INT: My name is Michael Apted. Today is April the 11th, 2016. I'm conducting an interview with Mike Newell for the Directors Guild of America Visual History Program. We are at the DGA in Los Angeles, California.

MN: My name is Michael Newell. I'm known as Mike Newell. My name at birth was Michael Newell. My nicknames are Fuckface, Eggy, I don’t think I have any others. [INT: I think we'll leave it at that.] That's right. Birthdate: 28, three, '42, 28th of March, 1942. City and State of birth. City: a place called St. Albans, 20 miles north of London. State of birth: United Kingdom. [INT: All right.]

INT: So we should come clean first, shouldn't we? 

MN: We should. [INT: We should say that we've known each other very well since the early 1960s.] Since 1960. [INT: Yeah. We went to university together and our careers have run in parallel.] That's entirely right. [INT: All right.]

INT: So what got you into this business in the first place? 

MN: I suppose that there would have been about three things. One is that, probably the most important, is that my parents were dedicated, to an extent crazed, amateur theatricals. And they thought of nothing else. They formed their own company, a company of their friends, in the early 1930s when they were, so from 19 and 20. Those friends remained their friends throughout their lives. They put plays on. They acted in those plays. They sometimes wrote those plays. And they ultimately built their own theatres. And so what I saw from a tiny child was adults and the people set in authority over me having a roaring good time doing this thing. And I then became the kid who, if they needed a kid, they led me on by the hand. And if I wanted to pick up a, some little job, if I wanted to do the props on a show, I would be allowed to assist on the props on the show. I became a member of the company. [INT: Did it make you want to be an Actor though?] Oh yes it did. Yes. it did. I'm, I was very keen on being an Actor. I then went to Cambridge [University of Cambridge] and discovered that I was not an Actor. And discovered it when having done my two pieces, my Shakespeare and my modern piece for Trevor Nunn, I looked up into the auditorium of the student theatre there and he simply said, "Thank you." And I thought I'm probably not an Actor. Indeed how could I have been? I was enormous. I was tall as a beanpole and I was very unskilled, so I was likely to say, "Dinner is served." But when the beanpole came on, the whole audience of course would have said, "Dear god, what's going to happen?" Well nothing happened. Dinner was served and so... But I was, for one wonderful time towards the end of my undergraduate time, I was a professional Actor and a prop man and a call boy and a general dog's body around a tiny theatre company which existed to do a children's' play in the West End theatre of London every year. And in my year they were doing--and of course my father and mother knew the people who ran this company as distant, distant acquaintances. In the year that I worked for them the play was a thing called “Billy Bunter's Christmas Circus”. Billy Bunter was a famous child's character. He was a fat boy, a fat freak. And everything happens to Billy Bunter and he got mixed up in the circus in which I played Mungo the Gorilla, because I fitted the skin. And I would go into the theatre an hour before the show went on to set the props out and all that. And the first thing I did was change into the skin because there wouldn't be time to change, so I worked the whole show through as a--[INT: Was this when you were at college?] Yes. I moonlit. I had to go back and forth a lot because one of the rules that we lived by, you may not remember, was that we had to eat a certain number of dinners in college per week in order to prove that we had been in attendance. And so I used to roar up and down on the milk train and do stuff like that.

INT: So since you weren't going to be an Actor, how were you satisfying your hunger for theatrics at Cambridge [University of Cambridge]? 

MN: Well, what I did, of course, was I did everything else. And I had a very mixed career there. I did some plays. I did a college play and then I did a little one-act play. They were called something, I can't remember what. [INT: Was this as a Director?] Yes. And then, like you, I did what was known as a main, which was--they did three mains a year, one in each term and you had to vie for those against the competition. [INT: That was for the ADC [Amateur Dramatic Club].] That was the ADC. But I'm sure you did the same thing. We worked for all of the major companies. There were several companies. There was another company called the Mummers. And then there were a lot of individual companies, which came into existence and went out of existence with a particular show. And I used to do, oh I don't know, four or five shows a term--[INT: Wow.]--in an eight week term. But it was, that, it was pretty lowly stuff. I mean I was a stagehand a lot of the time. [INT: There was a lot of kind of distinguished people that we were contemporaneous with.] Yes. There was ol' Frears [Stephen Frears], always a good act. If you remember, he had an overcoat, which distinguished him from absolutely everybody else on the planet. It was like watching, oh, Charles De Gaulle go past. A lot of mystic. [INT: He's still got it, hasn't he?] What? [INT: I think he's still got it.] He probably has. And so the, he was there, Richard Eyre was there, who then went on and ran the National Theatre [Royal National Theatre], Trevor Nunn was there, who ran Stratford and the National Theatre. There were lots and lots of people and lots of good working Actors as well. We were lucky in that too.

INT: So Cambridge [University of Cambridge], we, you finished at Cambridge, what was the next step in this theatrical journey? 

MN: Well, what I did was, my parents were aghast when I told them what my plans for life were. Because they said, "But it doesn't work like that. It works that, what you do is you get a job, which you can stomach. You make your living, and then from the moment you step on the 829 to St. Pancras, to the moment that you step off, you will think about only the script that you are reading and the production that you are planning and that's what we do. And then we do it at the weekends and we do it in the evenings. And sometimes we forget to feed the children," as they did. And we were lucky in that we lived next door to two maiden aunts and the maiden aunts always made sure we were fed. But they were completely consumed by this thing. And that, of course, was a lesson, which I was not prepared to learn. I didn't believe in that at all. So what I did was I wrote to pretty much every rep theatre. At that stage, it's very difficult, I, one of the things I want to do, if I may, in this, is to explain the differences in the world as it was when we began and the world as it is now, because the differences were very radical. And we, at that stage there was a theatrical organization of the whole country into what might be regional theatres or might be civic theatres or might be simply traditional companies which had homes in particular towns. And this was called the repertory system, the rep system. And we, when we started work in television, very often bumped into Actors who had been creamed off or selected out of and then would go back into the rep system. The rep system was simply you did a play, in a posh rep you did a play every two weeks. In an unposh rep you did a play a week. And in a slave ship you did two a week. And simply the learning of the, these guys had astonishing memories. And it was, so I wrote to all of the rep theatres that I could and I got three replies, all of them negative. Because, of course, you know, the acting schools were pumping people out and there were people much better qualified than I. And so nothing happened. I went to be interviewed by the BBC for a job in sound, which, thankfully, I've always had good luck turning jobs down. And I was, I had the bottle to turn that down. But then television was getting going, and television was the great energizer of our times, of your times and mine. It's daft telling you all this stuff that you already know, Michael, but. [INT: I'm in a minority of one, so carry on.] Yes, indeed. Okay.

MN: And the, while you and I were in our last term at Cambridge [University of Cambridge] there were three huge TV jobs that were in the ether, buzzing about. There was Granada [Granada Television; ITV Granada], there was… what was it called, the trainee ship at the BBC, which was the posh job. But what they didn't want, it suddenly, I realized halfway through the interview, these people didn't, they wanted administrators. That was where you were most powerful and most respected at the BBC was as an administrator. You didn't get your hands dirty. And I realized that what I, the only thing that I was interested in was getting my hands dirty. And I saw this truth halfway through the interview and tried to backpedal but there was no going backwards. But at the same time they were also starting off BBC Two. There were only, when we began, there were only two channels in the UK. And they broadcast from what, about half past five to about half past 11, very short hours. And the BBC Two was a very, lot of very clever people there, Michael Peacock and people like that. And by this stage I'd got a job at Granada because, and you must have met him too, because Derek, had been in, Derek Granger, a man that we both know and--he's still alive. Unbelievable. How old is he? [INT: He's in his 90s.] Little sweetheart. [INT: He wore a purple shirt when I met him. But I thought was...] Well there you are, you see, because what I remember, he didn't wear a purple shirt when I met him. He wore this electric blue, wild silk jacket. And he said, "I'm terribly sorry." He said. "We're out of vodka. What an appalling thing to happen. I can't give you a drink." I thought, "Jesus Christ, this is, is this a job?" And they were always, Granada were, this was, he worked for Granada. And Granada were, it was like being at a graduate school I always felt, because the quality of the people around you was so high. The program controller [Denis Forman] had written the standard work on the Mozart piano concertos [Mozart’s Concerto Form], as well as everything else that he had done, as well as being the youngest colonel in the British Army and so on and so forth. They all had very good wars.

MN: And they were a tremendous group of people [at Granada Television]. Sidney Bernstein, who was the owner of it and had been a very important man about culture in England in the '30s [1930s], knew everybody. And he collected this extraordinary group of people around him of whom one was Denis [Denis Forman] and the other of whom was a beloved mentor for me, and I'm sure for you as well, called Julian Amyes, who was simply, he was the man to get your hands dirty. I mean he was just a Director; he was a Director of the company as well because they thought they couldn't do without him. But he directed television plays, and again, made, not in this case, a book, but made a famous thing called “The Guidetape”, which was how you do it and how you don't do it. And we were all supposed to study “The Guidetape”. It was made while the company was on strike and so it was sort of bootleg labor. But they were extraordinary people. And then the guys who were sort of one generation up from us, people like Les Woodhead [Leslie Woodhead] and whatnot, who was a wonderful documentary maker, is a wonderful documentary maker. And simply, they collected this group of people. And when I said to the, the BBC said to me, BBC Two said, "Have you got another job." And I said, "Actually as it happens, I think I might have." And they said, "We strongly advise you to take it." And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Because what will happen is that we will, in our first year, we will fire 50 percent and there's absolutely no reason why you should not be amongst the 50 percent fired. If you want to play a safe hand, take the Granada job. It's a very good company." [INT: And there were only six of us, weren't there?] There were six. [INT: Yeah.]

INT: So what do you, what was the learning process at Granada [Granada Television]? 

MN: We’ll chuck you in and see whether you floated. I think they were confused by us because there was another side of the company, which was the side that actually kept it running, who were the, sort of the Directors of the bread and butter shows: the daily news magazine show, the local news broadcasts, what the papers… all of these things, which had, for the most part, a journalistic slant. It was a very journalisticy company. And some of the big beasts there were journalists and taught me one thing, at any rate, which was that you'd better learn how to drink. And I, we both remember Tim Hewat, who invented, if it can be said to, you know, really, to have been invented, invented SEVEN UP! because he'd heard this wonderful phrase and he was an Australian. He was a very kind of brutish Australian. And he'd heard this marvelous phrase about the Jesuits, about give him a child, give me a child until he is and I will give you the man. And he thought that that was spiffing. And we could make a show about that. It was a slow week, why didn't we do a show about that? And I was not part of it. God that I would have been; I would have been so proud.

INT: Well I was, so while I was doing that [SEVEN UP!--[MN: I know you were.]--what were you doing? 

MN: I think that what I was doing was, they were… they had a marvelous set of visiting firemen, as a company. And one of the, two of the people who came in was this pair of documentarists from the BBC, one of whom was called Norman Swallow and the other of whom was called Denis-- [INT: Mitchell.] --Mitchell [Denis Mitchell]. And you went to work for Swallow and I went to work for Mitchell. And Mitchell was a miserable sod. He had a gammy leg and it hurt him all the time. And he truly believed and would tell anybody, that nobody under 30 had any right to say anything because they knew nothing. And he would say that very loudly. And as I have grown beyond 30, Michael, I see exactly what he means. Oh god he was a miserable sod. And the company had invested enormously in tape technology when clearly the way forward was film because it was the middle of the Vietnam War and what had, what the Americans, what the American news networks were desperate for was a lightweight handheld camera. And the French went and invented one. It made a noise like a machine gun, but who cared about the sound? Sorry, I shouldn't have said that should I? Well it's what we all believe. And that had liberated the making of documentaries. But Granada, god bless it, had decided that the future was in tape and tape at that stage, I mean it's not cards. I mean it's nothing like what's in that camera there. It was huge. It was two inches broad. And the only time I got anywhere near to, at any rate, knowing that I would probably be fired was when I stopped the tape on CORONATION STREET. You were not supposed to stop the tape; because to start it again meant so many hoops that you had to go through. You had to kind of inform central control. You had to inform god, "I stopped the tape but don't worry. I'm starting it again." There was a huge fuss. And so it had, tape had no value whatsoever in the making of documentary and in came these two god given documentarists to make their shows on tape. What was it? A WEDDING ON A SATURDAY and... [INT: I can't remember.] I remember. It was called ONLY BELIEVE.

INT: Were you interested in becoming a documentarian or did you have other ideas? 

MN: Well I swam in the same tank [at Granada Television] that everybody else swam in. In that tank, the water had a very strong tint that said documentary to it. And so I assumed that I should be, ought to be, good at it. And I wasn't. I was very excited by Denis, Denis Mitchell. He had a walking stick and he used to lash about him in the back of the mobile tape control room, which was mostly used for football matches. And it [ONLY BELIEVE] was about, the show was about a faith healing church. And miracles happened. You could see them. And I would babble, "Look, look, it's happening. It's happening." And Denis would start to smack his stick on the desk in front of me saying, "What about the visuals? Cut, cut, cut, cut." And then there were various documentary strands which they let us loose on as Directors. And I made a very, and we'd been working as sort of little documentary Directors for a long time, probably for a couple of years by that time. You will remember SCENE AT 6:30 and the little films that one used to make. You know, you'd make three and four minute films, which is exactly what a film school student will do now. And some of those I rather enjoyed and thought were okay. But when I tried my hand on something more, something longer, I didn't know what to do. I had no idea what the, kind of the, what cemented the whole thing, how to tell a story. And so I went back to doing drama, which by this time wasn't CORONATION STREET, which was the big, huge national soap opera. It was a very, it was a big, important show. And it told a kind of social truth, which many of the dramas that were being put out in the early '60s [1960s], early mid-'60s did. There was a show called Z CARS, which is a police show, which again, had a very strong, set in Liverpool, had a very strong social content. And we got educated in that and used to that.

MN: And what the company [Granada Television] believed was that it was worth us doing this show [CORONATION STREET] because while the performances would not be, would not educate us in any way whatsoever, dealing with the Actors would not educate us in any way whatsoever, dealing with the equipment would. And exactly the reverse was true because the equipment ran in grooves on the floor. You know, there were only, on any set, there were eight shots and that was it. Dealing with Pat Phoenix [Patricia Phoenix], who was one of the leading ladies, hung-over the next morning when her latest boyfriend had run away with somebody else and, that was just a skill that was worth learning. And it was, I think that we benefitted hugely from when we were 22, 23 dealing with stars. And you might have been frightened, but you couldn't afford to show it. And so a whole new kind of technique came in. But then, of course, what happened was that we were maids of all work, as Directors we were maids of all work. When I started I had to do the news in Welsh, “Roll the film when I scratch my ear,” 'cause you couldn't, he was speaking Welsh. And you'd do kids' programs; you did everything. But of course when we'd been undergraduates the big thing, really big thing, was going to the movies. I used to spend unthinkable amounts of time at the movies. I remember one afternoon seeing HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR and IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART II as a double bill. I mean who could have programmed those two films together? But nonetheless, you sat...

INT: So how are you relating seeing those films [HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR; IVAN THE TERRIBLE] to directing Actors in CORONATION STREET? 

MN: What I, the way that I'm relating it goes like this: that, I believe that if we had started work in London, we would have become part of a kind of Variety with a capital V, Variety inspired programming, which would have had no social credibility whatsoever. It would not have been about the world that we saw around us. It would have been about what Lew Grade, who was an ex-musical Producer, what he thought his audiences should be watching. Or it would have been about the BBC, which was not in a good state at that stage. The BBC came up later. What we got in Manchester was we got Norman Swallow and Denis Mitchell. We got CORONATION STREET. And one of the things that they made us do was they made us watch the first six episodes of CORONATION STREET because they said, "That's what it's about. It's always been about that. It may have been running for eight years now, but it was always about that and it always will be." It's now been running 50 years and I think it probably is still all about that. He died the other day by the way. [INT: Tony Warren.] Yeah.

INT: What did you learn from these [CORONATION STREET] Actors do you think? 

MN: The Actors? They're a lot of fun. And Pat [Patricia Phoenix] used to sometimes tell the most scabrous stories about her life in rep theatre, in these little mid-Lancashire market mill towns. I can remember her saying, "‘Ooh,’ he says, it's this big lorry driver. He'd back me up against the wall in the alley he said, ‘Come on then toochie, let's have at it.’" This kind of, this wonderful language saying, "Come on then toochie."

INT: How did you learn how to handle them [CORONATION STREET Actors], 'cause they had to do sort of what was asked of them, and you had to, or we had to sort of direct them. How did we speak to these? 

MN: Well they sort of said, they were very sweet to us. They were kind to us. I didn't think they thought that there was that much difference between us and them. We were a bit younger but we were all kind of fixed in the same terrible morass; we gotta get through it. And they knew themselves not to be grand Actors. We all then had a dose of grand Actors who, for my money, were much less entertaining and much less creative oddly enough. [INT: This was on what? Work you did subsequent to CORONATION STREET?] Yes, work subsequent. Yeah, I mean-- [INT: Within Granada [Granada Television but...] -- worked with Olivier. I worked with Alec Guinness. You know, we all had our go at the knights. And they weren't nearly as interesting as Len Fairclough's assistant, Jerry, I can't remember his name, who was-- [INT: Jerry Booth.] --a breathtakingly good Actor. [INT: Yeah. Booth.] What was his name? [INT: Jerry Booth.] Was it? Right. Right. He was just wonderful. And he'd knock people's socks off with his audition for “Hamlet” at the National whatever, but thought he didn't really want to leave Blackburn. [INT: So did you develop a taste in Actors do you think that--] Yes. I'm sure that-- [INT: --has stayed with you?] --I'm absolutely sure I did. And would then go out and look for the kind of, the unvarnished, the rough edge, which would tell a truth below the truth that was simply printed on the page. That there was a way of, in fact, broadening the resonance of what you were doing by clever casting, by, you know, good casting. No, not him. That's who you expect to see. Who's off the ball? He's on the ball. Who's off the ball? [INT: So these soap opera Actors gave you an insight into the real level of acting?] Yes. [INT: The reality of acting?] Yes. I think that's true. [INT: As opposed to the posing of acting?] Yes. I think that's absolutely true. And they were as fascinating to me as kind of social objects, as they were to professional... I was very interested in watching the way that a style in an Actor would be achieved. And there was a very famous character Actor whom both of us knew, called Arthur Lowe, who was a great comedian. But people in America won't know him, but he was, he came from the rep theatre system. He came from northern rep and he was an absolutely god given comedian. Not a kind of posturing, not a ba-boom comedian. Not a Ken Dodd, but a comic Actor. And he achieved what he achieved by actually never knowing the lines. He didn't ever really know the lines. And so therefore his style, which was, while he was desperately searching the memory banks what he was supposed to say next, that became his whole style. And so to watch that and to tweak, you know. And I found them fascinating and endearing and all sorts of stuff because they brought themselves to the job in a way that those great big posh, important people didn't quite bring themselves to the job.

INT: So after you're done with CORONATION STREET, as we all did, then you went on, staying in Granada [Granada Television], but to do sort of more major work for them. [MN: Yes.] Do you have any memories of that sort of stuff? 

MN: Well what was beginning to happen to us was that you could, without seriously damaging your brain cells, you could do six to nine months of soap opera before it actually started to damage you. You know, the way that it worked was that on a Friday afternoon the two episodes for the week following were recorded. Everybody went off and got drunk. Everybody went home. And then you went in on Monday morning and the next two scripts fell on your desk with a thud. And there was another 100 pages of, no it couldn't have been that much. [INT: Well two episodes.] Well two half hours anyway, 60-- [INT: 60 pages, yeah.] --70 pages, I don't know. And then what you did was, if there was casting to be done, the first week would be casting. If there were new sets to be designed, which was a very ticklish thing, because that affected, it affected budget but it also affected audience expectation. Hang on, are you going to freak 'em if you take 'em into a ladies' nail bar or something like that? And they took that very, very seriously. There were an enormous Writer, we gotta talk about Writers because they're great people that I came away from that whole experience at Granada were the Writers. And that you did in your first week. Then in your second week you sort of refined it, and please, god, there might actually be some, there might be a scene outside, in which case you'd have to go and find a location. I remember some weird stuff that we did because we didn't have any equipment. We had equipment that was used for sports mostly. And so I remember doing a tracking shot on an enormous thing with a bicycle wheel that stood almost as high as that frame. The cameraman sort of crouched down between the wheels and it was very softly sprung so that, I don't know, you could follow somebody on a quarter mile, you know, round an athletic track. And we did a great, we did the first tracking shot on CORONATION STREET. And everybody went "Oh wow! It's a tracking shot!"

INT: When you were doing the STREET [CORONATION STREET], did you begin to realize there had to be more than this? [MN: Yes.] So what did you do about it? 

MN: Well what we did was, what I did was I started to, I started to look for films. I started to look for one-hour films because that was a perfectly legitimate use of the company's money. It was, everybody was actually rather excited by it because it was breaking away from, it was new. I'm not sure whether they'd really started doing this sort of thing at the BBC yet, and the BBC was always the torchbearer, but I think that Granada [Granada Television] got there first. And you made friends with a group of discontented but savvy Writers. And you'd sort of say, "What's in your bottom drawer? What, have you got anything?" And they always did, of course. They always had stuff that they had written. And there was a Writer called John Finch, who was particularly, had a very big bottom drawer. He was rather dour as a person. Some of them weren't. Some of them were very, very jokey indeed. And, but John had a lot of stuff and he was a sort of country Yorkshireman in a way that that particular company, Granada, was very much a Mancunian company. It was a big city, Lancashire company. And Lancashire is absolutely flat, has a filthy atmosphere. It's dirty to a degree. It actually had a song called “Dirty Old Town” written about it. My beloved son goes to university there right now and describes it in exactly the same way. [INT: God.] And John had all sorts of ideas and sometimes even scripts for these little stories about, you know, what happens when a farmer thinks he's going to get married and then his, somebody steals his girl away from him. So he writes this little script and there's 50 pages and it's all set up on the tops of the moors and you buzz off there for three weeks and you come back with, actually a not very good film. [INT: But nonetheless they--] You're surprised. [INT: --gave you the opportunity.] Just really surprised. Yeah. And it was a tremendous release that you could actually go out and make films in the open air about a completely different sort of reality. The studio at Granada, because, partly because of this investment in tape, had been, you had to have sets. Sometimes if you were very bold you could sort of ooze out into the car park. But mostly not. And the sets used to drive you nuts. You know, just how much could you do with, you know, a crane that had a travel of about seven feet? Not very much. So we got to learn to be very expert doing more and more with less and less. And so to get out was everything and we could, we began to be able to realize that we had to handle budget and that we had to be able to produce this stuff for the same amount of money per hour, which was ludicrously little compared to what we are now used to. They used to produce an hour of dramatic television for 30,000 pounds. And that was everything. That was your wage, the Actors' wage, the travelling wage to the location, all of that, you could get for 30,000. And so we began to get very, we began to make a sort of new, a discipline of the whole thing.

MN: The [Granada Television] Writers began to show what they could do and there were again, the kind of, the garden which grew the Writers was, for the most part, CORONATION STREET. Because out of it came Jack, a Writer who-- Jack Rosenthal, Peter Eckersley, lots and lots and lots of them all came out of there. And all of them had the same ambitions that you had. They'd mostly been journalists and they were completely fascinated by going to the movies. Everybody went to the movies all the time. You saw the most outlandish things. [INT: I just always used to wonder...] I remember going to huge, outlandish films in Manchester. [INT: I just always wonder why two white boys like you and I who had been in the suburbs of London and went to Cambridge University somehow managed to click with these great north country Writers. 'Cause they were the making of both of us weren't they?] They were. [INT: What was it? What was--] By Christ they were. [INT: --the chemistry? What did we give them and what did they give us?] Well, they were a little older than us. They were probably seven or eight years older than us. And therefore, and I don't know how it was for you, but certainly for me, I was an absolutely stone acolyte. I admired them beyond measure. I wanted to know what they did. I wanted to know how they did it. I pretty quickly discovered that I did not have the talent for doing it but they could teach me so much that I could actually make what they were writing into, well I was making films. It was more than the script. And that's, they wanted to be part of that as well. They wanted to get away from the formulaic, and they saw us, they thought we were weird, to start with. Because, you know, they'd all been at northern universities and here was us posh kids. And I don't suppose you remember this, but of all of the six of us, I was the most northerly coming from St. Albans. You know? And they thought we were funny and they, I don't know. We amused them. [INT: Yeah. It was a great learning thing for them and for us.] Yes. [INT: But then--] God I remember it's a big, was big learning thing for me. [INT: Yeah.]

INT: But then there cometh a time when we would outgrow Granada [Granada Television] then. [MN: Yes.] Like we outgrew CORONATION STREET, we outgrew Granada. [MN: Yeah.] And where did you go next? 

MN: I went to the BBC. To the fount of all good. And I went to their drama department, which was run by a succession of very good men, all of whom were Directors, Chris Morahan [Christopher Morahan], oh, I'm not gonna be able to remember their bloody names. But the drama department was run exclusively, except Graeme MacDonald who was always a Producer, but again was a Granada person. There was this huge connection between the BBC and Granada. Granada really admired the BBC, 'cause it had ideals. It had something that was thought out. Nobody laughed at Lord Reith [John Reith] in Granada. You know, it was a serious business, to instruct and entertain was a serious, you know, that was worth doing. And so I went there and started to work on a series of shows, which were run by another Granada guy, called Tim, Little Tim, ah, it'll come. And he had been a Producer at Granada. He'd been a Producer on CORONATION STREET and had been, he'd been absolutely pie-eyed one Friday just before Christmas and had said, it was a pub that everybody used, had said, "I bet you don't think that I can kill Minnie Caldwell in the snug of the Rovers Return on Christmas Eve." And everybody said, "No, Tim, you can't do that. You can't do that." And he did. She had a heart attack in the snug on Christmas Eve. [INT: And the nation wept.]

MN: A nation wept, yes. And he [Tim Aspinall] was running a strand at the BBC drama department, which was called THIRTY-MINUTE theatre and it was there to turn up new Writers, again Writers. And so I then started to work with a load of Writers who, all of whom I've forgotten, though there was one guy who was a very distinguished, experimental novelist who would write his novels without numbers on the pages, and he would publish them in a box, so you could shake the box up and you would get one novel. And then you could shake the box the other way and you could get another novel and so on and so forth. And that was part of his theory. And he actually wrote a play, think he wrote a couple. And then there was the very, very soft beginnings of feminism coming along. And it was a very good, it was a very, very good place to meet new Writers and to be kind of experimental. And then they had two other important strands of drama, one of which was called the heavyweight BBC Two strand. And they had the BBC One strand, which was run mostly by a guy called Ken Trodd [Kenith Trodd], who was like a lot of these people were, quite why I don't know, Ken was educated by, I think in his case, the Army, as a Russian spy, like Ted Braun was, like Leslie was, Leslie Woodhead was the same thing. Jack [Jack Rosenthal] was. Jack was in the Navy, and they all learned Russian, and they all spied on the Russians. And Ken did the same thing. And he had his thumb on the pulse of what was now. And I guess he milked that for four or five years, and out of that came Dennis Potter, probably Potter and he were in parallel. But there were a lot of, a lot of other very, very good Writers.

INT: And what, which of your work came out of that [BBC]? 

MN: Significantly, for me, about three pieces. One was about a, it was called MR. & MRS. BUREAUCRAT [BBC2 PLAY OF THE WEEK: MR. & MS. BUREAUCRAT]. And it was about what happens to people in relationships when the basis of their language, the, what they speak in, becomes hijacked by their professional selves. And so these people who were in the Civil Service and were writing drafts of memos for the Civil Service about tax matters and foreign affairs and this and that and the other, but nothing that you could make any sense of. It didn't make any sense at all. It wasn't supposed to make sense. And they began to talk this extraordinary gobbledygook. And we did a play for, I, for Tim, there's a wonderful Writer called Rhys Adrian, who had this extraordinary imagination. And it was just two Actors. It was Jack Shepherd and a woman called Anita Carey and it was gobbledygook. It was Samuel Beckett. But if you could track through it, there would be this kind of wild surreal comedy. So there was that. And then there was another wonderful thing set in Scotland, which was about a Catholic-Protestant working class marriage in Glasgow. I had to go up and do research on that, which meant I had to go up and get drunk on their filthy drinks. Oh, god the stuff they drink up there. And it was called JUST YOUR LUCK [PLAY FOR TODAY: JUST YOUR LUCK] and there was a wonderful scene in it where the Protestant, the, finally the two families are put together. And it's about culture clash and the Catholic culture simply utterly clashes with the Protestant. It's like we would understand it through Northern Ireland now. It was like an, a pre-Northern Ireland. [INT: So between CORONATION STREET and the North Country, now this experimental stuff. You covered some serious bases.] Yeah. I guess so. I guess so. [INT: And you were barely 30 by that time.] Yeah. About that.