Anybody I think who was around in Manchester in the late 60s, early 70s and through the 70s and into the 80s, just couldn’t avoid the place. The cultural imprint that Granada had particularly on Manchester, and more broadly in the northwest, has no equivalence. When the Manchester Guardian dropped ‘Manchester’ from its banner, which was in 1959, obviously Granada sort of stepped up; and the unity between both of those institutions is quite remarkable, because a fair number of Guardian employees migrated down Quay Street and took up their positions there. And in a way the kind of intellectual core of Manchester shifted from the Guardian to Granada almost automatically, and for them, 15, 20 years until the mid 80s, Granada had a massively significant role to play within Manchester. But by the same token, as Michael Parkinson was very quick to point out, in the 1960s it wasn’t just that Granada was kind of opinionated and cutting edge and televisually the place to be, that was significant enough in itself, but of almost greater significance was the fact that Granada was in Manchester, and serendipitous though that might be, I think the significance was huge. I think that Granada went on to form the largest part of what came in the 90s to be known as Manchester attitude.
