Читать книгу Tony Wilson - You're Entitled to an Opinion But. . . - David Nolan - Страница 10

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable

– SHIMON PERES

For decades bright young things from Oxbridge have taken a route into television via graduate trainee schemes. Tony Wilson’s television traineeship was at Independent Television News (ITN). He’d tried and failed to get on a scheme at the BBC. The same thing happened at the Reuters news agency. If he didn’t get in at ITN, then it was looking like he was heading for a regional newspaper. Tony got lucky.

‘At my interview they said, “Was there anything that we could have done better,”’ he later remembered in an interview with Q magazine. ‘I said that I didn’t think much of their coverage of Jimi Hendrix’s death. I said, “It might not matter much to you but from the culture I come from Hendrix is a very important person and it seems to me that you should be able to cover it with a little more insight and not treat it as something from the counter culture that means nothing to you.” About four days later a telegram arrived at my room in Cambridge and I’d got the ITN job.’

ITN had broadcast its first bulletin on the first day of the new Independent Television (ITV) service on 22 September 1955. From the start ITV was seen as a somewhat gaudy upstart, and it was known in BBC circles as Cad’s TV (because they felt it was run by ruffians, cads and bounders). At 10pm on its first night, Christopher Chataway became the first ITN newscaster and the first person in Britain to read the news on television after an advertisement (for an electric razor, as it happens). ITN prided itself on being leaner and lighter on its feet as an alternative to the perceived stuffiness of the BBC.

The ITN that Tony Wilson arrived at nearly 20 years later was an edgy, combative place, full of larger-than-life characters. His editor was Nigel Ryan, a pinstripe-suited Oxford graduate with a reputation for getting what he wanted from and for his reporters. Wilson’s era at ITN saw the birthplace of a concept that has since become familiar: newsreaders as TV personalities. It also had a notoriously boozy atmosphere. After the flagship News at Ten bulletin, reporters and newsreaders would ask: ‘Who are we drinking against tonight?’

‘I went to ITN, which had just reinvented TV news with News at Ten,’ Tony later recalled in an interview with journalist Andy Fyfe in 2006. ‘It didn’t have people wearing bow ties and at that point in the early 1970s ITN was the second-best TV news organisation in the world behind CBS News New York, just. If you put yourself up there with CBS New York and its traditions and way of doing things it meant you felt you were the top of the pile. I learnt so much in those two years.’

The most high-profile card in the ITN pack when Tony arrived was Reginald Bosanquet. A toupee-topped Oxford graduate who lived, loved and drank beyond his means, Bosanquet was a lightning-fast interviewer who oozed mischief. Author Richard Lindlay, himself an ex-ITN man, described him in his biography of ITN, And Finally…: ‘The whole point about Reggie was his unpredictability; it made him exciting to be with and as a viewer, exciting to see. But as the years went by his bosses increasingly watched him through their fingers, hearts in their mouths. “Vroom, vroom,” he would shout stamping on an imaginary accelerator beneath the newscasters’ desk as the News at Ten title music swelled. It was like watching a highly charged racing car about to leap from the grid. Everyone was waiting to see if the car made it round the circuit or came spinning off the track to crash spectacularly at some particularly tricky bend.’

There’s no doubt that Bosanquet made an impression on Tony, if nothing else because Reggie gave the trainee reporter a tough time. Wilson would later tell colleagues at Granada how Reggie would thrust his news scripts back at him, telling how rubbish they were. Tony was learning at the feet of a true maverick. Impervious to all forms of man-management, Reggie did what he wanted, the way he wanted, when he wanted. His love life made tabloid editors rub their hands with glee; Reggie was the first newscasting personality who had personality and he was loved and lampooned in equal measure. Wilson’s presenting career would follow a remarkably similar tack.

Not long after arriving in London, Tony was sent back up north, to the Post & Echo in Liverpool. Journalist Peter Trollope, a crime reporter on the paper, was assigned to look after him. ‘ITN in their wisdom had a scheme where they sent their trainees to regional papers to learn how to be journalists. The Post & Echo was a place full of this breed of guys who still wore the hats and the coats – it was like Life on Mars. There was this fug of smoke, all these hard bastards, five pints at lunchtime, stagger back, do your last edition, back in the pub till 10.30, five days and nights a week. It was a goldmine of experience; guys who knocked the training into you… literally. There’d be fistfights going on, real blood on the tracks.’

On his first day, Tony was taken into the office of the editor George Gregeen, who had a routine he would go through to make it clear to new recruits just who was the toughest in the room. ‘George’s novelty was to put a flame under each bare arm to show he felt no pain,’ says Peter Trollope. ‘I could see him doing this to Tony, who was slightly bewildered by George’s party trick. After George had set fire to himself, Tony was introduced to me. The first thing he said to me was, “Hi, I’m Tony Wilson. I’m going to be the next David Frost.” He was cocky.’

Trollope recalls being impressed by Tony’s long hair, his love of West Coast American rock and the fact that he seemed to have five girlfriends on the go at the same time. Tony also got a taste for the Scouse versus Manc office banter, especially if it was football related and never missed a chance to stick up for Manchester United. ‘There’d be big football debates – Liverpool were cocks of the north. He would always stick up for Manchester. He felt like he was in a foreign land. Here was this Manc in Scouseland.’

Tony became a regular gig goer and also got a taste for the free tickets that would come the newspapers’ way. Peter Trollope: ‘He knew he would never be a musician, but he loved the buzz of the musicians’ world.’

One of the regular tasks was to take free copies of the papers to police stations, essentially an excuse to talk to the desk sergeants to see what was going on. On one visit to Hardman Street police station, Tony’s recreational habits attracted the attention of a passing police dog. ‘One of these ginormous Alsatians got away from its handler and leapt up at him,’ says Trollope. ‘This dog was a beast. It put its paws on his shoulders and backed him onto a wall. Tony went white. The handler managed to drag the dog away. We walked away and he pulled out an apple-sized lump of cannabis from his pocket. It was a rock.’

Tony was never cut out for newspapers and managed to not do a great deal of work in Liverpool. After three months he headed back to London with his hands still relatively clean. One of his girlfriends – an elfin, Irish girl named Eithme – went with him and moved into his groovy basement flat. He seemed to have it made. As ever he maintained his links with home and even received a delegation from De La Salle’s drama players.

Peter McNamara: ‘Myself, our teacher Kevin Conroy and a guy named Nick Dobson were down in London. It was decided that while we were down there we’d go and see Tony. He was living in a basement flat. We knocked on Tony’s door and he was in bed. It was only about 10 o’clock. He let us in with a certain degree of reluctance. He had a fur coat on and nothing else. Kevin Conroy was aware of Tony’s predilection for smoking a joint. Kevin would have been in his thirties and he’d always wanted to smoke a joint. He insisted that Tony roll a joint – he put pressure on him. I was more into alcohol. Kevin was sitting there with his suit and tie on looking very straight. He kept saying, “This is having no fucking effect whatsoever. Fucking useless.” But he got turned on, drawing on the joint: I could see a change in his behaviour. He started giggling. He was getting stoned as he was trying to convince us it was having no effect.’

Halfway through his ITN tenure, Wilson decided he’d had enough. There were too many faces ahead of him in the queue to be on TV – and by this stage, Tony really wanted to be onscreen. Seasoned ITN newsreader Gordon Honeycombe apparently informed Tony that the young trainee’s appalling taste in ties would have to alter radically if he was to stand any chance of getting on television. ‘I found it horrendous,’ he later recalled in an interview with the Manchester Evening News. ‘For 18 months I did nothing much more than writing news scripts. I wanted a bit of the action.’

He applied for a reporter’s job at Granada Television in Manchester, the flagship operation within the independent network of companies. They were relaunching their regional teatime magazine show as Granada Reports. The Granada region – knowingly branded as Granadaland – was a geographically rum proposition, serving what’s known as the North West of England. After originally covering both sides of the Pennines, by 1968 it had pared down to a patch covering Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire and Liverpool, but also taking in the lower half of the Cumbria, a bit of North Wales and small slices of Staffordshire and Derbyshire. This ‘region’ makes no sense until you realise that the North West is actually defined by nothing more scientific than the power of the Granada transmitter. When the analogue signal fades away, so does the idea of the North West. Granada defined the North West rather than the other way around.

Tony was interviewed for the job by David Plowright, the former head of the station’s current affairs flagship World in Action who had since become controller of programmes. Despite Wilson talking too much during the meeting, his looks and charm impressed sufficiently to win him the job. But Tony’s mother took a dim view of his TV career. ‘She thought television was frivolous and didn’t really approve at all,’ remembers Pat Dilibero. ‘She thought he should get a proper job. Doris always used to have a go at Tony. She would never acknowledge how clever Tony was.’

Tony settled into Granada – and Granadaland – instantly. He became a big fish in a relatively small pond. It was something he could continue to be for the next 30 years. It seemed to be the way he liked it. Granada suited Tony and he would henceforth refer to himself as a ‘Granada boy’.

‘People called it The Fun Factory,’ recalls Tony’s colleague Bob Greaves, some 35 years after the two first met at Granada’s first-floor newsroom overlooking Quay Street in Manchester. ‘Eighty per cent of my working life was fun. I was there from the early 1960s to the turn of the century, by which time it was going downhill at a fair lick in terms of getting rid of people and cost-cutting. I’d been there through the halcyon years. I was one of the lucky ones in the sense that I went to Granada in 1963 as news editor and I was surrounded by people like Michael Parkinson, Bill Grundy, Peter Eckersley. My newsreaders were Brian Trueman and Peter Wheeler, both radio actors. David Plowright was running regional programmes. Then it turned into a journalist’s paradise. They decided to get rid of actors and presenters reading the news and get journalists to do it. Which was very clever of them, because they got two jobs out of people for the price of one. I was news editor then I became the main news presenter. They were very clever with money.’

Tony’s on and off screen persona – one part effete Oxbridge intellectual to one part groovy hipster – made him stand out. ‘The cliché “a breath of fresh air” was the wrong way of looking at it,’ says Bob Greaves. ‘Gale is another way of looking at it. He was different to any others who were around. He stormed in – I don’t mean angrily – he was like a tempest. It took all of us either a long time to get to know what he was really like, or we should have just accepted what he was like. He was a marvellous maverick. He spoke a different language. Literally, a different language. Apart from the Americanisms – “Hey, move ass man!” – You could sit with him in the canteen or in a newsroom conference and he would use high-flown phrases – all the ’ologies and ’osophies – most of which I’d never heard of. We used to hang on his every word because his language and his vocabulary was different to any of ours. Most of it wouldn’t make sense to us, because he would use high-flown, fluttery phrases. He was eminently likeable.’

Belfast-born Gordon Burns joined the new-look magazine show as a reporter. With four years of reporting experience with Ulster Television under his belt, Burns had toughened up quickly reporting on The Troubles. The environment he found in Manchester couldn’t have been more different. ‘When I came to Granada Reports my jaw dropped,’ he recalls. ‘It was massive. They had umpteen researchers, directors and producers. If you were going out on a story you said to someone, “Get me a hire car.” A hire car was duly delivered. Expenses were terrific. It was a huge operation and it was very exciting. The competition was fierce and I remember a lot of outstanding people came from that pot. Charles Sturridge came in as a researcher. He went on to do Brideshead Revisited. Anna Ford was there and went on to ITN. Paul Greengrass [later director of The Bourne Supremacy] was there as a sport researcher. It was massive, it was all happening. It was the best company to work for anywhere and what appealed to me was their absolute dedication to quality. Everything you did at Granada had to be quality.’

It seemed to Burns that Tony Wilson had the confidence of someone who had been in the newsroom much longer than he had. ‘Tony was very competitive. Very young but an outgoing, loud, friendly warm guy who was a daily reporter. Whatever story he was sent on – no matter how boring it was – he always brought back a very watchable story. He always found a twist. But getting it on air was unbelievable – like a vaguely orchestrated crash.’

As Burns saw first-hand on many occasions, the strict running times required for television really didn’t suit Tony’s style. News was shot on 16mm film and those films had to be off to the Granada labs for developing by 4pm if the item was to be ready for the teatime news. Gaps were left on the soundtrack in between interviews to allow reporters to lay their commentaries down live. Running orders were chillingly precise as production assistants timed the items to the second to keep the half-hour show running smoothly.

‘Tony and his stories just fell into the building,’ recalls Burns. ‘He was always late. He flung himself into the studio like a whirlwind. No one in the gallery had any idea what he’d be doing. Amazingly it always worked. Afterwards everyone jumped up and down and screamed and yelled and told him it must never happen again. But Tony was Tony. It was always meant to be that way. Because his stuff was so good he got away with it. He understood film-making.’

Tony also understood that he needed to stand out from the other reporters. One element in his work was certainly different: action. It was, after all, the very thing that he’d found lacking at ITN. He soon got it, settling into the rather unlikely role of Granada Reports’ resident daredevil. It was his basic unsuitability for the role that made it appealing to viewers. The ‘Kamikaze Kid’ the papers called him. The posh-talking, butterscotch-haired reporter could be seen tickling lions, feeding alligators and being dropped into the sea then rescued by helicopter. One hang-gliding stunt – where Tony was required to launch himself from the top of a hill with virtually no training – left him unable to walk for several days. This wheeze would later provide the basis for an early comic scene in the film 24 Hour Party People. It would prove to be one of the few sections of the movie that were truly reflective of real-life events.

‘He went out and did daring things,’ confirms Gordon Burns. ‘He abseiled and he jumped out of aeroplanes. Within the office the strand [series] was known as Let’s Kill Tony Wilson. Phenomenal courage but great films.’

Tony loved being on the telly. Many onscreen reporters feign a slight distaste for the attention that being on television can generate. Tony revelled in it. What’s more, he reasoned, if he presented the teatime programme rather than merely reported for it, he’d be on the telly even more.

‘Tony was desperate to be a presenter,’ says Burns. ‘He liked the limelight and the fame. He was always pitching to be the presenter of Granada Reports. He was a better film-maker than a presenter in my view.’

As soon as he arrived back in the North West, Wilson sought out the company of musicians. ‘I first met him when he first came back to Manchester in 1973,’ says Durutti Column drummer Bruce Mitchell. ‘I was a working musician and Granada was a platform for musicians. He was a bit too sophisticated for the TV audience at the time. He said comical things that were pretentious and bizarre. Tony just wanted to spend a lot of time with musicians. I’ve often thought the musicians haven’t really been worthy of him. He’d say to them: “Look, you need to listen to me, because I’ve never made a mistake.” When I challenged him on this, he admitted he’d once made a mistake about Neil Young. It was the only revisionist thing I ever heard him say. Looking back he was always right.’

Chris Lee of comedy art rockers Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias was another musician Tony found on Manchester’s pre-punk scene. ‘He introduced himself backstage at a gig at a venue called The Squat in 1974,’ says Lee. ‘He came across as a hippy or a freak… a head. It was very obvious that he smoked dope and took acid. And when I met him in the flesh I discovered that he did. He was obsessed with music. His enthusiasm for music was reflected in what he did for music.’

Bruce Mitchell: ‘He was everywhere. He’d go to opening of an envelope. Wouldn’t you? Musicians reacted to his enthusiasm. He was always interested in those bands who had only just learned how to unpack their instruments.’

Tony’s enthusiasm may have gone down well within Manchester’s music community, but among the wider public he prompted extreme responses. ‘I would be with him in public and there’d be varying reactions to him in person,’ remembers Chris Lee. ‘From “Pleased to meet you” to an almost psychotic hatred. I was amazed at the levels of abuse he got from people – and that was before punk. He was well used to it by the time punk came along. I was intrigued and amazed by the degree of animosity.’

‘Wanker’ was the favoured insult to throw at Tony. Wanker Wilson. He’d particularly attract abuse at gigs. ‘I remember going to a Rory Gallagher gig in 1975 at the Free Trade Hall,’ Tony later told Spike Magazine. ‘There were 2,000 people and 1,999 people fucking hated me. And I just thought, What the fuck have I done to these fuckin’ people? What shits they are. So people shouting abuse has happened for a very long time and I find it kind of amusing and irrelevant.’

Tony made friends far more easily in the Granada newsroom. Gordon Burns even used him as a babysitter. ‘He came round to our house and he arrived with one of those ping-pong ball machine guns. Instead of putting my son to bed they spent all night shooting umpteen ping-pong balls at each other all over the house. That was typical Tony. There was lovely side to him.’

Tony also got himself a bijou cottage in the village of Charlesworth, close to Marple but just over the border in Derbyshire. His London girlfriend Eithme moved with him for a while, though the relationship wasn’t to last long. Friends and colleagues remember being invited to regular parties in the remote spot, often leaving them in no state to drive home. Doris didn’t approve of Tony’s lifestyle and would travel the four miles up the road from Marple to clean the terraced house for her hippy son. She often found drugs paraphernalia and would flush them down the toilet.

But Tony’s personality got him noticed. By 1975, Granada’s press office was claiming that the ‘handsome six-footer’ was receiving 200 fan letters a week. Promoted in the local press as a bachelor after he’d split with Eithme, Tony Wilson became – unlikely as it may seem now – quite the sex symbol and with that came certain benefits. ‘Whichever woman he was with, they would always be the golden couple sweeping in,’ recalls Chris Lee. ‘He was at the top of the pecking order because of his profile. His girlfriends were always lookers. Granada was where the usual pick-up pool was. He had a “Cut me another little heifer out of the herd” mentality.’

Tony played the regional celebrity game, taking part in charity events and even giving a talk at his old school. He’d been invited by Peter McNamara, who was now a teacher at De La Salle. ‘I invited Tony in as he was doing some political reporting,’ says Peter. ‘We got a good turnout. But you had to be careful what you said in front of kids. Tony arrived. He had a fur coat on and a manbag. It was a handbag, but you’d call it a manbag today. And long hair. And he swore all the way through the talk, effing and jeffing. The kids loved it. The next day, the head teacher said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t come to Tony Wilson’s talk.” I was bloody glad he didn’t.’

Even at this relatively early stage in his career, it’s believed that Tony received an offer from the BBC’s Nationwide programme, essentially a networked version of a regional magazine show with news and fluffy filler sharing air time. Its current equivalent would be BBC1’s The One Show. It’s been claimed that he got as far as resigning, clearing his desk and driving to London to take up the reporter’s post, before changing his mind and asking if he could have his Granada job back. If that’s the case, then Granada’s personnel department must have been extremely fond of the young presenter, because his record of employment with them remains unbroken from 1973 to 2003, with seemingly no mention of this resignation.

Tony’s localised fame would prove immensely useful as his career progressed. It would help him get things done. With only three channels to choose from, his profile was inordinately high. Frank Cottrell Boyce, who would go on to write 24 Hour Party People, vividly remembers Wilson’s small-screen personality filling the North West at teatime. ‘I grew up in Liverpool. Tony was our newsreader, although we were more of a BBC family than an ITV family. I felt very much that you lived in Granadaland. It was kind of great that it wasn’t named after where you lived. Border was named after the border region, Thames was named after the Thames. We lived in this dreamy, other-worldly place. The North West is the footprint of a transmitter. And he was the face of that footprint.’

Martin Moscrop of Factory band A Certain Ratio: ‘I was very aware of Tony on the telly. I was an apprentice at 16 and lived in a boarding house in Offerton. I shared a room with five smelly blokes. We used to get home from work and watch telly while we ate our tea. We watched Granada Reports. I loved the bits with Tony on. This was before he was doing anything musical. All I knew him as was as a TV presenter. He always had an interesting slant. He had a good way with people. He was young – a lot younger than the other presenters. Him having long hair was an added bonus.’

Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: ‘Initially I took him to be just a local journalist on the telly on a regional news programme. Then I realised this guy always seems to do the musical bits. And he actually seems quite knowledgeable and has some interesting stuff, not like your average local TV presenter who knows bugger all about the “groovy” music that we’re into. So in that respect it soon dawned on you that this guy was very different from your average suit-and-tie local TV news reporter. He was somebody who was allowing a window into our world.’

Don Jones, later Granada TV’s head of sport: ‘I always thought he was different and quite glamorous. Definitely a smart arse. In my pre-Granada days, I was a provincial newspaper reporter. I wasn’t terribly impressed by his news persona. I never disliked him, I always thought he was an impressive character. I had long hair, that was me. He did too. I suppose he was a pretty right-on kind of fella but I couldn’t quite square that with him doing the news show. I used to think that regional news on the TV was just nip in and nip out and not really cover the story properly. I always thought he was different and he was moving it on a bit. He was sitting alongside some very conventional people who were the kind of people you’d expect to see on regional news.’

Happy Mondays’ Paul Ryder: ‘I knew him as “The bloke on the telly.” Then when he got his music programmes he was the first bloke off the telly that we saw without his “telly” clothes on. He was on Granada Reports with his shirt and tie on, then at 10.30 at night it was like, there’s that bloke but he’s got normal clothes on. I’d never seen that before. That made him more human to me. Granada was way ahead of its time; it was the best independent TV company.’

Tony had achieved an extraordinary amount in a very short amount of time. No one should have been prouder than his mum Doris but in 1975 she suffered a fatal heart attack. Tony Wilson, then just 25, was stopped in his tracks. The call went out to the Knupfers to come to Oberlinden but it was too late. Tony was hitchhiking in America and it proved difficult to get the news to him. When he did hear, he was distraught.

Geoff Knupfer recalls events several days later at Doris’s funeral: ‘I remember the funeral cortège, sitting in the car with Tony and he was detached. Whether he was detached because of the shock or whether he was detached because he was detached I don’t know, but I remember being quite surprised by his manner. No visible signs of distress. I remember seeing him looking out of the window. I was sitting next to him. He was looking out of the window as if this wasn’t something he was involved in. I wondered if this was his way of dealing with it or whether he really was detached from it.’

There’s no doubting Doris’s strength of personality and the impact she had on Tony’s life. Whatever the reasons for Tony’s apparent detachment that day, her presence would be felt for many years to come. Nearly 30 years after her death, Tony Wilson was asked a disarmingly simple question by the Manchester Evening News in one of those questionnaires that people like Tony Wilson are asked to fill in on a fairly regular basis. The question was, who do you love? He replied: ‘Kids and partner, Manchester United, all my bands, Proust, Shakespeare and the rest. My mum.’

Tony said a prayer for Doris at Manchester’s St Mary’s church, tucked into a back street a short walk from Granada. Known as The Hidden Gem, the church was frequented by Granada’s Catholics who would discreetly nod to each other from the pews at lunchtime mass. Actor Brian Moseley (Alf Roberts in Coronation Street) was a regular. Later in life, Tony would mainly go to mass when he was abroad, as his appearance in a church in the UK – and especially in Manchester – would cause a scene. He would make an exception on the anniversary of Doris’s death.

Sydney was also distraught when Doris died. ‘He absolutely adored her,’ says Pat Dilibero. ‘When she died his world fell apart. She was his total life.’ When he later moved in quietly with a young male photographer in Manchester, it was never really discussed in the family. Two years after Doris’s death, Pat Dilibero and her husband went to visit him and his friend to get some pictures taken. While they were there, Sydney dug out some photos he’d been meaning to show her for some time. When he showed them one of his ‘wife’ from his days in India, it was a picture of a good-looking young man.

* * * *

When it came to interviewing pop stars passing through the North West, Tony was the obvious choice, but with varying degrees of success. After David Cassidy announced his retirement from live performing after the death of a 14-year-old fan at a gig in London, his final performance as a teen idol was to be in Manchester. He turned up for the interview wearing a sumptuous fur coat. Not to be outdone, Tony wore his own, slightly ratty version.

Paul and Linda McCartney ran rings around Tony as he tried to interview them about their new band Wings. The McCartneys had clearly noticed Tony’s nerves and gave the reporter a stream of nonsense in place of answers. It must have been galling for Tony to be mocked by his Beatle hero, as McCartney and his wife told him how they wanted to be fairies when they grew up and that Paul was going to join the merchant navy. When Tony tried to ask them about the audience’s expectations that they would play Beatles songs on a Wings tour? ‘State of you and the price of tripe,’ McCartney huffs, first at Wilson, then at the camera.

‘He [Tony] would make outrageous remarks,’ says Bob Greaves. ‘I remember sitting in the canteen and someone mentioned drugs and he went on for about an hour about how there was no danger to any human being putting anything in their bodies. We all went, “Tony, come on.” He gave us reasons why there was no proof that anyone was in any danger. We said, “But Tony, people die.” ‘“They’re going to die anyway, man,” he’d reply. He was just great fun. And we took a lot of it with a pinch – a large sack – of salt.’

There was, however, at least one occasion in the Granada canteen when Tony was effortlessly outsmarted. Holding court and sporting that same coat, he was approached by Russell Harty. The effete presenter glanced disdainfully at the younger man and his ratty fur. ‘Tony,’ he sighed, ‘you look like a cunt in a bucket…’

‘Wilson was an extraordinary presence around Granada in that period,’ recalls former Granada researcher David Liddiment, who eventually became director of programmes. ‘He was on air a lot. He played a full part. He got into arguments about what programmes should be on the telly. He was a broadcaster. He’d gone into it as a career because he knew he had a feel for it. And he got better at it, more confident – not that he ever suffered from a lack of confidence – but his style was very particular to him and one of the strengths of Granada Reports at that time was that he was fronting it. It was because he loved the camera, he loved broadcasting, he was very fulfilled as a broadcaster. It was in his being.’

Tony made friends easily around Granada and one key relationship was with would-be band manager Alan Erasmus, whose acting career is often given little recognition. Yet he had a small but impressive list of credits, having acted alongside Ben Kingsley and Alison Steadman in a Mike Leigh-directed Play For Today called Hard Labour, as well as working with writers like Jack Rosenthal and directors like Michael Apted. He had appeared in Coronation Street and was also adept at comedy, with appearances in The Liver Birds and the Diana Dors vehicle Queenie’s Castle. He was also a regular face around the same haunts in the upmarket suburb of Didsbury that Wilson frequented. With its mix of money and grubby bohemia Didsbury fancied itself as south Manchester’s Chelsea, and Tony did his socialising there despite living out in Charlesworth, nearly an hour away by car. Wilson and Erasmus had Granada, music and partying in common. More than enough to forge a friendship.

As well as presenting one edition of Granada Reports per week, Tony had taken over the arts and entertainment slot What’s On, a ten-minute strand at the end of the Friday show. It was here that Wilson’s music credentials – in television terms – began to be forged. Granada had always been a music-friendly environment, as Bob Greaves recalls. ‘When Scene at 6.30 [Granada Reports forerunner] was in its heyday, every evening there’d be music. Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine used to come in regular as clockwork. So there was a history of music on the evening programme. Then Tony developed that into separate programmes like What’s On and then So It Goes, so it was a natural progression.’

Many of Granada’s presenters branched off into their own shows. Bob Greaves had Bob’s Beat and Gordon Burns did the popular science programmes that eventually led to The Krypton Factor. ‘I used to do a half-hour audience participation, pop psychology thing where we did experiments. I even ate human shit in one of them.’

Tony had his eye on a politics programme rather than music. He’d already done some Westminster reporting and fancied more, enjoying the buzz of parliament and the company of MPs. On one occasion, Tony was sent out to interview Labour minister Tony Benn. Benn was being guarded that day by Tony’s cousin Geoff Knupfer, who had become a Special Branch officer. Geoff stood behind Benn, just off camera, as Wilson interviewed the Energy Secretary. The cousins did not acknowledge each other. ‘Our worlds were very much apart,’ says Geoff today. ‘I’d joined the cops. We were following different routes. He jumped ship from the family to a large extent.’

But unpredictability, unreliability and a penchant for recreational herbs had effectively marked Tony’s card as being unsuitable as the main presenter of a political programme. Gordon Burns: ‘He wanted to do the politics show. He was desperate to do it but they gave it to me. He sort of resented that. The bottom line was that Granada executives couldn’t trust him on air. He was a loose cannon. He also had his little pouch with substances in it that he probably shouldn’t have had. Granada were worried sick about him and wouldn’t let him do the politics. In fact Tony didn’t speak to me for over a year because I was doing what he wanted to do. Then along came So It Goes.’

The show was Tony’s compensation for losing out on the politics. It was a half-hour music and entertainment programme, produced along similar lines to the regional output, but other regional television companies had the option to run it as well. In early production meetings it was decided to broaden the show to take on board comedy and social comment. ‘We were turning it into a comedy show because there was, in our opinion, no music worth covering,’ Wilson told me in 2001. ‘It’s hard to describe how bloody awful music was, how desperately bad it was, how our 1960s heroes had become boring and useless. Not only were they bad, they were badly dressed.’

As Tony and the team began preparations for So It Goes, new faces were brought in to front What’s On. ‘I was asked to go in and audition,’ remembers classical musician Dick Witts, later of The Passage. ‘I had to stand in the corner and talk to the wall as if I was speaking to a camera. I said, “I can’t do this.” Later they rang and offered me the job.’ Also taken on were actress Margi Clarke (then styling herself as Margox), plus radio DJs Ray Teret and Mike Riddock. ‘I think it said a lot about Tony that he had to be replaced by four people,’ says Witts. ‘Tony wanted to move on. He had ideas for programmes… starring him.’

As What’s On quadrupled its presenters’ bill, So It Goes – operating out of the same studio – was coming together. Australian television critic Clive James, another Cambridge man, was brought in to provide cultural comment in a slot entitled Brain Damage, along with another Cambridge graduate, the acerbic comic Peter Cook. Although delicate through drink, Cook was about to get a dubious career boost thanks to the potty-mouthed Derek and Clive recordings he’d made with Dudley Moore. The first transmission was scheduled for the first week of July 1976. Tom Waits, The Chieftains and The Jeff Raven Band were lined up for the show. All sorted. Unfortunately, as the So It Goes team moved into pre-production mode, the musical sands shifted right underneath Tony’s platform-soled feet. He would need to negotiate some swift repositioning – maybe even a touch of revisionism – if he was to stay in touch and on trend.