Barry Bowmer joined the mailroom at Granada’s Golden Square office in August 1959. One of his principal jobs at that time was to take the early morning mail around to Lord Bernstein’s Mayfair flat where he was often greeted on the doorstep by Lady Bernstein in her negligee. He later moved to the mailroom at…
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Barry Bowmer’s memories of the productions in the early 60’s
I wanted to get into production and as there was a studio at Chelsea I applied and got a job there which started in the mailroom and shortly afterwards I went as callboy which obviously involved all the shows that were put on there. And there were lots of them. Such as? Massive productions. Well…
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Barry Bowmer describes his first job at Granada in London
Well, I had various jobs where I lived in the south. My father who was a tool-maker at the BMI could see that going downhill so he persuaded me not to go into engineering and there were various jobs at London Airport (or Heathrow as it’s now known) and eventually my uncle, who used to…
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Barry Bowmer on Granada’s early days in Golden Square
Was Golden Square at that point the headquarters for the entire Granada Group? Yeah I’m sure it was 4 storeys and a basement and then whilst I was working there they built another 2 storeys on top but it was taken up wholly by Granada, you know for television etc. Another place that we used…
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Barry Bowmer remembers travelling in style with the Bernsteins!
You got to know the Bernsteins in Golden Square. Did you keep contact with them later on at all? Did you come across them? No. I got to know them. We knew each other but we weren’t that close, myself being a mail boy, callboy. It was just through frequency of working with them and…
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Barry Bowmer describes his role in Film Ops in Manchester
And you moved up to Manchester to become…? I went into Film Ops. Film Operations, which was under Bill Lloyd and did various parts of jobs there initially. Some film library, again messages to the labs. Humphries Laboratories which used to process film which was quarter of a mile away, used to go backwards and…
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Barry Bowmer on the role of the film editor
OK, so you become a film editor, tell us something about the role of the film editor. What does a film editor do? Well a film editor, director, producer, cameras etc. go out and shoot whether it’s a drama or documentary and then it comes back into the film editor who in agreement with the…
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Barry Bowmer remembers working with Tony Wilson
I did lots of documentaries, not complete ones but ones to go into other shows etc. Having said that one of them was So it Goes with Tony Wilson, which was a music programme in the Seventies, Eighties was it. And did Tony get involved? Yeah. Oh yeah, once we’d got, again that was a…
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Barry Bowmer’s impressions on Granada as a company
So when did you finish at Granada? 1991. When they were cutting back and a good few others had finished when they were 48 and times were changing there and it wasn’t a good feeling, you know, as people were leaving. I mean we’d had the best times in London, at Golden Square, at Chelsea…
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