Tony Drinkle talks about when he left Granada

I left in 1989, just when… it was when the voluntary redundancies… I was 49 at the time, and funnily enough me and Jack Dardis left on the same day as well! We started on the same day in 1956 and left on the same day in 1989. So they were asking for redundancy and at the time it was a good deal – a month for every year you had been there. I didn’t jump at it, put it that way, because as I say I was only 49, but they said that I could start drawing my pension at 50, which I had been in for a few years, but it was talked over with the wife, and I said, “I’ll take it, we’ll have a couple of decent holidays and then I’ll start looking for another job.” Of course, while I was off, roughly about a year after I’d been off, I got a phone call off a chap called David Black, do you remember him? You could say he was more in touch with that department, presentation, everything used to go through Dave Black. And I got a phone call one day from Dave, and he said, “Can you do us a favour and come in for a month?” What it was, there was this Brian, and Maurice had come in as I left, and the girl, three of them, when there were three of us working there you could only have one off at the same time on holiday, and they wouldn’t let you have two on holiday at the same time. But I think Maurice wanted to go to America for a month and someone else was off for two or three weeks at the same time, so Dave asked me to come in. So I went back into Granada doing my old job for a month, of course while I’m in there, you’re seeing people, “Oh, hello, you’re back, how are you?” “I’m all right, I’m only here for a month.” You know, you’d get talking. And one particular day, a guy in the post room called Barry, I was just talking to him about things in general, and he said, “What are you going to be doing?” So I said, “Well, I’m looking for a part-time job really. I don’t want to be doing nothing, I’m only 50…” So he said, “We could do with somebody to cover in the post room, you know.” Going back to square one! So he said, “Are you interested?” I said, “I’m here for a month, I’ll tell you before I finish.” So anyway, to cut a load of rubbish out, at the end of the month, I saw the chap in charge of the post room, a feller called Dave Crowther at the time, and he said, “What we could do with is cover for holidays when there’s two off.” So I said okay. I was virtually like on standby. I might get a phone call saying, “Can you do next week? I’ve got someone off.” So I would go in and do a week on the post, and I actually ended up doing regular mornings, 8am-1pm, which fitted in great. So I started that roughly in 1991 and I left again in 2002, so I actually finished with Granada completely in 2002, and then that was it really.

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