I retired in 1998. I’d been there for 36 years. I was then age 60. I was told to leave. It was very cold outside, I can tell you. It was not this wonderful benign outfit. Towards the end I hated Granada because it had been taken over by Gerry Robinson and it was no longer the place which it used to be. They made the cardinal mistake of getting rid of David Plowright, and the only thing they were interested in was asset stripping and ratings. There’s nothing wrong with ratings, but if David had been there, he would have still kept some of the great ideas and programmes that we’d all lived on. It was a much tougher time because there were lots and lots of channels, and I realised that, but it was only ratings, and there were a great deal of sackings and asset-stripping going on and I was quite pleased to leave, actually. You know, I’d been making some pretty dim programmes which I’d been asked to make, and I then became freelance and as an outsider slowly clawed my way back into making half-decent programmes again.
So you got in through drama, but never went back to drama. Well, you did drama docs.
Drama docs, that’s the only thing I ever did.
