I left RADA at Easter in 1966 and managed to become part of the acting company at The Royal Court Theatre.
I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing small parts and understudying.
My father had taken a job in Hastings. So he bought a house in the Old Town and moved there with my mother and much younger brother
I rented the actor Simon Ward’s basement flat off the Essex Road in Islington. My rent was £12 a week and my wages were £15 a week. Television work made life possible.
I had already played a small part for Granada Television, founded in Manchester almost 70 years ago, in 1956, by Sidney Bernstein.
There was a new series planned: City ’68, concerning social problems. My part was as Len (Husky) Huskisson, a football player whose violence on the pitch provoked violence in the spectators.
I told the director and producer I supported Millwall, which wasn’t true. But I knew it would sound as if I knew about violence. I was suited and booted, had the right look and got the part.
The director was Michael Apted (1941-2021), famous for the great Seven Up! series. I worked with him throughout my career, lastly as Pompey in HBO’s Rome (2005-7).
In City ’68, James Beck (1929-73), the spiv from Dad’s Army, was cast as a sports reporter. He told me I should stay at the Brown Bull, a pub with rooms on the edge of Salford – walking distance from Granada Studios. I had a single bed on the second floor.
The ground-floor bar was packed with the doyens of Manchester: Doreen Wells, an elegant, beautiful ballerina, later the Marchioness of Londonderry; Manchester United footballers; Coronation Street actors; and police officers. There was an upright piano.
They’d lock the doors and people would sing into the night. Frankie Vaughan’s Green Door came to mind: ‘There’s an old piano and they play it hot/ behind the green door.’
Well, I was finding out. Thanks to James Beck, who was catching my eye from across the bar, I was with the Manchester Granada TV ‘in’ crowd.
Granada Television created a film company, Granada Films. They put me under contract for All the Way Up (1970), a version of the play Semi- Detached – a huge success for Leonard Rossiter but no one else. It was one of the last films to have a photo card outside the cinema. Granada Films didn’t last long.
Granada Studios was a modern block facing a bomb-damaged area, overgrown with bushes and wild flowers, now used as a car park.
The men in uniform at the front desk were helpful and friendly. Facing them was one of Frances Bacon’s screaming popes. The corridor that led to the canteen was an art gallery of 20th-century modern art; none of it abstract – wonderful northern landscapes. The uniformed men made sure you received your expenses.
There were two major television companies at that time in Britain: Granada in Manchester and the BBC in White City, London. Built within four years of each other, they were totally different.
The uniformed men at White City, some of them rumoured to be retired prison warders from Wormwood Scrubs up the road, would eye you suspiciously and not want to let you into the building. They were too busy perhaps doffing their peaked caps to the trio of fiddlers, Savile, Rolf and Glitter.
At the entrance hall at Granada, they were delighted you were there and fattened your pockets with expenses gladly. Nearby were the best Chinese and Italian restaurants I’d ever come across. No wonder I love northerners and northern cities – and have done all my life.
One day, they needed to film a sequence: a newsflash of my character, Husky, committing a foul on the pitch – and the crowd’s reaction. A large number stayed on after the match; perhaps they thought they were going to be on Coronation Street, filmed at Granada since the first episode in 1960, 65 years ago. It was supposed to be a floodlit game at the Stockport County ground. Three of us walked on to the pitch. Two elderly costume ladies had given us football kit, still folded in creases from the packet. My opposing player was fat; the other one was skinny. None of us actors looked like footballers, especially alongside the real players, whose legs were twice the width of ours.
I had to knee one of them in the midriff and he had to hit the ground. The crowd, loving their chance to be on telly, clapped rhythmically and chanted ‘Poof, poof, poof’ in loud unison.
It was raining and muddy. In the changing rooms afterwards, we three weedy actors in the washroom were looked over by the real geezers.
I went to the Stockport County clubhouse and sought the company of the fruit machine. It had a cluster of silver sixpences nestled in its frontage.
On the third pull of the lever, I won the jackpot. The fruit machine opened and poured sixpences on to the floor. I gathered them up and had £15 in small coins. Bliss.
A few years later, Granada Television had a clubhouse and bar. If you were working there, you were a member. The North seemed to have kinder fruit machines. I loved sitting in the club watching Jean Alexander, the charlady Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street, dressed to the nines in smart coat and jewellery, armed with a stack of coins, playing her favourite fruit machine all evening. It was her date.
My friend Rick Stroud, now a writer and Oldie contributor, learnt to direct TV drama at Granada. Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell would tell him gently which camera angles worked best in the Rovers Return.
In 1968, I was cast in Coronation Street as a hippie. Elsie Tanner, much to my disappointment, had gone away. Her son, Dennis, had let a gang of hippies squat in the Tanner household. The hippies – Martin Shaw, Michael Attwell, Angela Pleasence, Veronica Clifford and I – sat cross-legged on the floor, crumbling Oxo cubes into cigarette papers.
Meanwhile, back at the Brown Bull, there was a snug bar occupied by an elderly couple with a beautiful shy young man. He’d been brought over from Belfast and was lodging with the sort of kind, older people he was perhaps used to. His name was George Best.
It was a great joy to go to a midweek game at Old Trafford and watch the magical trio of Law, Best and Charlton playing together – winning easily, no sweat. When United won the European Cup in 1968, George ignored the containment that had been advised and made the night his own. At the Brown Bull, George volunteered to organise fish and chips for the crowded bar. Not only did he remember everything that had been ordered, but the owners of the fish-and- chip shop served it all on china plates.
A television show was made 20 years after the European Cup win for Manchester United. One of the TV excerpts in the show was of me as a long-haired hippie descending the stairs in the Tanner household in Coronation Street. I had a black wig and body paint in flower patterns.
At the bottom of the stairs stood the landlord of the Rover’s Return and Dennis Tanner. I said to the two of them, ‘What’s for breakfast, man? If it’s flesh, it’s out.’
Manchester loved George, who died 20 years ago, aged 59. He would have been 80 this year. He was their crown prince; the fifth Beatle. I adored him, too.
He opened a Manchester boutique, Edwardia, and Slack Alice, a nightclub. There I watched him build pyramids of champagne flutes and fill them up – a torrentially epic way to lose money.
One night in the Manchester rain, I was at a bus stop. George pulled up in his white Jaguar. He opened the door and I got in. He drove me to the Brown Bull. No one saw me get in and no one saw me get out. It exists only in my memory.
And what a warm and lovely memory Granada Television is.
Kenneth Cranham was in Oliver! (1968), Shine on Harvey Moon (1982-85) and Hatton Garden (2019)
