Part 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre
Part 4: How to get a book published
Of the many ways in which those of us who worked in universities were privileged, one was that we had little or no first hand experience of the irritating frustrations that so many industries were up against – especially, I soon learnt, in the world of the media.
When the Granada Television crew came to film in my study at home, I remember being amazed at just how many of them there were – and quite shocked by how little there was for some of them to do.
There was an electrician, for example, who spent about a minute poking a gadget into one of the electrical sockets on my study wall before giving the crew the ‘all clear’ to set up the camera and lighting. It was a warm sunny day, so he went to the village shop, bought a newspaper and spent the rest of the time reading in the garden.
Granada needed to know exactly how many RSC electricians would be doing the stage lighting. If there were three, there would have to be three from Granada, if four then four from Granada, and so on. It wasn’t that there would be anything for them to do, or even that they would have been allowed to do anything by the local electricians, but the rule was that same number would have to be there (and paid) for the same number of hours as the theatre’s own electricians.
How many production assistants does it take to carry a film to Manchester?
Don knew the union rules well enough to know that he had no choice but to cancel his meeting in London and go back to Manchester - sitting next to the same woman on the same flight from Gatwick – for the sole purpose of carrying the film from the airport to the laboratories (which she had to go past on her way home).