Well, you were always seeing the most fantastic people in the canteen, and you would find yourself sitting next to some famous actor munching his grub. What was nice about Granada was… it wasn’t like a family but it was lacking an ‘us and them’ mentality, and I think that was partly because it was based in Manchester. I mean, I don’t feel any doubt that the programmes were better because they came out of a different place, and you felt that people perceived themselves to be equal to each other much more than in a very hierarchical organisation. Like I would get in the lift, and Steve Morrison, the boss of Granada, would say, “Tell me about what programme you’re doing now, that sounds just so exciting.” And there was no idea that he was too high up to speak to me. And again, you didn’t feel because you work in drama, I can’t know you – and I think some of the best ideas came because people in different genres were really relating to each other. And people say it’s wrong for a company to have a bar, and in some ways it is wrong, because you could argue it’s encouraging people to drink alcohol, and why should a company do that. But in another way, having a place where everybody socialises with everybody else was a very important part of the creative spirit of the programmes.
