Maggie Coombes – Granadaland

Maggie Coombes recalls how she came to be employed by Granada TV

I’d done a postgraduate course at Bristol University in film and television, and I just wrote round to all the television companies I could think of, this is who I am, I’ve done this postgraduate course, I’ve been at art college for four years before that, I’ve done a three-dimensional design course, I’d like to…

Maggie Coombes remembers working with the director Ken Russell

So you became a production designer … That’s the top of the pile, if you like, and that was a tremendous privilege really, because you get to work with so many creative people, I mean, writers and directors. I mean, Anthony Minghella, Charles Sturridge, John Madden, Ken Russell… I mean, I worked with those people,…

Maggie Coombes on the social side of working on a drama

To start with, probably because I was the only woman in a very male environment, I don’t think the social bit was as important – I was sort of take up with the job to start with – and I think too, as I say, I worked with mainly men, and I think it was…

Maggie Coombes talks about filming on location as a designer

TThe Sherlock Holmes thing with Jeremy Brett, which, I think, was through four series (Jeremy did four different Sherlock Holmes productions, each ran for between one and three series) and then they did some one-offs after that. I really enjoyed that. I mean, one of the great things if you were doing drama, and particularly…

Maggie Coombes describes the design process on a drama programme

I think the first thing I worked on was Sam,which was a long-running drama series that John Finch wrote, and I was working for somebody called Colin Pocock. I think the first thing he asked me to do was to design a wall for somebody’s back garden – they needed something for an actor to…

Maggie Coombes on Granada as a regional company

I’m from the south myself, but I’ve lived most of my adult life in Manchester, and I think what was so refreshing about Granada was that it wasn’t a London satellite. It really wasn’t. And when I first went there, and sort of into the ‘80s, people were actively… they were expected to live in…

Maggie Coombes on the challenges of working in a male-dominated environment

The designers and the other assistants I think were pretty welcoming, but I think there were issues with some of the tradespeople that I worked with in the construction shop – again, mainly it was fine, but I remember them telling me, I think in my first week, somebody down there said to me, “Oh,…

Maggie Coombes talks about Granada as an employer

I think they were terrific, absolutely terrific. It was small enough and eccentric enough to feel almost like a family. I mean, it sounds like a cliché, but it was – and although I didn’t really have anything to do with the very senior people like the Bernsteins or Denis Forman or others, I mean,…

Maggie Coombes reflects on the changes within Granada as a company

Yes, I think in the sort of mid to late 80s, things started to change, definitely. I mean, for some years before I left, and I left for personal reasons, because we had a child and I wanted to spend more time… but it had really started to change by then. It was quite obvious…

Maggie Coombes on how reduced budgets have impacted on design

First of all you’d get a script, and you’d break it down, so you’d read it, you’d work out how many different locations or sets there might be, and you’d have to think about if it was a period or contemporary and how you’d dress it and work out budgets… obviously talk to the directors…