Michael Ryan – Granadaland

Michael Ryan biography

Michael Ryan began his television career in 1963 as a BBC2 trainee, working on Panorama as a studio director. However a chance meeting in 1966 with Michael Parkinson in his father’s London pub, led to him joining Granada as a Researcher. In 1967 he worked on Cinema which, at the time, boasted an audience of…

Michael Ryan recalls how he first came to work for Granada TV

What were you doing before you joined Granada Television? Working for the BBC as a studio director. I was headhunted, or something, for the BBC2 start up. Technically I was a BBC2 trainee from Oxford in 1963, and I spent about nine months on Panorama as a sort of tea boy/researcher. Then I went into…

Michael Ryan recalls working on World In Action

I went to World in Action as a producer/director in the autumn of 1968 and basically I stayed there for ten years and I didn’t do anything else, with the exceptions of oddities like election programmes. But to all intents and purposes I was on World in Action as a producer…. I had the long…

Michael Ryan describes one of his most memorable WIA’s

From a personal point of view, the stand-out success of the seventies was the film I made in Longnor in Derbyshire in 1971, where I persuaded the village to give up smoking for a week. This was at a time, of course, when 75% of the male population was still smoking. It was timed to…

Michael Ryan describes filming the funeral of Steve Biko in South Africa

Another one that worked brilliantly was the funeral of Steve Biko. I’d done with David Hart a sort of undercover film in South Africa at the time just after the student riots in Soweto. So I had all the contacts and when Biko was obviously murdered in prison, I knew exactly who I would go…

Michael Ryan’s opinion of Granada’s political stance

People have said to me that Granada was unashamedly left-wing. Yes, I think that’s true. I wouldn’t say left-wing, I would say anti-establishment. I can think of some individuals who were Conservatives actually. But the broad picture was what you might call the Labour Party consensus of the seventies. I think, in all, honest people…

Michael Ryan on what Granada was like to work for and the support he had

Did you feel it was a special company to work for? Yes. What made it exceptional was that the people at the top cared about television. They weren’t necessarily always right but they were always up for an argument. I’m thinking particularly of Forman and Plowright. They liked an argument. You could go from an…

Michael Ryan on Denis Forman, David Plowright and the Granada management structure

I think the important thing at Granada for me personally coming out of the BBC was the unbelievable short chain of command: the editor, Plowright, Forman, and that’s it. Things weren’t allowed to drift. Also when it’s as simple as that it’s not a constant clash of egos because when you get eight or ten…

Michael Ryan on Granada’s relationship with the North West

What was interesting about the local programming was that apart from university I hadn’t really lived outside London and being in Manchester was actually quite an education for me. The sixties were the last decade of Manchester as the industrial city. The buses to Old Trafford used to be choked at 6:30 in the morning…

Michael Ryan compares Granada to the BBC

The BBC responds to competition, so the BBC in one period will be different to the BBC or Granada in another period. Perhaps I’ve tilted it more in terms of the Sixties and Seventies, but I do think that the central model is rather like putting on play, you only need a producer, a director…