I was sad to hear of Peter Fonda’s death, not just because he starred in Easy Rider, one of my favourite films, or just because he was unusual for a Hollywood star (in those days) to take an active role in the counter revolution of the late 1960s, but also because I have personal memories of the time when I met him and filmed him in 1986 when making the British TV documentary, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. He was fun and amusing and on my initial recce trip to meet him in Livingstone, Montana, he invited me to race him back to his ranch a few miles away. I had a big American car (can’t remember the make) and he had something fast and expensive. He sped off, a challenge I think, so I had to put my foot down to keep up with him. We spent the evening sitting in directors’ chairs, drinking Californian white wine, on the veranda of his house and watching the light fade over the Rocky Mountains. It was a truly memorable occasion. He was an old friend, it seemed, when we met again for the filming in Los Angeles. RIP Peter Fonda, you were a good man.

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It definitely felt like the passing of an era, hearing about Ray Fitzwalter’s death. He was a truly decent person and a wryly funny one too, as well as being one of that clever, yes, brilliant, but also very lucky generation of TV producers who held the reins when the ‘miracle of capitalism’ that was pre-Broadcasting Bill ITV meant that companies like Granada actually invested real money in serious programme-making, before the whole industry changed, partly through the consequences of the mostly exciting digital revolution and partly through the wilful and on-going destruction of British public service broadcasting by government interference.

My main involvement with World In Action was being asked, over a number of years, to do the voice of ‘sneering authority’ whenever they needed someone to voice some of establishment’s bad guys, including politicians, bishops and captains of industry. It may have been embarrassing to be considered the right voice for these people but I always felt I was doing my bit when I was asked to go down to sit in on the programme’s dubbing. Now that the series is long gone, I still feel good about  my minor involvement with such an important programme.

I look back fondly, and with some pride, on my twenty years at Granada TV and offer my sympathy to all who will be saddened by Ray’s passing and to all those bright-eyed TV folk still fighting to keep British television alive.

Ray Fitzwalter:

Bafta Award-winning investigative journalist Ray Fitzwalter  was the longest-serving editor of ITV’s World in Action. His programmes for the Granada-made series, which ended in 1998, included an investigation which ultimately led to the release of the Birmingham Six. He spent 23 years working on the World in Action series, which was aired on ITV and gained a reputation for its audacious reporting. He was also instrumental in the uncovering of the Poulson affair – an investigation into the Yorkshire architect John L Poulson and his use of bribery to win contracts. The scandal rocked the Edward Heath government and led to the resignation of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling.

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I am sad to see the passing of that seemingly eternal ‘young Turk’ of British politics, Tony Benn. He lived long enough to survive the vilification and ridicule that was often thrown at him by his opponents and became in the end a bit of a National Treasure, albeit still very much an irritant on the backside of the political establishment. No one, fortunately, seems to have missed the fact that he was a man of integrity and one of the most charming people ever to walk the British political stage.

I was fortunate to have met him on a number of occasions when I worked in television. As a young and inexperienced TV researcher for Granada Television one of my earliest assignments was finding myself seeking a short street-side interview with Tony Benn in the early 1980s when he was almost daily news as the leading spokesman for the left of the embattled Labour Party. He knew that the media was often not his friend so I was somewhat daunted by the disdain that answered my request. Maybe he noticed my reaction because in moments his demonic expression turned to one of mischievousness as he told me not to forget that he’d once been a young broadcaster too, in his days at the BBC, and he said: “don’t forget that i know all your techniques.” When the camera rolled he was every bit as articulate and professional as if he had been interviewed by someone who knew what they were doing. I was deeply impressed that someone in such a dramatic period of his life could find the time for a moment of fellow feeling. I think that was his greatest characteristic.

I met him again on numerous occasions during the 1980s, mostly at the Labour Party Conferences where he was a significant voice during the long years of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration when, no longer a cabinet minister,  he became the voice of Labour’s socialist conscience or, depending on your viewpoint, one of the main reasons why the Labour Party in those years became unelectable. His oratory at that time was impassioned, focused and remains memorable. I was thrilled to witness it. Again, in my humble position as a media hound, I was consistently surprised by the man. He was very much in the firing line in those days but, in my experience, he always took the time to talk, to treat every question, even unworthy ones, with respect and usually he could still find the time for a joke.

I was still on the scene as a political TV researcher when he decided to take his fight for Socialism even further within the Labour Party by standing for the Deputy Leadership of the party against the equally formidable Denis Healey, who won. Both men impressed me with their charm, their sense of fun but most of all with their intelligence and passion. Britain misses politicians of their intellectual vigour today. I was lucky to be a behind-the-camera witness to those years when battle raged inside the Labour Party to find an electable manifesto to replace the pre-eminence of Margaret Thatcher. The Labour Party fractured before our eyes, splitting down the middle and leading to the the formation of what was to become the Liberal Democrat Party. Tony Benn never wavered in his position on the need for Labour to be a Socialist party and even when Tony Blair became Prime Minister, in 1997, Tony Benn called him the worst leader the Labour Party had ever had. The battle is still raging today and will continue even though Tony Benn has died. History may see him as a failure, a man who failed to make Britain a Socialist country but it will also have to note that he was often right too. He predicted the dangers of a World in thrall to a few powerful international companies and of the consequences of that particularly soulless form of Capitalism for the vast majority of the World’s citizens. If many of his policies failed then his voice of conscience was heard and will be remembered. In many ways he was the Saint Francis of Assisi of the Labour Party. His ideals and his example inspired but as in Saint Francis’ Christian Church, the compromises of politics held sway.

I last saw Tony Benn on 15th February 2003 when I went on a march through London with a million others in demonstration against the Iraq War. I was inspired once more by his oratory and impressed that, after all these years, he still hadn’t given up on his ideals. We lost that cause too but his fiery voice lives on beyond what was then seen as another failed cause.  He will, I hope, be honoured one day as the profound voice of a nation’s conscience. He will certainly be remembered and, once more, he was right about that. His meticulous diaries will be read long after many of his opponents are forgotten.

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

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There is no question now that the death of Margaret Thatcher has been seen as a significant event worldwide. Britain’s only female prime minster and the country’s longest serving premier of the last century, was also Britain’s most controversial leader. Adored by her fans and yet still capable of producing anger in her detractors 23 years after leaving office.

Cleverer people than me are already writing political analyses of her period in office so I shan’t try to add to the media babble except by marking the moment with some personal recollections of the woman and that time.

In October 1980, as a very junior TV political researcher for Granada Television, I was dispatched to the Brighton Conservative Party Conference. I stood in the journalists’ corale at the foot of the conference platform with the newspaper photographers and hacks, the Conservative Party loyalists sitting behind me and in front, on the stage, Margaret Thatcher was making what is now one of her most famous speeches: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” I was there in a professional capacity, along with a horde of other slightly scruffy “neutrals” separated from what turned into a rumbustious celebration by the Tory faithful.

Lefty liberal me was astonished by the charisma and power of this woman on my first sighting of her “in the flesh”. Of course I knew that she hadn’t written that speech, it was the work of playwright,  Ronald Miller, but there was no question about the power in the way she delivered Miller’s words. She was not turning, she said, on the economy. This was the beginning, in many people’s minds, of what Thatcherism really meant. She was not going to change her mind over monetarist economic policy even though even many of her own party were advising a less drastic solution to the then rising unemployment figures,  there were two million people unemployed in October 1980 and the country was in recession. She didn’t turn and unemployment continued to rise.

Going into that conference, I wore a grey suit. It was an unusual style for me but necessary as I was meant to be mingling with the Conservative Party elite and I tried to look the part. I had my journalist credentials on my lapel as I walked towards Brighton’s concrete Conference Centre and even before I got there I could hear the shouting. Crowds of demonstrators stood behind iron rails and a human wall of policemen and, quite unexpectedly, I felt myself running the gauntlet of abuse as I walked through the barriers on into the conference apparently mistaken for an eager young Conservative. Up until that point in my life I had never heard such anger and hatred expressed by so many people. I was shaken to my core. So there it was, in a nutshell, the great divide between Mrs Thatcher and her opponents. It has never healed.

After her speech, she descended from the stage and mingled with the audience, at one point she was propelled by crowd pressure in my direction and, briefly, she brushed into me. I realized, even then, that her security would need to be tightened but these were the still comparatively innocent days before the IRA blew up the Brighton hotel where she was staying for the conference four years later. In that moment of physical contact, I realized how vulnerable politicians really were and, also, that, charismatic or deluded, they were all just human beings.

During my time working on political programmes, I came across many of the leading figures from all sides of the political divide in those dramatic and painful times. It wasn’t easy to find heroes in those days. I saw Margaret Thatcher deliver many more speeches feeling that I was witnessing a phenomenon but also the destruction of Britain as I knew it.

In 1980-81 I filmed the some of the consequences of the closing of the Shotton and Corby Steel Works, a symbol then of the eventual collapse of British industry, and the effect that it had on the local population. I also filmed in the village of Grimethorpe during the now World famous 1984-85 Miners Strike and, without entering the debate over trades union power, I saw at first hand the despair and hardship of the miners and their families. It was very difficult to see these things and to remain neutral over government policy. The damage to British manufacturing has not been mended and if it is true that some trades union excesses were curbed for the good, today’s loss of adequate representation for many poorly paid workers is a tragic legacy of those times

I kept that grey suit and was often sent on party political assignments to the House of Commons, to the political conferences and, on one memorable occasion, to a drinks party given at Conservative Party Central Office for newspaper and television journalists. It was there that I had my only face to face meeting with Margaret Thatcher. A little bit of me wanted to blow my professional cover and tell her what I really thought but I would never had done that even if I had dared. I was doing a job. Instead, she asked hospitably if I had a drink and talked about Granada Television with well-informed good nature while drinking what looked like a rather stiff glass of whisky on the rocks. Considering the hectoring and often patronising manner that came across on television, and I hate to admit it, she was actually a rather attractive woman with a fetchingly down-to-earth manner and, yes, even a sense of humour.

On later filming projects, in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Hungary, East Germany and what was then Czechoslovakia, I met many people who spoke fondly of the “Iron Lady” seeing her as an essential ingredient in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thinking of that drinks session with her, I could quite believe that she would have used her charm on the Americans and Russians to help bring about the  end of the Cold War  and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall. As we come to bury Margaret Thatcher, let that be praise enough even if not everyone in those former Soviet nations can still celebrate the dawning of the true downside of Thatcherite capitalism.

I know I would never have liked her on a personal level and I still stand on the side of her detractors despising her narrow-mindedness, her intolerance, her philistinism and her brutality but I was privileged to have been able to observe her and that time at first hand. She was undeniably a powerful and charismatic leader and personally more fun that I had imagined too. Her personal achievement as Britain’s first female Prime Minister has to be acknowledged and it seems strangely appropriate for the nation to bury her with some dignity and without some of the tasteless but understandable abuse sung by her more thespian-minded detractors but –  ah yes, and it’s a big but – but much damage was done to Britain and to many British people in those days and I fear worse to come in the unsteady hands of the present government run by her enfeebled heirs.

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For nearly ten years, Geoff was one of the most famous faces on British television and going out with him socially was often the friendliest of obstacle courses wading through autograph-hunting fans, encouraged by his jovial persona, who came over to talk wherever we went – mostly bars, restaurants and clubs all over the North West of England. “Hey Eddie!” would often cut through quite serious conversations when the two of us were just out for a quiet pint or two. He was, of course, as we the audience often like to forget, just a human being, a very sweet one, who enjoyed his celebrity (and his success) but who also led a normal human existence just like the fans who identified with the jokes and sadnesses of his down-to-earth on-screen character.

I was thinking about my old Granada Television days last year when I went back to Manchester on a rainy weekend visiting some of my old haunts. Geoff was a vivid presence in my early years there.

I had not been to Manchester for a long time and it was even longer since I met up with Geoff who, not wanting to be a one role actor, left the series at the height of his fame and, apart from a single return guest appearance, always turned down offers to rejoin the cast.

This was the house in Stretford where I lived in the first years of my time at Granada. I rented the two top floors and a trombonist with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra lived downstairs often filling my flat, enjoyably, with the glorious sonorities he could produce from that wonderful instrument. I never minded other people’s music as I had an old piano up there in my flat to accompany my enthusiastic operatic, if not always mellifluous singing. Geoff enjoyed singing too and once we even dared to do the tenor/baritone duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers in the living room that over-looked an exotic view of the  Stretford tip and the M25 motorway. Well, we enjoyed ourselves and the trombonist never complained.

We shared an enthusiasm for music and, in those Manchester days away from home, he was happy to join me going to rock concerts where we often found ourselves on stage behind the band proudly wearing our back-stage passes. We saw many legendary bands together that way. No cool back-stage crowd was too cool though to shout out “Hey Eddie!”

More often than not and maybe more often than was good for us, we would often prefer to sit up there on that top floor with a bottle of whiskey, a packet of cigarettes, a choice selection of music and some great conversations that lasted well into the night. The World was firmly sorted by the time it came for sleep.

Geoff left for other successful TV roles and, as often happens in the mobile world of television, we gradually lost touch and our lives moved on in different directions. I shall however always remember him fondly for those badly-behaved bachelor pad days. He was much too full of life for it to have come to an end so prematurely. It was a crap deal, Geoff.

Here he is in what will probably always be his greatest role, the unforgettable Eddie Yates:

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I went back to Manchester over the weekend to the city where I lived for longer than I want to admit and where I had not only a very interesting  and inspiring time working for the legendary and ground-breaking TV company Granada Television but where I also had a lot of fun too.

It could have been a rather melancholy and sentimental visit as, next year, Granada is leaving the iconic building where it had been since its creation in the 1950s.  It will join the newly created outpost for some of the BBC’s traditionally London-based departments in what is already known as Media City on the site vacated by the great industrial buildings that used to line the Manchester Ship Canal.

It was difficult to feel sadly sentimental though when Manchester itself was bursting with new life whilst, as far as I could see in a brief visit, the old spirit of the city that I knew was still very much in evidence.

The massive buildings works going on over there in Media City is nothing if not impressive in its ambition – let’s hope that a similar heroic spirit livens up the, dare I say it, rather dull  and unadventurous television programming that has been the recent output of those mighty monsters now settling into their new home.

Let’s hope that television scoops up some of the excitement of my old home town where the city centre  has survived several depressions, an IRA bomb and much Southern cynicism to become as lively and as
varied a place that anyone out for a good time could imagine.

The three nights of this long weekend were enlivened by the new generation of pubs and clubs which were always a Manchester speciality. Manchester folk have always had a healthy respect for fun as well as music (from The Hollies, The Smiths, The Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, The Inspiral Carpets and Oasis to the present) and both were in evidence as I wondered around town.

It was great to see, long after my debut in such things, hordes of people putting on the style and getting out there dressed and ready for whatever took their fancy.

Great too that all those Chinese restaurants around Princess Street are still thriving and that I could still weave my intoxicated way in time-honoured Granada tradition to the Kwok Man restaurant – the scene of many a very late night sojourn.

The, for me, new and brightly gay Canal Street development fits naturally into Manchester’s lively society too and it was wonderful to see the place so full of unrepressed energy.

Old traditions too have maintained their style in Rusholme, Manchester’s Curry Mile – still one of the best places to eat Indian cuisine anywhere in the World outside of the Indian sub-continent.

So thanks Manchester – not just for some immortal memories but for your brightly forward-looking face. Good luck to you and all who sail in you. I won’t leave it so long next time.

If I have to play one track that sums up Manchester music for me then it has to be This Is How It Feels by The Inspiral Carpets. It spawned many followers.

STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

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I got used to turning corners only to find that familiar places had disappeared and there was a profusion of building sites and, I suppose, inevitably, a lot of new car parks where there were once friendly but tatty old buildings.

There were the trams too which have transformed the city centre making sense of the roads and keeping them clear of the old traffic jams of my memories. Strange how the re-introduction of old technologies can give the place a modern feel.

..but these days, they are looking smarter and many of them have been given the space to breathe – almost as if, at last, the city has recognised the beauty of ugly Victoriana.

It was good to see though that my old workplace at Granada Television was still there even if it has been crowded out by other taller buildings and now gives off the aura of having seen better days – which of course it has.

I was based here for more years than seems possible and Manchester has been the scene of a lot of fun, excitement and drama for me over the years. Walking around town, I couldn’t but remember some of the old days and I was happy that, once you look beyond the glossy new offices and hotels, it is really the same old scruffy place…..

….where shabby streets still avoid pretentious showiness and where you can still wander in search of no-nonsense fun in disreputable establishments.

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I went up to Manchester last week for a concert at the impressively modern Bridgewater Hall. I haven’t been back to the city for years but I lived there for a long time and my work meant that I got involved in the place’s musical culture, from native bands like The Stone Roses and Oasis to the Hallé
Orchestra. One of the quirkier moments of my career occurred whilst I was taking a documentary film-maker’s interest in the creation of a brand new concert hall to replace the historic but inadequate Free Trade Hall. I followed the build right from the beginning, at the drawings stage and often went round in a yellow hard hat to see the work in progress. Then, surprizingly, I was asked to sit on the “naming committee” for the new building.

I forget exactly who else was there, some people from the local orchestras, the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic, representatives from the town hall and from the Royal Northern College of Music. Then there were the television guys, me and the well-known Manchester rock music impresario, television presenter and cultural icon, my old friend, the late Tony Wilson.

It was an energetic debate with a number of names hitting the ground early on before we settled for a shortlist of two – The Bridgewater Hall and The Barbirolli Hall. Tony, of course, was full of enthusiasm for Barbirolli, the great conductor, Sir John Barbirolli, who made the Hallé Orchestra world famous. I too supported the Barbirolli name having sung under his baton once as a student tenor in a performance of the Verdi Requiem, an evening that I shall never forget. We both, I suspect, revelaed our populist bias wanting to give it the name of one of the very few classical musicians that everyone would have heard of.

As you can tell, we lost the vote to wiser voices, well, I guess they were, who didn’t want the venue to be too associated with just one organisation, the Hallé . So the Bridgewater Hall it was to be, and it is a fine name and a fine thing to be named after the murkily romantic Bridgewater Canal that runs along behind it.

Whatever it is called, it is a great building with a splendid acoustic and I was proud to have been associated with it and very happy to visit it again last Thursday the first time since what was, I think, the opening concert some years ago when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim played Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

I was there for the exciting Danish violinist Nicolaj Zneider playing one of my favourite concertos, the Elgar, with an inspired Hallé Orchestra under their inspiring new conductor Mark Elder.

I was staying, in this now almost totally modern section of Manchester’s city centre, in a hotel immediately behind the hall. it was almost a concrete jungle but, nestled there was a throw back to another century, well the century before last in fact, and, I have to admit, an old haunt from my youthful days in the city.

The Briton’s Protection was always a “real” pub even when it sat in a rather down-at-heel but now demolished section of the city. It was only right that I should go back there after the concert for a pint of Manchester’s very own Boddingtons bitter and some animated conversation with some of the members of the orchestra after a thrilling evening of music. Some things never change. We even drank a toast to Tony Wilson and Sir John Barbirolli, great men both.

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I don’t know, but then I wouldn’t would I, what sort of thing modern Russian spies try to espy but somehow it doesn’t seem such a matter of life and death which it undoubtedly was in the dark Cold War days. Maybe they were told to find out the secrets of those bankers and sub-prime mortgage financiers and to try and find out how to get away with making money out of the poor – oh yes, the Russians know about that already.

John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a purer tale – a study in real darkness from the days when there really was a choice between political system that could divide a family and induce someone to sacrifice everything to further a passionate cause even if it led to murder and betrayal.

I have always been a bit of a sucker for the idea of being a spy but I am sure the reality of it would have been both boring and also unacceptably bloody-handed but, thinking of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy reminded me of my connection to possibly one of the best ever book dramatisations on British television, the series staring Alec Guinness and written by my old friend and one-time mentor Arthur Hopcraft.

I was a young television researcher at Granada Television in Manchester at the beginning of my career and Arthur, working for the BBC at the time was an old Granada luminary with a number of television plays and successful adaptations behind him as well as having written one of the great books on sport, The Football Men.

I used to have the odd drink or three with Arthur in a club/bar called The Film Exchange, now long gone, but then just down the road from the TV studios and the hangout for the great and good from TV in those days. My admiration was high for this experienced man who had succeeded as a writer in just the way I dreamt of in my idealistic youth. He went out of his way to encourage me so, over a lot of Boddingtons Beer, we discussed writing, television and, well, life.

He was a very private man who enjoyed a drink and bouts of sociability alternated with introverted grumpiness and he would use these visits to the bar as a way of staying in contact whilst in the grips of working on his script. He was writing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and, he said, he was stuck.

There were many sessions talking about spies and the minds of spies, mixed with what were probably naively innocent moments when I tried to fill him in on my ambitions and he was kind enough to listen without too many sign of irritability.

I forget when exactly this was but over a period of weeks, maybe a month or so, we met like this and he shared his anxieties over the Tinker Tailor script. Then one day, he invited me to dinner to “celebrate” – he had, he said cracked it. He certainly had, when it was televised, and still now on DVD, it was acclaimed as the great work that it is.

Over dinner, he thanked me. He said that he had been struggling to find the character of the guilty man, the double agent that is the pivotal point in the book. He understood the character at last, he said, by basing it on me.

This is, as far as I know, the only time that I have been the model for a television character and, now that Arthur has been dead for a few years, he died in 2004, I am proud to keep that connection.

I will never really know what it was he saw in me that worked for him and maybe I don’t want to find out but, if I did have some characteristics of a double agent, I don’t think I would ever have been brave enough to have put it into practice.

If you haven’t seen the series then I won’t spoil it for you by saying which character it was…..watch it if you can not for me but for a great moment in the history of television.

Here is the opening scene – no clues here – or are there?

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