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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Kim Horton on his memorable programmes
I think I suddenly sort of did a lot of kind of history/science stuff with offline, and we did a thing called Savage Skies, which was the making of… we had a kind of history/science department then, people like Bill Jones and Liz McLeod in particular, suddenly realised that we had a real talent for…
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Thelma McGough on how she got a job at Granada
To get back to your original question, how I came to work there, on… following Anthony (H. Wilson) around, it always seemed like a really vibrant, interesting job, and he made it look easy and effortless and fun. Being a Scouser, there’s a bit of that Yozzer – though that came later – [attitude of]…
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Kim Horton on the shift from film to video
At what point did you switch from film to video? At what point, that would have been in the in the 90s. It probably would have been possibly early 90s. The last thing I did on film was it was a series called God Bless America, which were great, a great series, all directed by…
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Arthur Taylor on how he came to join Granada
I was teaching. I was lecturing in further education colleges. I did have a slight connection with Granada in the very, very early days. When I was doing my post-graduate certificate of education, they called it, in Manchester, done my degree in London, came to Manchester to do this postgrad thing and I got an…
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Chris Kelly describes how he joined Granada TV
I was with Anglia Television in Norwich and I had gone there straight from… not quite straight and leaving Cambridge, but I taught French for a couple of terms at a very bizarre establishment in Sussex. And joined Anglia, got a job as an announcer initially, did that for about three months, moved over to…
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Arthur Taylor recalls the programme On Site
I was a researcher on a programme called On Site. I should have said I was very lucky at the time, because Mike Scott had just been made executive producer of local programmes, and had torn up the old system and wanted to create it in his own image, and completely changed everything. And there…
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Chris Kerr on joining Granada
Joining Granada was for me a question of being in the right place at the right time. I had started life as a trainee vision mixer at Thames tv followed by a three years as a researcher on the children’s programme Magpie. I had wanted to try life outside telly for a time and had…
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Thelma McGough’s memories of The Krypton Factor
I worked on Krypton Factor with Nick Turnbull. That was the beginning of the best part of working at Granada. Pete Walker was the director on that, and Gordon and I used to travel around looking for, or interviewing, possible contestants for that. And do you know, that stood me in so much good stead…
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Arthur Taylor on the challenges of being a presenter
They persevered with the idea that I should present, which I didn’t want to do. From day one I didn’t want to do it. But I did, because it was experience and because if I hadn’t done it I would have kicked myself for being yellow, you know? So I read the news, I did…
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Chris Kerr remembers his days at Exchange Flags, Liverpool
David has already given you a brilliant account of those early days in Liverpool; they were the greatest fun and I have happy memories of meeting the inspirational Mike Short and the likes of Roger Blyth, Shelley Rohde and Nick Turnbull. Nick produced a late evening cabaret-style show called After All That This; he gave…
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Thelma McGough on the early days of GTV in Liverpool
Chris (Pye) and I went to the Liverpool office. It was behind the Town Hall, Exchange Flags and was a beautiful building. You went to the front door, Chris had a beautiful big office to the right and I had a beautiful big office to the left. There was no secretary, no staff, no anything.…
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Arthur Taylor describes producing for the first time
The first series I actually did get round to producing, and looking back it was, there was a thing called Songs from the Two Brewers, which was a folk music series. And I got on very well with Mike. I mean, he could be insufferable, and he was easily distracted. But he was basically a…
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Chris Kelly recalls the enjoyment of Clapperboard
Clapperboard was a movie programme that went out… it became a bit of a moveable feast, but it started at about 4:30 in the afternoon. And it was nominally a children’s programme, although, as you know, Granada took the cinema seriously, and so did we. And I remember doing an hour’s interview with Anthony Quinn,…
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Chris Kelly on some of the stars he met on Clapperboard
(It was a) A weekly programme. …. Chiefly Manchester based, but set visits, so we went to Pinewood quite a lot and various other places. We did a spin-off series called Clapperboard North West, in which we went to the places where they filmed very, very early movies, then on the Pennines, westerns they were.…
Read MoreChris Kerr on looking after the programme makers
After about a year at the Liverpool studio I was sent for to Manchester. Jules Burns was moving up a level and needed someone to take over running the researchers and journalists department. Effectively this meant making certain that all the 100 or so researchers had a programme to work on and that producers had…
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Thelma McGough on the day John Lennon died
Here’s an interesting story about my work at Granada Television. At some point, I was living in London but working in Liverpool. I think it was after the strike, and it was when I came back. And so my mother would travel down to London to look after my kids, and I’d travel up to…
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Arthur Taylor on producing the Cinema programme
When I was at university in London, I frittered away my time going to the cinema – I was a member of the National Film Theatre – going to the pub, and playing a lot of jazz. What I didn’t realise was that the time I frittered away became far more useful than the degree!…
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Chris Kelly on the faith Granada had in its young staff
The other great thing about Granada was they had enormous faith in young people. I mean, I remember once, I had read about a Picasso exhibition in Paris, 16 rooms, and he walked into one of them and allegedly said, “I didn’t paint a single canvas in this room.” Mind you, Picasso was known to…
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Chris Kerr remembers working at the Albert Dock
In 1986 Granada had decided to move its Liverpool operation to the Albert Dock to coincide with the Electronic Newsgathering revolution. Mike Short, Sue Woodward, the News Editor, and I spent many weeks interviewing potential staff. I got a call one afternoon from Rod Caird who was screen-testing possible presenters for a political programme; would…
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Thelma McGough meets Graeme Souness & Bill Shankly
Oh, a funny incident in the Liverpool office, long before there was like big, proper studios. Sometimes you’d have people come in to be interviewed and there were two sound guys there, that’s all I remember. And I remember Graeme Souness came in for an interview, and he was… there was a stand mic. I…
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Arthur Taylor on the success of GTV’s gardening programme
The thing about Granada, and I don’t know where it came from, but it was drummed into everybody without it being drummed in, if you know what I mean, it was just in the air, was that Granada would make programmes that would be better than anybody else’s, because they were more interesting, because they…
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