They talked about the past. Escapades, capers, scandals, outrages.
Bad Luck and Trouble, 2007
It was Wednesday 29 June, 1977. At some point between 2 and 3.55 p.m. Jane was out at work. Jim was out of work, apart from occasional shifts as stage manager at the Crucible. He was lounging at home on the sofa in the soulless new flat in Halfway, mentally constructing the blueprint of a better house and watching the Wimbledon Championships (in those days the women’s final was played on Friday and the men’s on Saturday). They were so poor they had rented a black-and-white television, but by then the green grass was stamped on his retina.
It was a historic occasion. Thirty-one-year-old local favourite Virginia Wade, three times a losing semi-finalist, was facing her nemesis, US golden girl and defending champion Chris Evert, a decade younger, who had beaten her in twenty-two of their previous twenty-seven meetings. Evert had already dispatched fourteen-year-old Tracy Austin and Billie-Jean King, who was even older than Wade. Ginnie’s American coach Jerry Teeguarden was puffing on his pipe in the players’ box and Chrissie’s on-off love interest Jimmy Connors was poised to face eighteen-year-old John McEnroe.
It’s no coincidence that it was to New York-based Chrissie that Reacher so ecstatically surrendered in High Heat at the age of sixteen. Chris Evert was Jim’s favourite tennis player. Even forty years later he recalled how pleasant it was to watch her ‘glow’ and how both pleasure and glow increased as the match built to its climax. Miss Evert was retro. She didn’t sweat, she ‘got damp’. But in some repressed recess of his Americanophile psyche he was happy that the long-suffering Miss Wade went on to beat Betty Stöve in the final, thrashing her 6–1 in the third set and perspiring profusely.
Somehow the tennis focused Jim’s mind. That and the holes in the wafer-thin wall, which he’d had to patch, having accidentally drilled through into the neighbour’s flat while putting up bookshelves. Jane would be pleased when she got home from work. But it wasn’t enough. I’d better get my act together, he thought, and apply for that job.
At first he hadn’t taken any notice. But in the end he couldn’t help himself. He was programmed. That was his job. To get a job and support the family, even if for now they were only a family of two. It was in his DNA. And in case he had any notion of breaking the evolutionary mould it had been drummed into him at King Edward’s too. It was right there in the school song, like an earworm admonishing him from within. Die of service, not of rust.
So when the match was over and Chrissie had gone and while the thought still remained he hauled himself up off the sofa and went in search of the newspaper. Specifically, the Guardian of Friday 24 June. There in the media section, he saw an advertisement headed: Granada Television, Trainee, Transmission Control.
That would do very nicely.
He didn’t so much apply as notify Granada of his intention to arrive. Which he did, on 12 September, a date he remembered as vividly as he did Chris Evert.
Robert Reeves had got there ahead of him. He had seen the exact same ad a few months before and had started work on 21 June. Granada were after two trainees but had found only one. So the notice Jim saw was a re-advertisement: Previous applicants need not re-apply. It was like it was directed at him. We’re waiting just for you, Jim Grant! ‘I knew I’d get it,’ he told Rob. ‘I knew exactly what to say.’
‘I knew I’d get it,’ he told me forty years later. ‘I knew exactly what to say.’
When asked what he’d written in his letter of application he said: ‘I know I’m the person for this job, you won’t need to hire anyone else, I know it’s me.’ Which I interpreted as a concise paraphrase of a considered argument until Nigel Hallam told me it read: ‘Look no further, I’m your man.’ As Rob put it, there were times when Jim was ‘teetering on the edge of arrogance and maybe going over the other side’.
But there was no denying he was right. ‘Sure enough, he got it,’ Rob said. ‘He was cut out for that job. It’s a job for cool, almost machine-like people in their thinking, and he was ideally suited to it.’ Legend has it Granada were so tantalised by his one-liner that by the time Jim and Jane got home from holiday there was a pile of letters on the doormat all saying something like, ‘Why aren’t you answering our letters? We’re holding the job till we can interview you.’
‘He slotted right in,’ recalled Stephen Gallagher, who was already established in the same role. Presentation was a hard gig to define. It recruited individuals with a creative bent for a job that allowed little scope for individual creativity. ‘We were at the heart of show business, the point crew for the country’s leading commercial broadcaster, but when it came down to it we were the traffic managers of other people’s art.’ Jim’s attitude was that he’d fallen backward into this well-remunerated media job where he could sleep in late every day for three out of every four weeks and where the weekend evening shifts were the cue for an elaborate boozy picnic in the control room. ‘We called them “soirées”.’ Gallagher remembered Jim saying how his parents made him swear never to tell his more diligent older brother how much he was earning. It was almost indecent.
In August 1978 Jim and Jane moved to Stalybridge in Greater Manchester and got their first dog, Stanley (for whom Reacher’s father was named). Stalybridge was eight miles east of the city and had been one of the first centres of cotton manufacturing but was now semi-rural. Copley Park Mews was the Grants’ first house, where Ruth was born, and special for these reasons alone. But, directly opposite Copley Mill in a cobbled courtyard off the Huddersfield Road, it was also of historic interest, judged in a 2013 conservation appraisal to be ‘a pocket of character’. No. 13 is in a terrace of 1830s workers’ cottages, built back-to-back in local stone with slate roofs but later knocked through into three-bedroom single dwellings with private parking. The robust architectural detail was typical of early nineteenth-century Pennine mill buildings, the watershot cut of the bricks helping rain to run down the exposed masonry. The terrace was built by mill owner James Wilkinson and had outlived his own Brookfield House, whose adjacent grounds, lake and glasshouses had long since been reclaimed by self-seeding woodland.
It was tempting to see the move to Granada as written in the stars. On 5 July 1954 the British Broadcasting Corporation broadcast its first daily news programme, with Richard Baker presenting. In the same year, a few months before James Grant was born, the government passed the Television Act, permitting the creation of the United Kingdom’s first commercial network. The weekday franchise for the north of England was granted to Granada Television, which along with Associated-Rediffusion, ATV and ABC quickly became established as one of ‘The Big Four’ providing the majority of network output. The Conservative government had learned from the American experience that multiple competing stations meant a race to the bottom, so instead awarded a monopoly to the regions. Costs were 100 per cent tax deductible and in the trenchant opinion of plain-speaking newspaper baron Lord Thomson, a stake in commercial television was the equivalent of having ‘a licence to print money’.
Granada’s rise from zero to hero was spectacular. Just a year after the contract was signed, the inaugural transmission went on air from a state-of-the art studio complex on Quay Street, the first commercial building to be constructed in Manchester after the war, crucial to the city’s regeneration and with its illuminated period typeface soon to become a landmark on the skyline. Twenty-odd years after this genesis moment there were many more independent stations but the technology remained largely unchanged, and Jim and Rob were at the sharp end. Jim calculated that there were fifteen thousand pieces of information to process in any one day, all of them timed to the second.
Lee’s memories of that time are of how carefree it was. When asked at interview if he had any questions, he replied ‘No, I think I’ve got all I need, thank you.’ ‘Don’t you want to know how much you’re going to be paid?’ ‘Oh yeah, of course, thanks!’ Then: ‘Wow, really?’ Jim couldn’t believe how much better it was than selling ice-creams or drying peas or lugging boxes. ‘I thought if I earned £100 a week everything would be just fine. Then pretty soon I was earning £500 a week. What more could I possibly want?’ He got a 40 per cent pay rise after his first year. It was a period of high inflation, and he soon became accustomed to the rapid escalation in salary.
He contrasted his ‘charmed career’ with that of his father. ‘My father got a job and dutifully went to work every day for the rest of his working life, but never enjoyed what he did.’ Whereas Lee had done ‘only things he loved doing, in a realm that he loved’. While admitting he sometimes complained, he had never felt unhappy about going to work in the morning. Especially since becoming a writer. ‘This job? It’s a dream! Sit around and make shit up and get paid a shedload of money?’ No, I think I’ve got all I need, thank you.
Success had contributed retrospectively to this Chrissie-like glow. ‘I had a very lovely career in TV,’ I heard Lee tell assembled fans more than once. ‘I loved every minute of it. By my third day I was being trained by a lovely woman who told me “Come on, we’re going to lunch with some actors.” And she picked up a Fortnum & Mason wicker hamper and I followed her out of the room and we had lunch with Alec Guinness, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier.’ What more could I possibly want? ‘Lovely’ became a defining word.
‘Bollocks!’ was Rob’s response. ‘He wouldn’t tell that story if I was in the audience.’ It was true that Olivier had made Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, shot at Granada Studios in 1976, and Rob knew someone who could remember Olivier being snubbed by Ena Sharples of Coronation Street when he ventured into the canteen. But ‘no one in our department knew Alec Guinness and John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier.’
Rob recalled his own first day, which he surmised was typical. He came in wearing a jacket and tie and got introduced to people: Candice Morgan, secretary to David Black, boss of Presentation, and head of Promotions Joe Rigby, brother of actor Terence and known as the fifth Beatle for his haircut, and music hall artist Wilf Parkin, then someone took him down to the canteen for lunch, where he saw no wicker hampers and no Laurence Olivier. ‘I would say London to a brick on it’s not true,’ Rob concluded, emphatically.
We shared a moment of contemplative silence then remembered how Lee would also tell audiences that if you asserted something with sufficient authority people would happily believe you. ‘By telling you that story he’s just had you,’ Rob said. ‘You’ve believed something that isn’t true.’ The compliant reader was always willing to suspend disbelief.
I confronted Lee with Rob’s scepticism. He stood by his recollection but conceded he was hazy on timing. Perhaps it was the third week, or the third month, but in his mind it had definitely happened. I found no evidence of all four actors convening at the Manchester studios on a single day. Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land aired in early 1978, starring Gielgud and Richardson and overlapping with the prestigious Laurence Olivier Presents series – maybe if you discounted Alec Guinness it was all true. Either way it felt like mythic realism in action.
Mainly Lee told the story to set up his punchline. ‘I had a very lovely career in TV. I loved every minute of it. Then one day my boss said something to me that made it impossible for me to continue: You’re fired.’ Guinness, Gielgud, Richardson and Olivier would have applauded his determination to deliver a crowd-pleasing performance.
Lee had commended Rob to me for the excellence of his memory. But later Rob wrote to say he was no longer certain, like he too was falling prey to that persuasive authorial voice. ‘The weird thing is that when I was driving home a dim remembrance did come back that maybe he’d told me something along those lines one time. But not all four giants of the English stage, in one go on his third day!’ When a huge star was filming there (Bowie, Hoffman) ‘you generally knew and would talk about it’.
‘Not sure why everyone would assume they were all working at GTV,’ wrote Lee. ‘There was the BBC in Manchester, also theatre, plus nearby cities. Larry was out of seclusion, and if he invited friends to lunch they might have travelled a distance.’ It was characteristic that he should want the last word, but there was no disputing his logic.
Training began in the third-floor open-plan office that housed Planning, Presentation and Promotions, where you got a sense of the interlocking whole. Schedules were produced on typewriters and listed programmes, promotions and commercial breaks, with the length of each precisely defined. ‘Everything had to be exact,’ Rob said. ‘It was timed to an absolute second.’ There was an area set aside for changes to be made by hand and until you mastered those critical skills there was no way you’d be let loose on the ground floor.
There was a real sense as we went down to CCR [central control room] that we were the intrepid ones. There was a kudos to working there. It was a totally different world, the nerve centre, something bordering on the sacrosanct about it. Any outsiders who walked in seemed to emit a kind of nervous respect.
Jim and Rob trained together and were made assistant transmission controllers in January 1978, which meant Jim had got there faster. He was promoted faster too. From trainee to assistant to controller by 1981, then presentation director, the youngest by a decade, and finally senior presentation director, lord of all he surveyed. By the time he became Lee Child he was accustomed to being top dog.
Central control room looked like something out of the Starship Enterprise, a two-person flight desk facing a six-by-four bank of grey, slightly convex screens. For a lay audience Lee would liken his former job to that of air traffic controller. Rob thought it was more complicated, because the air traffic guy was dealing only with a single source, ‘with plane after plane after plane after plane’.
Transmission teams worked in pairs, with the senior partner on the right issuing instructions, and the junior on the left, executing them and operating the desk. The assistant was like the controller’s arms and legs. The controller was there to troubleshoot, would answer the red telephone if a problem was called in from across the network or take over the controls if the assistant had to be dispatched to the pub for a bottle of wine, and had always come up through the ranks. There was no such thing as fast-track officer-level entry: you had to have been a foot soldier first.
When I met him in 2018 in Kirkby Lonsdale, Rob brought with him two treasured archaeological artefacts: a pair of old-style faders, one for vision and one for sound, the same as had been used by every assistant transmission controller since the launch of independent television in 1955. When new technology was introduced in 1981 and the old control room was abandoned, Jim and Rob had broken in one night and rummaged around in the ruins until they found them in a box. ‘Here,’ said Jim. ‘You keep those two and I’ll have separate sound.’
Rob wanted me to hold the fader in my hand and test it out. He wanted me to feel how heavy it was and how it had a spring that made it resistant to pressure. I pushed down on the lever. Rob explained how when I released it, in that precise instant it would ‘take’ the next source I had chosen for it – movie, commercial, soap opera, news – and there was no going back. ‘See how it’s responsive to your touch? That’s why I brought it. It’s important. This was the job we did. Everything went through here: these two, and separate sound.’ The faders were built into the control desk side by side, plugging into the network wires, with separate sound just slightly apart in case you wanted to crossfade.
‘Technologically it was the most complicated time for the job we did,’ Rob said, because there were so many different sources, including a mix of still and moving images. ‘You had film, you had three-inch and two-inch videotape, which ran off fifteen-second rolls, and you had slide commercials on cassettes.’ Sometimes you had five cassettes to play in a single break, but the stack only held three, which meant you’d be holding down the sound and vision faders in the ready position with one hand while changing cassettes with the other.
Commercial breaks were insane. They only lasted five minutes but the assistant might have to take up to fifty separate actions, which meant fifty chances of getting it wrong. There might be three and a half minutes of commercial with a one-minute promotion at the head, which could involve cuing a live announcer, and a thirty-second promotion at the end, and since this was before the advent of self-contained television, when promotions would be delivered off-the-peg, you had to juggle all the elements simultaneously and repeatedly – image, jingle, caption, voiceover – like being conductor and orchestra all at once.
Meticulous planning went into the tour de force of those five-minute breaks. The watchword was to do the next thing you had to do as soon as you possibly could. ‘When it came up to one minute to the break you would open talkback and say, if the first source was telecine: “One minute stand-by 35 A”, which stipulated 35mm film on camera A in the telecine room, and then, at the end of that minute, “35 A roll film”. “One minute stand-by VTR A” would mean fifteen-inch tape on machine A.’ These were protocols he and Jim had executed thousands of times, so Rob was surprised when in 2015 Jim had asked to be reminded of the exact form of words.
Rob left Granada in 1984. He did seven years to Jim’s eighteen. But forty years later both still had the same dream, only it’s a nightmare: you’re doing everything wrong, and those five-minute breaks are five minutes of unmitigated disaster. A 2015 entry from Rob’s diary reads:
I had returned, and was on with Jim. Frozen by my complete unfamiliarity with the mixer, I floundered around looking for the right buttons and faders. Jim said nothing, except to say that all the faders were different, then he left me there, on my own, to watch another programme run out into interminable black.
‘If Jim hadn’t become Lee Child I wonder if he would have left me to get on with it?’ Rob mused. And if not for Reacher, would he have said nothing?
If you got it wrong you’d go in the log. Which explained the subject line of one of Jim’s emails to Rob: ‘I’m gonna have to log you, mate.’ This was a line favoured by previous-generation controller Norman Matthews. The log would read: ‘15:45 break, finger trouble ATC, missed first two seconds of commercial.’ The subtext: I’ve got it over you.
Caroline Gosling worked in Promotions for two years from 1979, around the time continuity announcers first went in-vision, while Jim was still an assistant. She too was from Birmingham and felt drawn to Jim’s ‘dry sense of humour’ and ‘slight Brummie drawl’. Promotions worked a day ahead, scheduling trailers and commercials (mostly slides with voiceover) as they were booked in from the Golden Square headquarters in London or from Local Sales down the corridor. Sometimes they had to mock up promos themselves, as well as supplying captions (white Letraset on black card) for the newly introduced local news bulletin that followed the News at One and was always pre-packaged, even though they spoke of putting it out ‘live’ to ‘air’.
One of Caroline’s jobs was to prepare a daily ‘spot sheet’ for Presentation to work from, alerting Jim or Rob to potential gaps. Programmes were cut to a commercial hour, and Promotions would request thirty-, forty-five- or sixty-second slots to fill the remaining time, with any slack taken up by continuity announcements. If it turned out there were twenty seconds unaccounted for going in to Coronation Street and thirteen coming out, those two periods could be combined for an additional thirty-second trailer, moving the episode up or down by ten seconds on the spot sheet and incorporating a three-second freeze where it was least intrusive. Often the announcer could self-edit on the hoof or improvise over a programme rundown slide, but sometimes transmission controllers would have to scramble to rewrite a script or cut some film together, troubleshooting on a wing and a prayer to cover their backs, because wasting seconds was the ultimate transgression.
The high stakes gave the job its adrenaline rush and conferred upon those who executed it a heroic glamour, like they were engaging in some death-defying extreme sport. Not only would mistakes be broadcast across the land but they would cost the company serious money. Commercials were a massive source of revenue and the loss of even a second would have to be accounted for. In the 1980s, Lee recalled, they were bringing in a million pounds a day and ‘if we screwed up it mattered’. Which meant they wielded tremendous power. As transmission controller you were in ‘absolute control’ and ‘not even the managing director could override you’. ‘On the day you were the word of God.’
Jim and Rob had about five years of unforgettable thrills and spills. Then things started becoming automated, which was one of the reasons Rob went. Everything was on tape. You no longer had to use a caption generator or live-mix a promo. The fifty actions were reduced to fifteen and you could start sleeping easy at night. But it was a loss as much as a gain, the end of a swashbuckling era of derring-do. When Channel 4 began in 1982 it was ‘basically computerised. They just loaded these cassettes. Every programme they had, every commercial, they just sat there and watched it go out.’
It was like they were watching the creativity go out of it as well.
‘Later the job became too slick,’ Lee said. ‘It was more fun when there was more of a random element to it.’ For him the difference was defined in the shift from the Falklands War in 1982 to the Gulf War in 1991. ‘In the first case we were having to think on our feet, with information coming at us left, right and centre. There were fifteen telephones and one day they rang incessantly, all day long. That night I heard telephones in my sleep. It was the closest I ever got to too much stress in my life.’ Whereas in the second case ‘it all came to us pre-packaged by ITN’, the Independent Television News channel that the networks owned collectively.
Jim liked being boss. He liked having to take decisions and act on them and defend them. ‘There were lots of vectors. We had to protect company revenue, comply with government regulations, consider public taste, respect moral imperatives and accept responsibility.’ Whereas the job of assistant was purely operational, that of controller was editorial too. Controllers had to be on-the-spot responsive. ‘If we had news film about famine in Ethiopia, it didn’t feel right to be pushing Fray Bentos meat pies.’ You were ‘thinking on behalf of the audience’. Like being a writer of popular novels.
Lee recalled an incident in Ireland. The southern networks weren’t interested, but since there was a strong Irish presence in Liverpool and Manchester he and his team took it upon themselves to assemble a news bulletin, and were hauled up next day for treading on the toes of the news team. ‘So I said, if you don’t want us to step on your toes then you’d better stick around until 1 a.m. every day to do it yourselves.’
‘Jim was always calm at work,’ said former colleague Janet Brown. ‘I never knew him to lose his temper. He would always take control when the system went down.’
Janet was a loggist from the mid-seventies until 1981. She was based at a typewriter with a silencer, and her job was to log every transmission. She would start by typing up the schedule, then systematically check off each item as it went out. If there was a deviation or loss of transmission, however fleeting, she would note it down precisely, including the exact duration. It was painstaking work, accommodating few pauses and no lapses in concentration, with only the assistant to cover for her when she needed a break, which then required the controller to step in at the desk.
It seemed to me that the members of CCR were engaged in a ceaseless ritual dance, or were like the interlocked, interdependent elements of a single complex organism. Like the artillery crews in Night School, whose coordination Reacher describes as ‘almost gymnastic’, ‘as complicated as a ballet, timed to the tenth of a second’.
Lee and Rob both remembered Jim Grant’s finest hour at Granada. But they were two different hours.
‘It was the Iranian Embassy siege night,’ Rob said. Even though Jim was still an assistant he’d been left on his own. It was bank holiday Monday, 5 May 1980, and Jim’s hero, Canadian Cliff Thorburn, had just won the World Snooker Championship at the Crucible. Maybe the controller had gone out to buy drinks or play a game of pool, ‘when suddenly the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy and the news channel took over’. Jim had to completely rewrite the schedule. ‘These bombs were going off and it was still all the complicated stuff and he was relatively new, but he held it together. He was ideally suited to do that.’ Like Reacher, Jim Grant had grace under pressure.
Lee thought his biggest gig came during the royal wedding of 29 July 1981, when Granada lost their live feed just as Prince Charles was saying ‘I do’ to Princess Diana. By this time Jim had been promoted to controller (and had moved house again as a result). Quick to recognise a state of emergency, he broke every rule in the book by patching into the BBC for several minutes just to keep the show on the road. He was no royalist, but he had professional standards, and to this day he was proud of that moment.
Later he would pass on to Reacher the benefit of his experience. This is from Killing Floor (chapter six), when the character is in the early stages of definition:
Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you do later. If you survive.
Ian Gerrard was an assistant under Jim in subsequent, less nail-biting years.
I remember him sat in the Control Room appearing to pay no attention to what was going on, reading books (he was an avid book reader) and papers all the time whilst the ATCs did all the work, but then when an emergency arose he was instantly on it, sorting any problems out. He was definitely the most calm and level-headed TC you could wish to have working with you. His photographic memory and knowledge were his greatest assets, which is borne out with the detail and descriptions in his books.
When he wrote in 2018 Ian was still working part-time in transmission control, but like Lee and Rob was quick to point out how much less interesting it was. ‘Computers have taken over and the job is basically list watching. In the past you used to go into work and think about how you could improve transmission – now you go in just to make sure the list keeps running and feed the machine.’ We were entering Vonnegut’s ‘little boxes’ future.
On 23 June 2005, at the Fox 6 TV station in Milwaukee for an author interview, Lee Child saw his first studio with robot cameras. ‘Made my old trade unionist’s blood run cold,’ he blogged, ‘all those camera operators out of work.’
Jim was the calm at the eye of the storm. Conservation of energy may have been his natural modus operandi but it made a lasting impression on colleagues. Iain Hale was an engineer who worked in the four operational studios: Telecine, VTR, Network Control and ACR. ‘ACR25s were video cassette recorders,’ he explained, ‘which had air-operated transport systems that would sometimes fail, with spectacular consequences for transmission as another source would need to be cued up while the ACR25 was recovered.’
Working in the adjacent control area meant that because of the long shifts (up to fourteen hours) […] we had time to get to know something about each other’s personality. Jim was always laid back and never flustered. Always in control. I remember he could be sitting at the control desk reading the paper and he would reach over to open the talkback key: ‘That’s a minute and ten VTR A.’ Having given the standby cue Jim would resume reading until about fifteen seconds before the roll, when he would put down the paper, open talkback and say: ‘VTR A roll tape’, and bring up the output on the mixer to Air. This was happening on multiple occasions at every programme junction throughout the hours we were broadcasting.
The less time there was, the more he had. It was the equivalent of creating the illusion of space in a tight New York apartment, or writing ‘the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast’.
By the time he was fired Jim held the title of senior presentation director. It was the same job he’d always done, if a little easier, but he’d risen to the top of the tree. ‘Maybe we had a new button to push. But they had to give us new job titles to justify the pay rises.’
Through the law of unintended consequences the word ‘director’ played right into Lee Child’s storytelling hands like a final-salary pension. ‘At Granada I was a director, not a writer,’ he would say in early interviews, when he was building his new persona and needed to make his mark. He never explicitly claimed to have directed Brideshead Revisited or Jewel in the Crown or Prime Suspect or Cracker. But he didn’t disabuse those who made that claim on his behalf. Their research was their responsibility. Not his problem. He rarely corrected the misinformation that circulated about him on the internet. It all added to the mystique.
Rob agreed that this was merely to sin by omission. He reviewed in his mind certain times he’d seen his old friend on television, maybe with Richard and Judy or on some other chat show, when he’d been asked about his Granada days. ‘He wouldn’t really talk about the job he did, not the job I’ve told you about. He’d just let these things go.’ The director of Brideshead Revisited was Charles Sturridge. ‘We were just rolling tape.’
But rolling tape was a big deal, back in the glory days of British television. Where would the artistic director be without the transmission team? What if the controller at the desk simply chose not to release that all-important fader? What then?
The job title was irrelevant. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Jim Grant was still the main man.