I think Granada was going to go through a downscaling period pretty much after I left, which is December ‘82.
So could you see the signs of the changes?
Not yet, no. But I did very quickly afterwards, because I went to work at TV-AM, which was another television disaster. I just regard my time in television as a total disaster, I’m afraid. Not in a bad way, in retrospect it’s funny, but TV-AM was completely chaotic and I got myself a sinecure for nine months where I just programmed one pop video a day and that’s all I had to do, so I could do my whole week’s work in the morning and just bunked off and wrote articles for The Face and other magazines. And anyway, TV-AM was obviously non-unionised, it was run by Bruce Gyngell and Greg Dyke, it was… you know, it was chaotic and you know, there was no union representation. Then I suddenly remembered one day a whole lot of Granada executives turned up. Mike Short turned up, and I thought, “What is Mike Short doing here? Oh, he’s picking up tips.” So that must have been late ‘8, early ‘84. That’s what I thought the dissolving was going to happen. I suddenly thought, “Oh, okay, they’re going to do this to Granada.” Because TV-AM really was an awful place to work.
