- Location
- Boom-town-on-Thames
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Inspired by Mazdaposting; don't say I didn't warn you.
When commercial television was launched in the United Kingdom in 1954 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority (which ran ITV, or 'Channel 3' to the sequentially-minded), the franchise for the North of England was awarded to Sidney Bernstein's Granada Television. Broadcasting to Lancashire, Cheshire and the East and West Ridings of Yorkshire, Bernstein envisioned 'television for the North' as a creative counterbalance to the London-centric focus of the BBC and some of the other commercial franchisees. Based in Manchester, Granada became the most successful of ITV's regional franchises, creating Coronation Street, the world's longest-running TV soap opera, Ricky Tomlinson vehicle The Royle Family, the brains-and-brawn game-show Krypton Factor, and the generation-following documentary Seven Up! Not even calving off the Ridings to Yorkshire Television in 1968, or even ITV's abandonment of regional broadcasting after the turn of the century, has stopped them, although their once-ubiquitous corporate identity is now non-existent (partly because, well, these days they are ITV; they merged with their one remaining competitor, Carlton, in 2004).
Did it always have to be this way, though? Bernstein bitterly resented the 1968 sundering, having spent fifteen years building a brand which represented 'the North' (as in, those bits of it he broadcasted to); he even coined the term 'Granadaland' for it. That period represents the only time since the English Civil War that any kind of administrative unit sought to build ties that rose above the hills of the Pennines. It was a limited vision - Granada was a broadcaster, after all, not the Council of the North - which would have met with many of the same obstacles that face the Northern Powerhouse today (whither Newcastle, Sunderland and other points Oop Further North?). It was also rooted in a particular self-image of the region, one which predated the South Asian immigrations of the 1970s that would change the face of the region forever (there's a quote from Bernstein where he talks of the North's 'indigenous' society, describes London and its suburbs as 'full of displaced persons' and manages to insult Wales by dismissing Scotland. It is a trip). It also ignores the tendency of the North's great metropoli to squabble amongst themselves; imagine taking the Liverpool-Manchester rivalry and the Leeds-Sheffield-Hull one, banging them together to create a bunch of whole new spats, and then trying to build a cohesive television empire out of it.
But what if Granadaland did survive? How might the cultural landscape look if there was one vast entity representing - and defining - 'the North'? Could Bernstein's vision of a home-grown, homogenous society adapt to the upheavals of mass immigration, or would it harden in the face of turmoil and open the door to something nastier? Would civic petty chauvinism tear the whole thing apart anyway, or could it survive to become its own 'Northern Powerhouse'? Or would it just lead to an earlier form of a consolidation that was inevitable anyway?
Most importantly, what would Auntie do?
(Gratuitously tagging @Thande so he sees this when he returns from the Great White North)
When commercial television was launched in the United Kingdom in 1954 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority (which ran ITV, or 'Channel 3' to the sequentially-minded), the franchise for the North of England was awarded to Sidney Bernstein's Granada Television. Broadcasting to Lancashire, Cheshire and the East and West Ridings of Yorkshire, Bernstein envisioned 'television for the North' as a creative counterbalance to the London-centric focus of the BBC and some of the other commercial franchisees. Based in Manchester, Granada became the most successful of ITV's regional franchises, creating Coronation Street, the world's longest-running TV soap opera, Ricky Tomlinson vehicle The Royle Family, the brains-and-brawn game-show Krypton Factor, and the generation-following documentary Seven Up! Not even calving off the Ridings to Yorkshire Television in 1968, or even ITV's abandonment of regional broadcasting after the turn of the century, has stopped them, although their once-ubiquitous corporate identity is now non-existent (partly because, well, these days they are ITV; they merged with their one remaining competitor, Carlton, in 2004).
Did it always have to be this way, though? Bernstein bitterly resented the 1968 sundering, having spent fifteen years building a brand which represented 'the North' (as in, those bits of it he broadcasted to); he even coined the term 'Granadaland' for it. That period represents the only time since the English Civil War that any kind of administrative unit sought to build ties that rose above the hills of the Pennines. It was a limited vision - Granada was a broadcaster, after all, not the Council of the North - which would have met with many of the same obstacles that face the Northern Powerhouse today (whither Newcastle, Sunderland and other points Oop Further North?). It was also rooted in a particular self-image of the region, one which predated the South Asian immigrations of the 1970s that would change the face of the region forever (there's a quote from Bernstein where he talks of the North's 'indigenous' society, describes London and its suburbs as 'full of displaced persons' and manages to insult Wales by dismissing Scotland. It is a trip). It also ignores the tendency of the North's great metropoli to squabble amongst themselves; imagine taking the Liverpool-Manchester rivalry and the Leeds-Sheffield-Hull one, banging them together to create a bunch of whole new spats, and then trying to build a cohesive television empire out of it.
But what if Granadaland did survive? How might the cultural landscape look if there was one vast entity representing - and defining - 'the North'? Could Bernstein's vision of a home-grown, homogenous society adapt to the upheavals of mass immigration, or would it harden in the face of turmoil and open the door to something nastier? Would civic petty chauvinism tear the whole thing apart anyway, or could it survive to become its own 'Northern Powerhouse'? Or would it just lead to an earlier form of a consolidation that was inevitable anyway?
Most importantly, what would Auntie do?
(Gratuitously tagging @Thande so he sees this when he returns from the Great White North)