Parky: My Autobiography (16 page)

Leslie Woodhead, who pioneered television drama documentaries, revealed his formidable talent as writer, producer and director on the show.Young men fresh from university, including Michael Apted and Mike Newell, cut their teeth on
Scene at 6.30
. They both went to Hollywood, Apted directing
The Coalminer’s Daughter
,
Gorillas in the Mist
,
Enigma
and the Bond movie,
The World is not Enough
. Newell directed
Four Weddings and a Funeral
,
Donnie Brasco
,
Pushing Tin
and
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
.

Fronting the programme were Mike Scott, who went on to become Granada’s Programme Controller, Gaye Byrne, who hosted the best talk show I have ever been a guest on,
The Late, Late Show
, which ran in Ireland for thirty-seven years, and the formidable Bill Grundy.

Bill, who sadly is best remembered as the man who presided over a notorious television occasion when the Sex Pistols reacted to his lack of enthusiasm for their music with four-letter words, was a difficult man to keep sober but not to produce. He was one of the best front men I ever worked with and I always believed that when Richard Dimbleby died Grundy was the one who should have taken his place on
Panorama
. At his best he was a superb forensic interviewer. He was intelligent, formidably well read, always well briefed and fearless. Sadly, as his career drifted, he let drink overwhelm his personality. But he taught me much about appearing in front of camera.

As the show progressed and became a very successful part, not just of Granada’s programming, but of its persona, we took the decision to let those of the production team who could write and produce material and who fancied their chances in front of camera have a go – which is how I made my debut as a front man. Not being stupid, and being the producer, I fixed it so I went on air with Bill Grundy. He took me to one side and told me to look at the camera and pretend I was telling a story to Mary. He advised me to lean into camera as if engaging it in conversation, and to slow everything down because the inevitable adrenalin surge brought about by a debut and live television would certainly make me gabble.

Then he said, ‘But most of all remember, if there is a cock-up, just look pleadingly in my direction.’

I got away with it. I reached the end of the show without fainting or making a fool of myself and, as the end credits rolled, I started to leave my seat heading for a large drink. Grundy stopped me. ‘You have forgotten something,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Say thank you to the studio,’ he said.

It was probably the most important lesson I ever learned in all my years of television. It is easy to ignore the guys behind the cameras, in lighting, or sound, the whole army of people responsible for getting you on air. If you do, they simply shrug and think there goes another performer with his head stuck up his bum. But if you thank them for making the show run smoothly, they become part of your team. We needed all the cooperation we could muster in those distant and daft days.

The notion of the television all-rounder reached its apotheosis with the creation of Granada in the North. This was a device to further Sidney Bernstein’s idea of Granadaland as a separate kingdom whose inhabitants tuned in to only one television channel, watched movies at Granada cinemas and, when they ate out, did so at Granada motorway cafés. At one time there was a rumour that Sidney intended issuing passports to be shown at motorway checkpoints to allow access to his domain.

The idea of Granada in the North was that each night, when early evening broadcasting began, one of us would pop up on screen with a headline of news and then a summation of the evening’s programming. We were like on-air station announcers, except every appearance was preceded by the Granada symbol, so even if a programme came from ATV it looked as though it belonged to Granada. At the end of the evening, round about eleven o’clock, we finished the day with a ten-minute late-night magazine programme. This was done from an unmanned studio, which is to say one with a locked-off camera but no cameraman.

On duty, the trick was to avoid too many visits to the New Theatre Inn, the local Granada pub, better known as Studio 3. (If anyone phoned your secretary, she would say, ‘He’s busy in Studio 3.’) This particular night Bill was on Granada in the North duty and I was drinking in the pub with Johnnie Hamp, who produced the nightly music spot on
Scene at 6.30
. Bill kept bobbing in and out of the pub and, as the night progressed, became more and more drunk. We tried to dissuade him from making the last appearance for the late-night sign-off.

I offered to do the show, so did John, but with that unshakeable belief drunks have in their own sobriety, Bill insisted on going back to the studio. We went upstairs in the pub to watch the programme.

When it came on air all the camera showed was an empty desk with a hand on top as if its owner was looking underneath for something that had fallen onto the floor, like a script. The language coming from beneath the desk indicated the search was not going well and that the searcher was getting increasingly fed up with looking. Eventually, after two or three minutes of worsening language, a sign came up saying: ‘Normal Transmission Will Resume As Soon As Possible. We Apologise For The Fault.’

An even more spectacular cock-up was produced by another old friend of mine from Fleet Street days, Denis Pitts. Denis was an accomplished journalist we hired to look after our London bookings. He proved to be a crafty operator whose Fleet Street habits sometimes did not meet with the approval of the Granada accounts department. He was once challenged on a mileage claim for a car trip from London to Brighton and return. The accountant said that after the most careful scrutiny he could prove that the claim was at least eighteen miles too much.

‘Ah,’ said Denis, ‘but did you take into account reversing.’

He had done some interviewing in our London studio and now felt it was time to take on Granada in the North. I sat him down and told him to keep it simple. This was his debut, so eliminate all those ideas that might get him into trouble, such as overcrowding the studio or relying on film and tape inserts, which could break down leaving the worst of all scenarios, time to fill and nothing to fill it with.

That night I switched on to see if Denis had taken my advice. He had not. He announced his studio guests including a hairdresser from Rochdale, who had won a national award, and two of his models, a man who collected toy soldiers along with the pride and joy of his collection, a film about Spitfires, and, best of all, a lion-tamer from a local circus with his lion.

From the start things did not go well. The model girls were frightened by the animal and knocked over the display of model soldiers, causing their owner to have a row with the lion-tamer. With this happening over his shoulder, Denis tried to move into the studio behind him, forgetting he was attached to the desk by a neck mike. As he tried to move smoothly towards the engulfing chaos he was jerked backwards by the cord like a man who had been shot. He ended up draped over the back of his chair. From this position, and while attempting to unwrap the microphone cord, which was threatening to garrotte him, he decided to introduce the film about Spitfires. The film came up but without sound. As the Spitfires won the Battle of Britain, the only noises we could hear were model girls shrieking, a lion rumbling and its keeper arguing with a hairdresser.

When we returned to the studio it had been cleared of everyone except Denis who by now had a weal around his neck and looked like a failed suicide. He signed off with the epic line: ‘We hope you enjoyed the show. Goodnight.’ It marked the end of Denis’s career on camera and almost the end of Granada in the North.

Scene at 6.30
was, however, unstoppable. The greater part of its success was due to the nightly music spot booked by Johnnie Hamp. Johnnie had already found the Beatles and given them their first chance on television. Ever after, as hit followed hit, they appeared on the show. They became our resident group. Along with an inspired director, Phil Casson, Johnnie produced the first Beatles solo television show. The Animals, then unknown, did the studio warm-up. We followed the Beatles from their modest start, when Paul McCartney asked me for my autograph for his mum, to the frenzied beginnings of Beatlemania.

Johnnie had a shrewd eye for new talent. One day he called from London and said he had seen a great band that was going to be massive – the Rolling Stones. They arrived at the studio and rehearsed. Barrie Heads, our executive producer was a Bing Crosby kind of man and sometimes curmudgeonly. He called me and said he didn’t like their music or the cut of their jibs. Pay them off. Johnnie pointed out we had nothing to put in their place. In those days we didn’t hang on to video tapes, we simply recorded over them. Reluctantly, Barrie relented, and only because we had nothing to replace them, and the Stones made their television debut.

Many years later Bill Wyman gave me a copy of the contract I had signed. On their very first appearance I also interviewed Mick Jagger. It was a wonderful piece of stilted chat. I asked how long he thought the band might last and he said maybe a couple of years. He sounded quite posh at the time. I looked constipated. It became a tiny segment in Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the Stones, so when people ask me what else I did apart from telly, I always say I was in a movie made by the director of
Taxi Driver
.

19

A SPOT OF TROUBLE IN ZANZIBAR

In between the laughter and the cock-ups and the visits to Studio 3 we worked hard and produced a variety of programmes. We created a weekly jazz programme hosted by Benny Green, a show about art with Harold Riley, and a medical programme with Michael (later Lord) Winstanley, a natural television performer who could talk the leg off an iron pot.

We were all expected from time to time to produce
What the Papers Say
, a nightmare in those days of live television because it was fifteen minutes of script tightly linked to captions. The autocue of the sixties was not the sophisticated machine of today. It looked like a roll of bog paper and, to continue the comparison, often tore as if perforated. Then all the producer could do was hope the performer was up to it, which is why we all wanted to work with Brian Inglis or Bernard Levin.

Bernard had a photographic memory, as he proved one night when, three minutes into his script, the autocue failed and with only the faintest of pauses he continued from memory. He performed the script well enough for it to match nearly all the cues. He was a prickly, combative man who always seemed to be hurrying between confrontations without time or inclination for pleasantries. That said, I liked him a lot and we muddled along in a style pleasant enough for me to imagine a friendly response when I asked him to contribute to a charity book I was compiling.

The idea was to replicate an old Victorian visitors’ book, which had a list of innocuous questions – Favourite Flower, Favourite Book, Favourite Quotation etc – for the guest to fill in. I wrote to Bernard asking him to be one of my celebrity guests. He replied, by return: ‘Dear Michael. Thank you for your kind invitation. Upon mature reflection I think I would rather be dead. Yours, Bernard.’

Brian Inglis was a most beguiling man. He had an enviable grace of manner and a quiet humour that made him an irresistible companion to both men and women.

He was deputy editor of
The Spectator
in 1956 when he wrote and presented the very first edition of
What the Papers Say
. He went on to appear in another 160 editions over the next twenty years, and he became a television celebrity – a description he would have scorned – by presenting
All Our Yesterdays
for eleven years. Brian was both the complement and the antidote to the brash and aggressive side of the Granada personality, which the younger journalists like to think they invented.

In fact, they took their lead from an audacious Australian called Tim Hewat. Tim had been northern editor of the
Daily Express
before moving to Granada, and he quickly established a reputation as an innovative and imaginative creator of current-affairs programmes. He had the idea of following the Aldermaston March with multi-camera crews, editing the film overnight and producing within twenty-four hours a fascinating filmed account of the event. It had never been done before. He formed
World In Action
, a revolutionary concept in that he eliminated the on-camera reporter and relied instead on good pictures and a vigorous script.

He was big and brash, a man who asked you a question and then looked away as if he already knew the answer. Derek Grainger, who worked at Granada in these early days and who was a perceptive chronicler of people and events, describes him as ‘the ultimate hairy ape’. If Brian Inglis was the charming, diplomatic face of Granada, Tim Hewat was the battering ram.

Many years after I had left Granada I went to Australia to work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. I called Tim, who by this time had retired to a farm near Melbourne. We had not met for ten years or more and he came to my hotel for a drink. In my room he spied the list of questions for the talk show I was to record the next day. Without being invited he picked it up and began reading. He threw it down and said, ‘Crap.’ He wasn’t being unpleasant and I wasn’t upset. I knew that in Tim Hewat’s world the only way to tell a story was his way. In other words he wasn’t being unpleasant, merely himself.

It was Tim who revived my career as a war correspondent. I was called in one day and told that, as a reward for all my hard work on
Scene at 6.30
and the rest, I was to be given a working holiday in Turkey.

This entailed filming in Istanbul and Ankara to get the Turkish side of the civil war in Cyprus. Shouldn’t take long, Tim said, then I could spend a few days relaxing in Istanbul, looking at the Bosphorus. He introduced me to my cameraman, a twenty-two-year-old newcomer to
World In Action
, Chris Menges. Chris was a quiet, seemingly shy young man with an almost diffident manner, yet a fearless operator who went on to become one of the great Hollywood cinematographers. He made his name with
Kes
and won Oscars for
The Killing Fields
and
The Mission
.