out, we were ‘Ten Pound Poms’ to go out…
Read More
Kim Horton on how the film library fired his interest in music
Kim Horton on how the film library fired his interest in music It was interesting because when I’d got into the library, they were a lovely bunch girls but they all looked like librarians. They all had the bobbed hairdos… and in fact, Julie Goodyear, who used to take a short cut from Coronation Street…
Read More
Kim Horton on his move into film editing
I was about 25 or something like that (when I started at Granada), so I wasn’t a young thing. Because I had travelled a bit, all Australians do that, you know, and I had done a bit of a hippy trail thing with a, you know, buying a Volkswagen van, outside the American Express office…
Read More
Kim Horton on training in the film-editing dept.
I was terrifically interested in the whole filmmaking thing, because just everything was going on there. You know, it’s just a joy to see, you know, Dennis Mitchell working in one of the edit suites. You know, Ken Russell was doing his Clouds of Glory, I think Roger Graef was doing his British Communist Party…
Read More
Kim Horton describes how his career progressed
Gradually, as it was meant to be, you would get other duties, other jobs, and that usually started with cutting the news. And this would be you on your own. Yes, this would be me on my own. I would be given the first… and it was film, so we’re still talking Steenbeck and it…
Read More
Kim Horton on the lifestyle of a GTV film editor
For the most part, what we liked about it was in the early time of my editing, is that you were you were pretty much told what you were going to do. Granada would have people that would say, “Well, we want this person to do this edit. It wasn’t producer choice we were talking…
Read More
Kim Horton recalls working on World In Action
And then I did my first World in Action and that was a really big deal, because it really was testing… and it was 1983 and it was produced by Ian McBride, and it was a film about Jesse Jackson, and actually on the road with Jesse Jackson, who was undecided about seeking nomination or…
Read More
Kim Horton’s work on the 7 Up series
Yes, it was good times. But it kind of led to other things, and one of those things was being asked – because Oral actually had been asked to do 28 Up and they needed a second editor on it, and because I had been his assistant and we were mates, he said, “Why don’t…
Read More
Thelma McGough describes her first contact with GTV
Well, long before I joined I was very familiar with the building, and a lot of the staff before I actually became employed there. In the late 60s, I’d done a fashion show with a friend of mine, we were students at Liverpool College of Art. I was a painter, but we decided to set…
Read More
Eric Harrison on the restrictions on editing programmes
Videotape as such was this technology which came in but again it was done, there was no editing, it was two-inch wide tape. You could edit it. Granada edited two programmes to my knowledge, one of which I was involved in which was Sir Thomas Beecham in London. The pictures came up to Manchester and…
Read More
Eric Harrison’s memories of his late wife, Meg, a vision mixer
Meg, like me, started off in a bank, a district bank, and then decided to become an air hostess with her sister. And they worked for Cambrian Airways. And she and her sister became air stewardesses for a couple of years. Meg then had to come home because her mother was ill, and she got…
Read More
Eric Harrison on filming the party conferences
The first conferences we went to, we weren’t allowed in to televise the conference, and so we built a studio over the top of the pub on the Blackpool prom, and various people came along and did interviews and so on. We were basically working for ITN. It was just a straightforward interview studio really…
Read More
Eric Harrison on directing The Time, The Place from Moscow
The Time, The Place was a programme which Mike Scott presented, and we’d done a The Time, The Place from Strangeways live, in the jail, literally in the jail. We did it from the chapel. And the opening shot as such is we have a camera inside, you see the bars of all the rest…
Read More
Eric Harrison on his proudest programme, Hypotheticals
We did various programmes, like nuts and bolts of the economy and so on, which we did out in London; we brought MPs across and we talked about politics. And then Brian Lapping had seen the way the Americans taught law in Harvard, and they all saw… the Americans were doing a programme called Hypotheticals…
Read More
Eric Harrison on the different sports he covered
Eric Harrison on the different sports he covered A typical weekend, well, you’d do you do a football match. Well, the football actually depended on what you were doing during the week; because the only way you could rig it in was you could rig it in after you’d finished the previous programme. So in…
Read More
Eric Harrison on filming live dramas
Granada decided they would like to drama but it didn’t have a studio big enough. Studio 6 hadn’t been built or anything else like that. So ABC Television had this big studio in Didsbury, the old cinema in Didsbury, and Granada hired that out. Now, the studio crew were busy, so the early lot of…
Read More
Eric Harrison on why it was ‘a joy to go to work’
In my day, as a cameraman we did all kinds of programmes like Shadow Squad and The Army Game and so on, which were done out of Studio 2 – I keep using 2, in those days it was 1 – before Chelsea opened, and we used to do these dramas and things like that.…
Read More
Eric Harrison describes the social side of Granada
The social side of Granada… Granada was a dry station. There was no bar or anything, there was no club on the station. You were only allowed to give alcohol to MPs and above, which was dispensed in the executive dining room. So there was no club until much, much, much later, then they got…
Read More
Eric Harrison on GTV’s brief coverage of croquet
Croquet was an idea of David Plowright’s. He got it into his head that the grass, which was in front of Granada, which eventually they built a studio on, would be nice as a croquet lawn. So everybody was saying, “Yes, great idea, David.” And he said, “And we’re going to televise croquet.” Silence. “And…
Read More
Eric Harrison on being in studio on the night that JFK died
The story of that is, the fact that we were due to do a local programme, a musical programme for Johnny Hamp, and my wife, as she eventually became, was a vision mixer as well on it. We were due to do a local programme in Studio 6. We we’re all in the canteen when…
Read More
Eric Harrison compares Granada with the BBC
The beauty of Granada was the fact that it wasn’t just bureaucratic as the BBC; you didn’t work in levels, and they didn’t have a meeting about a meeting about a meeting of shall we do it. In the case of Granada, if we had a good idea, we did it and we did it…
Read More
Kim Horton on his memorable programmes
I think I suddenly sort of did a lot of kind of history/science stuff with offline, and we did a thing called Savage Skies, which was the making of… we had a kind of history/science department then, people like Bill Jones and Liz McLeod in particular, suddenly realised that we had a real talent for…
Read More
Thelma McGough on how she got a job at Granada
To get back to your original question, how I came to work there, on… following Anthony (H. Wilson) around, it always seemed like a really vibrant, interesting job, and he made it look easy and effortless and fun. Being a Scouser, there’s a bit of that Yozzer – though that came later – [attitude of]…
Read More
Kim Horton on the shift from film to video
At what point did you switch from film to video? At what point, that would have been in the in the 90s. It probably would have been possibly early 90s. The last thing I did on film was it was a series called God Bless America, which were great, a great series, all directed by…
Read More
Arthur Taylor on how he came to join Granada
I was teaching. I was lecturing in further education colleges. I did have a slight connection with Granada in the very, very early days. When I was doing my post-graduate certificate of education, they called it, in Manchester, done my degree in London, came to Manchester to do this postgrad thing and I got an…
Read More
Chris Kelly describes how he joined Granada TV
I was with Anglia Television in Norwich and I had gone there straight from… not quite straight and leaving Cambridge, but I taught French for a couple of terms at a very bizarre establishment in Sussex. And joined Anglia, got a job as an announcer initially, did that for about three months, moved over to…
Read More
Arthur Taylor recalls the programme On Site
I was a researcher on a programme called On Site. I should have said I was very lucky at the time, because Mike Scott had just been made executive producer of local programmes, and had torn up the old system and wanted to create it in his own image, and completely changed everything. And there…
Read More