I left school when I was eighteen, and then I went to work for a company called Greendow, which was a small independent place that used to have freelance editors, assistants and things to help out all the television companies around the country. They used to supply editors to work on programmes like World in Action.
I started as the little van driver who took out bits of film and gave people lifts out to all the various other stations and things like that. After that, I was lucky enough to go into a department called ‘Negative Cutting’. We used to cut the negative to match the film. So the editor would work on the film, cut it all up into lots of little pieces, put it all back together again and then I’d match the negative to that, so that when it was printed in the labs you’d get a nice clean, pristine colour print. Or that was the theory of it, anyway. I did that for about three years.
Luckily enough, again, I managed to get from being a freelance to being an assistant at Granada. I was assistant to one of the best editors I ever worked with, which was Jack Dardis. I did that for about a year and then I was made staff.