It was my job to clothe the show. So I would start with the script, or sometimes I would actually start with the book. I certainly did with Jewel (in the Crown). I read the book before I read the scripts. Not always because sometimes it could be confusing. You’d work it out on…
Read More
Esther Dean on her responsibilities once in production
Once you were in production, once you were filming or in the studio, what were your responsibilities then? Well, I liked to be around when the filming was going but obviously I couldn’t. But what I always liked to do was if there was an actor and they were wearing a new dress that hadn’t…
Read More
Esther Dean on the challenges of moving from black and white to colour tv
At the time when you first started work, television was in black and white. What kind of challenges did that bring for you? Well the big thing with black and white was something called the grey scale. You had to know. It all had to be done in shades of black, white and grey. If…
Read More
Esther Dean on how costume brings out a character
I think when we were talking about Hard Times, I don’t know if it was the same for Jewel, but you used costume as a way of placing someone in terms of time and perhaps their background, but also their position as a character, or how they felt. I always used to feel that…
Read More
Esther Dean talks about filming in India for ‘Staying On’ and ‘The Jewel in the Crown’
The first big one and the one that was done as a test to see if one could film in India was Staying On, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. We did it first but story-wise it’s about an old couple who have stayed on in India after partition, after independence. It was done really…
Read More
Esther Dean describes the challenges she faced to recognition and equal pay
Costume design was a female occupation, is that a true assumption? Yes. I mean, obviously there are male designers, but yes, it was, and we were very much underpaid. It was also part of the sweatshop thing that we were in a way the lowest of the low and when I first went up there,…
Read More
Esther Dean on the awards she received for her work
When I got the BAFTA for Hard Times, there hadn’t been craft awards before. I remember being very excited watching the awards when it was Country Matters and Derek Granger got the award for the best series, and we were jumping up in the air. I was in my flat but leaping round cheering that…
Read More
Esther Dean’s memories of Sidney Bernstein
Bernstein used to walk round the building. He always used to walk round the building in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves. So all the managers used to walk round the building with white shirts and rolled up sleeves. He always used to eat in the canteen. Most places had a posh place for…
Read More
Esther Dean on how Granada’s northern location impacted on its dramas
Certainly a lot of the shows that I did like Inheritance and Shabby Tiger, there were a lot of plays at the beginning, and Hard Times, where doing it up in the North made a big difference to being in the South. You needed to have the feel of being in the North, the weather…
Read More
Claudia Milne remembers how she came to join Granada Television
I was working in Selfridges in the co-ordinates department, just literally to earn money. And my mum was a teacher and I had a half day and I was lighting the fire for her before she got home from school, and it was the beginning of November, this time of year, and I was shoving…
Read More
Claudia Milne recalls the early programmes she worked on
It was a light entertainment programme called Nice Time. It had Kenny Everett and Germaine Greer, and Sandra Gough who was a Coronation Street star, and Jonathan Routh who had done a programme called Candid Camera, I think. It was very popular. It went out on a Sunday afternoon and they were hiring because it…
Read More
Claudia Milne remembers Granada Reports and becoming a director
Granada Reports was a six o’clock magazine show. Maybe it was at six thirty; I can’t remember. It was linked to the six o’clock network news and it was the regional opt-out so it only went out in Granadaland. It was studio-based but with film inserts. It was a typical magazine, so it had sport…
Read More
Claudia Milne remembers filming Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callaghan at the party conferences
I was heavily pregnant at the time and we were at the Tory Party conference in Blackpool. There was no security in those days. We had to finish shooting by the Wednesday I think because it went out on Thursday night, or was it Friday? Friday, 10:30 I think. So we filmed the first few…
Read More
Claudia Milne on the challenges she faced when she became a mother
I was on maternity leave. I was the first woman at Granada to get maternity leave on a written-down basis. They had said to a couple of other people, “Come see us when you’ve had the baby, dear, and we’ll see if we’ve got anything for you.” But I wanted to go back onto…
Read More
Claudia Milne’s thoughts on Granada’s links with the North West
People like Plowright were very proud of its links with the north. I don’t think that came from Forman as much as it did with Plowright. I might be wrong. As far as I know Forman never lived in Manchester and Plowright did live in the North West. I don’t think he lived in Manchester.…
Read More
George Turner on his early interest in film-making
As a child I lived in Southport and my father, one of the many hobbies he had, was he actually had a cine camera. And I’ve subsequently seen footage that he filmed even before the Second World War. But as a child I was brought up going to the Isle of Man, and I have…
Read More
George Turner on his first job at Mancunian Films
So I left school and went to work for a computer company in Southport called ICT out at Crossens, which bizarrely was where my father worked during the war when it was Brockhouse, making bits of guns, shells and all kind of things. And after about ten months there I got a call from Peter…
Read More
George Turner on getting the call to work on World in Action
So I got a call just towards the end of December in ’68 when I was still operating on Big Breadwinner Hog and saying that the cameraman who had been on World in Action, which was Ray Goode, had had enough. Because I’d been involved in the Grosvenor Square demonstration, one of six crews, and…
Read More
George Turner on his early days at Granada
So we did lots of news stories and it could be everything, you know. Some pretty horrible stories, mine disasters in North Wales. Obviously what we didn’t know was… leading on to things like the ‘Moors murders’, and that was… We did two or three days a week, we’d drive to Leeds on a Wednesday…
Read More
George Turner on the ethics in filming
Did you ever feel that we were exploiting people? Well it depends who they were. Some of them probably deserved to be exploited, I would say! [laughs] No, I mean I think at the end of if you’ve got two ways to look at it. You’ve got obviously the professional people like politicians and things…
Read More
George Turner remembers how a camera crew operated in 1963
In those days you had to load the magazines with film, which would last ten minutes. That would involve putting the magazine which sat on top of the camera into a changing bag, like a portable darkroom, and in the dark, you learned how to put the film that had been exposed carefully into some…
Read More
George Turner reflects on the awards he has received
You’ve been recognised by BAFTA and you’re a fellow of the RTS. I wondered, what does that mean to you, that kind of recognition by your peers? Special. I think, upon reflection some years later, the BAFTA for one of the Up programmes, when it was presented to me, it was presented to me by…
Read More
George Turner on the relationship between camera operator and producer
Tell me about the relationship between the camera person and the producer/director. Very important. Most of the producers I ever worked with I’ve always – again, it’s a story I’ve mentioned a few times, but not today – when you meet a producer at Los Angeles airport, he’s maybe been over there for two weeks,…
Read More
George Turner sums up his work on World In Action
I probably worked on about 800 World in Actions out of the 1500 they made, of which I think I can honestly say I did in excess of 600 of them all myself. That doesn’t sounds much over 30 years but you know, it’s kind of 20 every year out of a run of 40.…
Read More
George Turner on the importance of Granada being in Manchester
I think it’s well-known that the Bernsteins were looking to have a television station in the north of England. I know for a fact they looked in Liverpool as well as in Manchester. And in fact they looked in Manchester out towards the Toast Rack site, but think it’s been documented that they realised, the…
Read More
George Turner talks about how long World In Action filming took
And when you were doing a World in Action programme, how long on average would you film for? About seven days. Certainly the World in Action period for the first four or five years, maybe ten, but say when I started in 1969. The first programme I did was a programme in Northern Ireland called…
Read More
George Turner on some of the memorable World in Action programmes he worked on
There’s no one favourite programme, and that sounds slightly glib because, you know, the variety of the programmes was so varied from, you know, spending time with ministers through to spending it with people who’d got illnesses, thalidomide being one of the cases, but, you know, people that had struggles in life, I’m thinking mainly…
Read More
Don Jones describes how he joined Granada TV
In 1980 I was a sports reporter on the Lancashire Evening Post. I’d been there six years. I’d joined them as a junior reporter, straight from school as an 18-year-old. So I had six years under my belt as a journalist on a local paper, and I’d got to a point where I thought I…
Read More
Don Jones on his first impressions of the sports department
The first day was really amazing because I was given a desk, and I was told that me and another guy had been taken on at the same time, and one of the lads in the office said I’d been described as the hardworking journalist who would bring some kind of proper sports reporting to…
Read More
Don Jones talks about how Granada and ITV covered football
The way ITV worked at the time was that each region covered its own match and then there was a massive exchange of footage on the Saturday night. When I first started the footage was going out on a Sunday afternoon. It was called different things in different regions, but it was The Big Match.…
Read More