I joined Granada in 1962. I was picked up at university, | was very lucky. I won the NUS Sunday Times drama competition and by great good luck, Derek Grainger happened to be in the audience. I’d done a lot of theatre at university, and he said, would you like to apply for a production trainee scheme at Granada? I knew nothing about it, or about television. We didn’t even have a television set in our house. I turned up in Manchester and was interviewed by Denis Forman and I realised what an incredible man he was immediately. He was incredibly handsome, erudite, great command of language, huge charm, very polite. He said, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got the job, but you have to do and be interviewed by Mr Sidney and Mr Cecil, and I hadn’t a clue who they were, I thought they were two benign hairdressers. And I found myself in the presence of Sidney Bernstein, you know, a great patrician, very handsome, broken nose, and I realised he was the important man. And within two minutes I discovered we were talking about the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist playwright. We got on very well, and I was luckily offered the job.
