The one thing it wasn’t any good at was women, I think. I’ve written about this actually in this week’s In The Can thing I do, but I think you’ve read it. The great thing about being a trainee director was you got different crews who would come in. You had a real problem and it was a kind of weirdly in-built issue that you had to deal with. Several people that you worked with, I think it was helped by the fact that Spence and I both had hair beyond our shoulders at this point. Several people that you work with had applied for the same job, maybe more than once, and felt that they were clearly more qualified to have the job than you, which may well have been true. But you had this extraordinary army of misnomered PAs because they weren’t PA’s at all. They were production assistants, but they were a mix of continuity, production management, directing. They were extraordinary knowledgeable, and you would have someone like Sue Wild or Sue Pritchard coming from Brideshead or coming from Jewel in the Crown who would be with you on a local shoot as a trainee with something that wasn’t going to be broadcast, giving you as much respect and help as they would have Jim O’Brien or Charles Sturridge. And that was extraordinary. And now, several of those women have gone on to become executive producers of Coronation Street, producers of Hollyoaks, producers of Coronation Street, heads of Lime Pictures. So things changed in a good way, but Granada didn’t exactly help that right at the beginning. And they should have done. To an extent, it was a male-dominated world. Sign of the times, I guess.
