It suited us, us left-leaning provincial grammar school boys. I mean it wasn’t a posh place, it wasn’t a place for public school boys. It wasn’t a culture-vulture place or snobbish. It was quite the opposite of that. It was a Northern ‘muck-in let’s do it’ kind of thing, which for example you found in the canteen. Everyone was in the canteen. I used to wander through the props area to have a chat with people and then Denis Forman would come to the canteen and it was just a great, there were no barriers. There was a kind of in-built anti-Southern thing, anti-London thing, you know, Plowright’s Craft Awards and also the Studio Tours was kind of him saying why not “from the North”? My Dad’s from Stockport, so I was into that! The attitude was, show it to ’em, stuff ’em. So the atmosphere as a place to work, great. I suppose the early ’80s with the Brideshead time and, you know, about ’81, Granada was the bees knees. It had the best drama and the best current affairs and the strongest regional programmes. We knew what the competition was, which was mostly not as good. We saw some of it. BBC Northwest just wasn’t as good. We were more adventurous and we had the people to be adventurous. “Let’s try this. Let’s try that” and to their credit we did try lots of things. But by the late ’80s I think also there was network pressure, from ITV, to make hit shows – the dash for ratings – and that meant taking slots and money away from regional programmes.
