They were all these people, Denis Forman, David Plowright. I went around them all actually, and it left me with an abiding sense of Granada as one of Britain’s great liberal institutions, like a great university, like the BBC and very different in character. One of those precious cultural institutions that, when you set aside all the bolshiness inside, actually they, as an institution, had an ability to mark those of us who grew up in it. You, me, I’m sure everybody that you interviewed, it was a defining factor. And the years that you spent there, whether they were small in number or many, marked you. That’s the measure of it as an organisation. You can look back and tell a rose-tinted history of it all, and it definitely did love its own mythology, but that said, the exemplary values, both creatively in terms of broadcasting but also as a company, it was benevolent. The fact that it enabled somebody as bolshy and insecure as me, to find myself and then go off and become the person that I wanted to be, because of my time there.
