I was working at the BBC in television in the north region, I was a general assistant as they call them, in other words cameraman, sound engineer, general dogsbody – and due to various reasons I got quite upset about the BBC and I saw this advert for Granada. So I applied. And I’ve since…
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Eric Harrison recalls GTV’s opening night in 1956
When Granada when on the air in May of ’56, was it, one outside broadcast unit went to Liverpool to do boxing, and ours was stripped and put into what was then Studio 1, which became Studio 2, as set dressing, where myself and Eric Prytherch and what have you sat by the side of…
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Eric Harrison on his director’s training in 1959
The way of training, all they needed to say was the fact that you went… it was like learning to swim – you went in the deep end. My “trainer” – in inverted commas – was a man called Eric Price, who came from New Zealand. He allowed me to do two rehearsals for a…
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Eric Harrison on directing The Beatles, with his wife as vision mixer
We were scheduled to do, in the hour, two Beatle numbers and an interview with Ken Dodd. So needless to say, I don’t know if you know anything about Ken Dodd, apart from the fact he overruns like crazy in the theatre, his idea of timekeeping is ridiculous. So if you wanted him for 12…
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Eric Harrison on the restrictions on editing programmes
Videotape as such was this technology which came in but again it was done, there was no editing, it was two-inch wide tape. You could edit it. Granada edited two programmes to my knowledge, one of which I was involved in which was Sir Thomas Beecham in London. The pictures came up to Manchester and…
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Eric Harrison’s memories of his late wife, Meg, a vision mixer
Meg, like me, started off in a bank, a district bank, and then decided to become an air hostess with her sister. And they worked for Cambrian Airways. And she and her sister became air stewardesses for a couple of years. Meg then had to come home because her mother was ill, and she got…
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Eric Harrison on filming the party conferences
The first conferences we went to, we weren’t allowed in to televise the conference, and so we built a studio over the top of the pub on the Blackpool prom, and various people came along and did interviews and so on. We were basically working for ITN. It was just a straightforward interview studio really…
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Eric Harrison on directing The Time, The Place from Moscow
The Time, The Place was a programme which Mike Scott presented, and we’d done a The Time, The Place from Strangeways live, in the jail, literally in the jail. We did it from the chapel. And the opening shot as such is we have a camera inside, you see the bars of all the rest…
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Eric Harrison on his proudest programme, Hypotheticals
We did various programmes, like nuts and bolts of the economy and so on, which we did out in London; we brought MPs across and we talked about politics. And then Brian Lapping had seen the way the Americans taught law in Harvard, and they all saw… the Americans were doing a programme called Hypotheticals…
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Eric Harrison on the different sports he covered
Eric Harrison on the different sports he covered A typical weekend, well, you’d do you do a football match. Well, the football actually depended on what you were doing during the week; because the only way you could rig it in was you could rig it in after you’d finished the previous programme. So in…
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Eric Harrison on filming live dramas
Granada decided they would like to drama but it didn’t have a studio big enough. Studio 6 hadn’t been built or anything else like that. So ABC Television had this big studio in Didsbury, the old cinema in Didsbury, and Granada hired that out. Now, the studio crew were busy, so the early lot of…
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Eric Harrison on why it was ‘a joy to go to work’
In my day, as a cameraman we did all kinds of programmes like Shadow Squad and The Army Game and so on, which were done out of Studio 2 – I keep using 2, in those days it was 1 – before Chelsea opened, and we used to do these dramas and things like that.…
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Eric Harrison describes the social side of Granada
The social side of Granada… Granada was a dry station. There was no bar or anything, there was no club on the station. You were only allowed to give alcohol to MPs and above, which was dispensed in the executive dining room. So there was no club until much, much, much later, then they got…
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Eric Harrison on GTV’s brief coverage of croquet
Croquet was an idea of David Plowright’s. He got it into his head that the grass, which was in front of Granada, which eventually they built a studio on, would be nice as a croquet lawn. So everybody was saying, “Yes, great idea, David.” And he said, “And we’re going to televise croquet.” Silence. “And…
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Eric Harrison on being in studio on the night that JFK died
The story of that is, the fact that we were due to do a local programme, a musical programme for Johnny Hamp, and my wife, as she eventually became, was a vision mixer as well on it. We were due to do a local programme in Studio 6. We we’re all in the canteen when…
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Eric Harrison compares Granada with the BBC
The beauty of Granada was the fact that it wasn’t just bureaucratic as the BBC; you didn’t work in levels, and they didn’t have a meeting about a meeting about a meeting of shall we do it. In the case of Granada, if we had a good idea, we did it and we did it…
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