Luise Fitzwalter – Granadaland

Luise Fitzwalter on how she came to join Granada

Well, we moved moved to Manchester because my then husband Deepak Nandy became the deputy chief executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), which had just been set up. And as a result of him taking on this equal opportunities role, I lost my job in London. So the deal was, have a baby, and…

Luise Fitzwalter describes her Granada career

I made a big pitch at my interview about children’s programmes, because inevitably I was a mother and I sat and watched this ghastly stuff. And I didn’t realise that Steve Leahy was just about to revamp the children’s department. And I was promised that I could work in children’s, but it didn’t happen, of…

Luise Fitzwalter describes the innovation on Open House

We created something called Open House for North West Parliament, which was a brilliant idea where we used the House of Commons set that Granada had and we invited local MPs from the north west, and the retired deputy speaker who lived in the north west, and they debated issues like education, health etc. They…

Luise Fitzwalter on Granada’s coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy

I mean, what happened to me with Hillsborough was that we…no mobile phones. We had these zapper things, can you remember, they buzzed to tell you to ring somebody. And it so happened that I kept them my children have their first professional haircut at Kendal’s that afternoon and I turned my zapper off.…

Luise Fitzwalter on the end of her Granada career

Let’s just continue with your career, to where your career ends at Granada. Huh. Right, well… I suppose I’m still very angry about it. What happened to Ray particularly. I think two people suffered the most from the whole debacle when Gerry came in, Gerry Robinson and Charles Allen, and one was Plowright and one…

Luise Fitzwalter on the change of culture at Granada

Apparently Charles Allen, when he gave this presentation to the board, said, “What you do,” and this is what they used to do on Granada’s… and this is hearsay, I heard this story ……“What you do is you squeeze the client, as it were, until the pips squeak. And if, when they start complaining that…

Luise Fitzwalter on attitudes towards her as a woman at Granada

The worst person was a female news editor. I came in as a married woman returner, and I had been doing various degrees at Bradford, I did an MA and a PhD. And then I came to Granada. They were poisonous. Utterly poisonous. I mean, she was, with her coterie of people. And they would…

Luise Fitzwalter on the great pool of talent at Granada

The great thing about Granada, as I said, was the great can-do attitude, and they had this phrase, “Let’s do some mischief.” So that that was hugely exciting and creative. But the biggest thing about Granada was the pool of talent. And you never got trained, but what you did was you worked with the…

Luise Fitzwalter on Granada’s cultural identity

Do you feel that Granada was more than just a television company in terms of its cultural identity? It wanted to be. I had an argument when I was on news with the powers that be because I said that I thought all our reporters should have a northern accent, a north west accent of…

Luise Fitzwalter on how her late husband, Ray Fitzwalter, joined Granada

I can tell you about his interview at Granada. He’s told this story many times. He was working… he was on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, and he had an inspired editor called Peter Harland, who allowed Ray to be everything including the… he was the Bangladeshi correspondent, he was the fishing correspondent, he did…

Luise Fitzwalter on the WIA programmes that Ray Fitzwalter was most proud of

I know he was very proud of the Gozo programme, which finally nailed Maudling. I mean, he was very proud of the team, you know? And we left, we took the personal BAFTAs but we left the team ones. And we left the team ones on the second floor because the team had moved! They…

Luise Fitzwalter on the importance of Ray Fitzwalter’s northern identity to him

Was that northern identity important to him? Desperately. Yes. Again, Paul Greengrass said at the award, at the luncheon for Ray’s award, you could see the curl of the lip as you came into London on the train with Ray as you approached Euston – and I think this is what gave him as a…

Luise Fitzwalter on the programme Union World made for Channel 4

David Boulton, who was a dear friend of mine, ours, really, really took the cream of people who worked on Union World, exactly at the point that he put me in there to run it, to go into his new news organisation in Liverpool. And therefore I struggled from the start with Union World. It…