Jane Houston – Granadaland

Jane Houston on the people who have influenced her – and the PA’s role

I mean the characters really that influenced me the most, I would say would be Hilda Miller and Sue Wild. Just because I wouldn’t have probably ever known about the job if it wasn’t for Hilda. And then she was just such a big influence in training me. And then we worked together for a…

Jane Houston how computers changed the PA’s role

Going back to when I’d been at school and my careers teachers had said, because I was very good at maths, “You should be going for a career in computers, get a proper job rather than going into television.” So, I think when computers were introduced, I just embraced it, and was lucky that I…

Jane Houston remembers an emergency on This Morning

We hadn’t been on air that long with This Morning when Lockerbie happened, and obviously the whole running order went out the window that morning. We used to always go through to central control. We would check the running time each day and the segments. We invariably went on air at 10:40:00 and came off…

Jane Houston on the early days of This Morning and going to Disneyland

I can remember when Granada were awarded This Morning, we all thought it would last six weeks. Taking crew every day on a coach to Liverpool, and that it wasn’t going to last. And here we are however many years later, and it’s still going strong. But it felt like it was… the same crew…

Jane Houston on her PA training and the excitement of live TV

Well, I was trained at first by Hilda Miller, which was strange because she was really the reason that I wanted to do the job, because she was my mum’s friend. So it was weird to be trained by her. I’d known her all my life. But it was fine, and I took to it…

Jane Houston remembers working on The Jewel in the Crown

The biggest thing for me about Jewel in the Crown was communication, because of course there were no mobile phones or computers in those days. And I ran the office in the UK for most of the time when they were in India. So just everything was done really by telex. Of course, there was…

Jane Houston describes working on Brideshead Revisited

Presumably fairly soon after you joined you went to work for the production managers. What did that involve? See, nowadays, they would be called line producers. But then everything was very different and they did all of the scheduling and budgeting and finding locations, all of that. We didn’t have a location manager and a…

Jane Houston’s memories of Granada as a child

So your dad, Alastair Houston, worked at Granada. When you were growing up, was that your memory of your dad always worked there? Yes, always, and I always wanted to be with my dad. And so one of my very earliest memories is being pushed in my pushchair across the cobbles, which would have been…

Jane Houston transcript

So your dad, Alastair Houston, worked at Granada. So when you were growing up, was that your memory of your dad always worked there? Yes, always, and I always wanted to be with my dad. And so one of my very earliest memories is being pushed in my pushchair across the cobbles, which would have…