Dorothy Byrne – Granadaland

Dorothy Byrne on how she joined Granada

I was working on the Northern Echo and I saw an advert in the Guardian for a researcher. I applied, and I found it very interesting that, when I think back, that this was an advert for the Guardian for a staff job in TV, and how that just doesn’t happen in that way any…

Dorothy Byrne on working on Granada Reports

Granada Reports… was really, really a good programme, and within a very short number of weeks I was out making 10-minute films myself, and I just thought it was absolutely fantastic, and because we made, in Granada Reports, investigative films. I did a film investigating how bed and breakfasts in Blackpool were taking money from…

Dorothy Byrne on the Channel 4 programme ‘Union World’

Then I went to work on Union World, and I had to pass a test to work on Union World. So I was called in by David Kemp – many people said, “I don’t know why you don’t work on Union World, because you’re Scottish,” and there seemed to be at Granada, as they called…

Dorothy Byrne on working on World in Action

I went to work on World in Action as a researcher, and that was fantastic. Although we were called researchers, anywhere else we would either have been called assistant producers or producers, so it was a bit of a misnomer. Because we were either given an idea or we came up with the idea ourselves,…

Dorothy Byrne about women working on WIA

Of course one of the things was, when I got my job on World in Action, I was at that point the only woman on the programme. So it’s not that women hadn’t worked there before, they had, as it happened at that point I was the only woman. And I always remember the first…

Dorothy Byrne recalls her favourite programmes

I never had any disasters with programmes! Because when you realise that the story isn’t turning out you turn it around another way. No… I mean, I worked on a huge range of programmes from a programme about women being scared to go out at night – and that was actually Stuart Prebble’s idea, that…

Dorothy Byrne on some interesting phone calls!

The way that we operated in terms of rights to reply and due impartiality was very different then. When I was a researcher I worked on a two-part World in Action special on Kurt Waldheim, who had been accused of war crimes. And after the first programme went out, the Austrian Embassy – he was…

Dorothy Byrne’s thoughts on Granada as a company

I wouldn’t call it a family. I would say it was a really brilliant and vibrant place to work, full of really exciting, interesting people. It felt… we believed in ourselves as a company, we believed we were the best company, and we were the best company – we made the best in everything. Jewel…

Dorothy Byrne on unions at Granada

I went in as an NUJ member, and then I became… I moved over onto an ACTT membership – I was amazed at some of the rules. So when I arrived, I was told that under union rules, the crew had to be guaranteed a choice of two or three starters for their lunch and…

Dorothy Byrne remembers the Granada canteen

Well, you were always seeing the most fantastic people in the canteen, and you would find yourself sitting next to some famous actor munching his grub. What was nice about Granada was… it wasn’t like a family but it was lacking an ‘us and them’ mentality, and I think that was partly because it was…