Don Jones – Granadaland

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

Don 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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…