And then I suddenly – ha! – in Granada’s typical way, I was made head of the play department, and rather eccentrically they didn’t call it head of drama which would have been sensible, I became head of the play department. But the interesting thing there was that I was working directly with the proprietor…
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Phil Griffin on how he joined Granada
This photo shows John Hopkins (Tech. Supervisor), Phil Griffin & Mike Short (producer) (courtesy of Barry Hairline). My first job after university was at Piccadilly Radio when commercial radio was just getting some its early evolution. In 1974 Piccadilly Radio was the second independent station outside London. BRMB was the first. So in April, April 2…
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Derek Granger talks about filming drama in the late 1950’s
Everything then was shot in the studio and this rather lugubrious way with these great trundling television cameras, and the PA system in the actual control room, having to signal where the next cameras went, it was very curious. The television was set up like theatre in a way with rehearsals, and when it came…
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Phil Griffin on the significance of P.T. Barnum
P.T. Barnum, the image of P.T. Barnum on the wall of all the offices in both Golden Square and in Quay Street, it’s kind of the key to it, because it’s the great showman, but bear in mind that’s also transatlantic, you know, P.T. Barnum is not is not round the corner, it’s not Billy…
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Derek Granger on Cecil Bernstein
Cecil was a very, very interesting man. He hadn’t got the huge personality or the grandeur of Sidney, but he had a great integrity, and he had a marvellous nose for comedy and popular entertainment. And that’s what he did. And comedy under Cecil was very, very good. There was a very, very good actual…
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Phil Griffin remembers Tony Wilson
Tony and I were… he was one year my senior, and we met when we were at school because Tony was a gobby sort, and across the Irwell in Salford he went to the De La Salle School, and I went to St Bede’s Grammar, which was on Alexandra Road in Moss Side. Tony and…
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Derek Granger recalls producing Coronation Street in 1961
Coronation Street began in on December 1960, and it was going on long very, very well, and then Cecil came to me and said, “Derek, do you mind awfully coming on to Coronation Street?” And the idea was that, although it was going all right, it was rather… it was on a very small scale.…
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Phil Griffin on commercial TV in the 1950’s
The buildings, the sort of mission hut-type buildings that went up as Ralph Tubbs was developing the studios and the studio building, was that little complex that always had… Sidney saying. “Well, if this doesn’t work we can get out of here pretty quickly,” and one forgets how uncertain all of that was, which is…
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Jacki Turner’s Granada memories
Below are Jacki Turner’s memories of her career at Granada TV. These were written by Jacki, rather than recorded as an interview. The other entries under her name are excerpts from this account. JACQUELINE MAJORIE STOTT/HARDING/TURNER – GRANADA MEMORIES Up to 1965 I’d been working as a secretary in an engineering company in Blackburn. I nearly…
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Derek Granger on Tony Warren and how the writer was treated by Granada
I was very close to Tony and we were very good friends there. Tell me more about Tony. Tony was wonderful. And I had a huge admiration for him. One of the less good things about Granada was the group thing, it always pretended that no individual did anything – it was company. And when…
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Phil Griffin on the importance of Granada to Manchester
Anybody I think who was around in Manchester in the late 60s, early 70s and through the 70s and into the 80s, just couldn’t avoid the place. The cultural imprint that Granada had particularly on Manchester, and more broadly in the northwest, has no equivalence. When the Manchester Guardian dropped ‘Manchester’ from its banner, which…
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Jacki Turner on how she joined Granada TV
Jacki Turner in studio with Johnnie Hamp and Phil Casson. Up to 1965 I’d been working as a secretary in an engineering company in Blackburn. I nearly married a colleague but then realised in a panic that I’d done nothing with my life and was not ready to settle down so I took myself off…
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Derek Granger on the presenters, Mike Scott and Michael Parkinson
One of the great things about Granada was that we were doing all this switching. I mean, it would be unthinkable now that one minute you were doing… and also I did a lot of the news programmes. I did People and Places, which I also liked very much, and then Scene at 6:30,…
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Phil Griffin on the architecture of the Granada building in Quay Street
It was the first commercial building to be completed in the city centre after the war. Its architect was a man called Ralph Tubbs, and he was selected by Sidney largely because he’d been impressed with his work in the Festival of Britain, because Ralph Tubbs’ designed the dome of discovery. So Ralph Tubbs was…
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Jacki Turner on her PA training and the early programmes she worked on
This photo shows Jacki Turner (on the left) withPhil Casson & Heather Burton. Ivy Stevens was my trainer and supervisor and the first thing you concentrate on is the use of stop watches in studio and how to cue film and time VT inserts, counting backwards to the end of the insert. I had a…
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Derek Granger on working with Sir Laurence Olivier
Well, we had a wonderful time really, most of the time, but this was David’s idea, when Olivier… you know, I’d worked with Olivier at the National Theatre as literary consultant, and then I’d gone back to Granada and then when Olivier became terribly, terribly ill with this horrible form of cancer, this sort of…
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Phil Griffin on the specific geographical location of Granada
The complex is very interesting because then you have the water tower, leading onto the back of what’s now the Museum of Science and Industry site, and of course what people forget about the Museum of Science and Industry is that within the complex is the first passenger railway station in the world, and so…
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Jacki Turner’s memories of Coronation Street and its artistes
The first drama that everyone had to cut their teeth on was Coronation Street and I first worked on this iconic programme in 1969. In those days we recorded two black and white episodes a week. This meant that any outside film/VT was recorded on a Monday then everyone rehearsed Tuesday and Wednesday morning in…
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Jacki Turner talks about working on A Family at War and Sam
I loved period drama and in the early 70s A Family At War, written by John Finch, was my first drama series. We would shoot most of each episode in studio and then go to various locations to shoot outdoor sequences and reconstructed events. My most memorable episode was filming in Llandudno – David, one…
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Denis Granger on the origins of Brideshead Revisited
The idea of Brideshead, did that come from Sir Denis? No, I went to Denis and said, “I want to do this novel.” Why? Actually, it had been suggested to me by one of the directors on Country Matters, Donald McWhinnie, who was a great old BBC hand, and he directed The Four Beauties. And…
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Phil Griffin on Manchester as the second city
If you want to know the difference between Manchester and London, then look at World in Action and Panorama – not that World in Action wasn’t a London-based programme, it very largely was – but it took a different editorial slide, and it did something much more boldly and it didn’t… it hesitated now and…
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Derek Granger on the truth behind the Brideshead script
Did you write the script? Yes. We had to ditch the (John) Mortimer script. We ditched that at the very beginning. But it was a very difficult contractual situation because the estate had made the stipulation… there was a condition that if we had the rights, we had to accept their choice of adaptor. And…
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Phil Griffin on the Granada art collection
I’ve been interested in pictures most of my life, but seeing the Francis Bacon in the Granada reception opposite the Christopher le Brun and alongside John Hoyland, and Patrick Heron on the downstairs corridor, these just sensational, mid-century, largely abstract paintings that the Bernsteins had had collected, and it was Cecil’s son, wasn’t it, that…
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Jacki Turner remembers working on Staying On in India
In the early 80s Granada planned to shoot Jewel in the Crown, much of it on location in India. Prior to this they decided to make a film based on the book Staying On about life of the English Raj and how they headed for the hills in the heat of the summer. This would…
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Derek Granger on Charles Sturridge as the Brideshead Revisited director
Anyway, Brideshead met our first catastrophe. Indeed, it turned out not be a catastrophe at all, it turned out to be our saviour. The thing that really saved the show, and that was the strike that hit us when we were filming in Oxford, and we stopped then, and we lost our first director Michael…
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Derek Granger on the continuing success of Brideshead Revisited
We’ve all been up to Castle Howard again to do this shoot for Vanity Fair. As I say, 35 years on, it’s the 35th anniversary of the first transmission, and Vanity Fair are doing a commemorative photo shoot for us, and we got all the cast back, everybody really, except for Claire Bloom as Lady…
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Colin Weston biography
Colin Weston joined Granada as an out of vision trainee announcer in 1968.He left 18 months later to work at Anglia TV where he became an in vision announcer but then returned as a freelance in the early 1980s. In addition to his role as an announcer he also read regional news bulletins and voiced…
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Colin Weston on joining Granada as a continuity announcer
Well, I lived in south London with my parents and I always wanted to get into television, and I used to regularly watch the ITV stations down in London. And I said, “I’d like to do that job,” which was continuity announcer, station announcer whatever you want to call it. And I sort of looked…
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Colin Weston on the role of the continuity announcer
A continuity announcer that is a guy or a lady who sits there and provides announcements between programmes, telling you what’s coming on later in the evening or the next day. They’re also there if the programme breaks down or there’s some technical error you have to fill by coming in to apologise and things…
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Colin Weston on going ‘in vision’
You continued as a non-vision announcer for how many years? Well I starred in ‘68 and I think they went into vision in the middle 80s. Granada never liked in-vision continuity. They never followed suit from the other companies who had a lot of in-vision. I mean, you might remember ABC TV up here, who…
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