Anna Ford – Granadaland

Anna Ford on leaving Granada

I was headhunted by the BBC. It was 1976, and a funny man turned up and said, “Would you have tea with me in the Midland hotel?” And I said, “What for?” And he said, “Well, I want to talk to you about the BBC.” He said, “Desmond Wilcox wants you to be on a…

Remembering Dennis Forman and the canteen

I think the thing about Denis was, it was partly that he took his jacket off and he had red braces, and he rolled his sleeves up. And also he would always come and sit beside you in the canteen. The canteen was one of the great levellers. And it’s not true of other companies…

Granada’s left-wing politics

The Bernsteins were businessmen who rented out television sets. And yet, there was this wonderful socialism which, given that we were growing out of the dull fifties where people were still touching their caps, and the establishment was still in charge. And you had MacMillan saying, “I don’t know what young people get up to…

Anna Ford remembers working on Reports Action

One of the programmes we did was called Reports Action, where they actually advertise children for adoption, but they weren’t the obvious babies. These were teenagers who nobody wanted. They were teenagers with difficult backgrounds who had been in multiple homes, who had got all sorts of problems. And what we did was interview the…

Life on Granada Reports

I started being on Granada Reports, and being in the newsroom, which was a fascinating place. Now, in the newsroom, you had to be in there by eight in the morning and you had, in theory, to have three stories that you could suggest to the meeting that hadn’t come from the newspapers. And so…

Anna Ford describes how she came to join Granada

I taught for the Open University in social science as staff tutor for a time, but by this time my marriage was coming to an end, and I wanted to get a divorce. So we decided the first one to get a job out of Belfast would leave. And so I left with a suitcase…

Anna Ford on her Manchester background

I knew Manchester quite well, because my mother comes from Manchester and she was in Manchester high school. And my grandfather was a doctor in Urmston. And all my grandfather’s brothers were either born in Pendlebury, Wigan or Salford. They were to do with coal mines and Pendlebury. In fact, one of them grew out…

Anna Ford transcript

Interview with Anna Ford on January 12, 2022. How did you come to join Granada Television? I was a student at Manchester University between 1963 and 1967. Although I did stay on and do another course after that. And because I was president of the Students’ Union between ‘66 and ‘67, and that was the…