I can tell you about his interview at Granada. He’s told this story many times. He was working… he was on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, and he had an inspired editor called Peter Harland, who allowed Ray to be everything including the… he was the Bangladeshi correspondent, he was the fishing correspondent, he did the weddings in the funerals, but he also did a lot of investigative stuff, and he had unearthed this scandal about the architect called Poulson and was making connections right the way up to Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, who subsequently resigned. And he’d become young journalist of the year. And it was his story.
And he went to this interview in Golden Square, Granada rang him up and said, “Would you be interested in working for us?” and he saw on the desk, reading upside down, as good journalists always do, the memo from probably – probably – (Mike) Scott, but I don’t know who it was from – which said, “We either need a hack, a well-known hack, from the city, from London, or somebody cheap from the provinces.” And he was the cheap from the provinces! And so he went in and he worked on that programme, which subsequently led to the resignation and probably the death of Reginald Maudling, because I think it was Ray’s opinion that he sort of gave up. But then it was taken off because there was so much legal stuff, and he was also writing a book about it, and worked on that for, I think, a year.
