Granadaland Granadaland

Claire Lewis on how she joined Granada

I was a newspaper reporter on the Rotherham Advertiser, believe it or not, in Yorkshire where I lived at the time. South Yorkshire. I had changed my career – I was reluctantly a primary school teacher – and then got an attachment to BBC Radio Sheffield in the ‘70s when Sheffield was the most progressive…

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Claire Lewis on Granada as a company

It was the best. It was the best. At the time I joined, I was very lucky. They were making wonderful, wonderful dramas that no one else was making – Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead – fantastic programmes. World in Action. Everything they did, wonderful. Tony Wilson, wonderful pop programmes. It was absolutely an amazing…

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Claire Lewis on learning filmmaking from the best!

I came as a journalist on Granada Reports. Off-screen journalist. And I’d only been at Granada six or eight weeks doing my basic filmmaking training, going out on stories, working with a film crew. I’d done a lot of radio, so I’d done a lot of radio reporting, so that wasn’t an issue. So I…

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Claire Lewis on how the programmes following Seven Up

So basically, the story about 14 Up, which is called 7 Plus Seven, Michael Apted, very quickly after Seven Up, wanted to be a drama director. His career progressed very fast. He did the Street, he then left, went freelance, came back, did some wonderful Jack Rosenthal dramas, and he was in the canteen and…

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Claire Lewis on researching for 28 Up

I think he (Steve Morrison) was quite sympathetic to me doing Seven Up, and because I’d asked for him, so it suddenly came up and there I was… we’re going to do 28 Up. And there’s a very interesting story about 28 Up. Somebody else did a little tiny bit of research and handed me…

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Claire Lewis on the challenges faced by mothers working in TV

I became news editor. I did a stint on an education programme, again with Gordon Burns, called Chalkface, which was a documentary series. So I swapped backwards and forwards from news to other programmes for three or four years. I then became news editor of Granada in 1981, which was great, working with Stuart Prebble,…

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Claire Lewis on the trials of working with animals

I’d worked briefly for Steve Morrison on his first drama, the Orwell drama, The Road to 1984, because I desperately wanted to do drama. And because I was working in local programmes, everything I was doing was in local programmes, I was working with Steve on a number of programmes and he got me in…

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Claire Lewis on tracking down the participants for 28 Up

I suppose 28 Up had the funniest stories. They were the ones where – I mean, there’s constant funny stories – but you have to remember, that when we made 28 Up there were no mobile phones. And I found Neil, who was a missing person, in this field in Wales. The problem with Neil…

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Claire Lewis on why Seven Up has been such a success

It’s worked because as time has progressed, we have progressed to a celebrity culture society. And the most wonderful thing about Seven Up is that it’s not about celebrities. It’s about us – ordinary normal people. And the more we become a celebrity-based culture, the more appealing Seven Up becomes. Because absolutely nobody gives anybody…

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Claire Lewis on Granada and the north – and Sidney Bernstein

Yes. Let’s talk a little bit about the ethos of Granada Television. Granada Television as a company. I’m thinking in terms of its northernness, its politics. They were very important. Its politics were very important. Its northernness was very important. It was completely different from anywhere else. And it was a combination of people who…

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Claire Lewis as an on-screen reporter and Granada’s ethos

I went back to Granada Reports as an on-screen reporter. Yes, that’s right. I went back as an on-screen reporter, which was also fun. I had to do a screen test, and they wanted more women on screen at the time, there were a lot of male reporters who weren’t that good. So there were…

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Claire Lewis explains the origins of Seven Up

Seven Up was a World in Action special made in 1963, and it was commissioned by the then editor of World in Action, Tim Hewat. Tim Hewat had been brought to Granada by Sidney Bernstein and Denis Forman as the very first editor of World in Action. He was an Australian and he was editing…

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Claire Lewis describes working on Reports Politics

I came back onto Granada Reports as an off-screen journalist, which I loved. I was immediately sent to Liverpool, to the Liverpool office in Exchange Flags to do a stint there, which was interesting and different, and then very soon, at Christmas, I was summoned to the head of local programmes, who said, “Right, we…

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Eric Harrison on his early days at GTV in the mid 1950’s

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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Kim Horton describes how he joined Granada TV

I think I should start by saying that I grew up in Australia, and probably had not much of an idea about what Granada stood for and what sort of country it was, although growing up, which was just even scooting back before that, we went out, we were ‘Ten Pound Poms’ to go out…

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Kim Horton on how the film library fired his interest in music

Kim Horton on how the film library fired his interest in music It was interesting because when I’d got into the library, they were a lovely bunch girls but they all looked like librarians. They all had the bobbed hairdos… and in fact, Julie Goodyear, who used to take a short cut from Coronation Street…

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Kim Horton on his move into film editing

I was about 25 or something like that (when I started at Granada), so I wasn’t a young thing. Because I had travelled a bit, all Australians do that, you know, and I had done a bit of a hippy trail thing with a, you know, buying a Volkswagen van, outside the American Express office…

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Kim Horton on training in the film-editing dept.

I was terrifically interested in the whole filmmaking thing, because just everything was going on there. You know, it’s just a joy to see, you know, Dennis Mitchell working in one of the edit suites. You know, Ken Russell was doing his Clouds of Glory, I think Roger Graef was doing his British Communist Party…

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Kim Horton describes how his career progressed

Gradually, as it was meant to be, you would get other duties, other jobs, and that usually started with cutting the news. And this would be you on your own. Yes, this would be me on my own. I would be given the first… and it was film, so we’re still talking Steenbeck and it…

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Kim Horton on the lifestyle of a GTV film editor

For the most part, what we liked about it was in the early time of my editing, is that you were you were pretty much told what you were going to do. Granada would have people that would say, “Well, we want this person to do this edit. It wasn’t producer choice we were talking…

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Kim Horton recalls working on World In Action

And then I did my first World in Action and that was a really big deal, because it really was testing… and it was 1983 and it was produced by Ian McBride, and it was a film about Jesse Jackson, and actually on the road with Jesse Jackson, who was undecided about seeking nomination or…

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Kim Horton’s work on the 7 Up series

Yes, it was good times. But it kind of led to other things, and one of those things was being asked – because Oral actually had been asked to do 28 Up and they needed a second editor on it, and because I had been his assistant and we were mates, he said, “Why don’t…

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Thelma McGough describes her first contact with GTV

Well, long before I joined I was very familiar with the building, and a lot of the staff before I actually became employed there. In the late 60s, I’d done a fashion show with a friend of mine, we were students at Liverpool College of Art. I was a painter, but we decided to set…

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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 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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