Hooded Men (1973)
My reward for the success of Dust At Acre Mill - see earlier story - was to be sent to Northern Ireland for a year as World In Action’s acting-producer-in-residence.
There are so many stories to tell about that year: My meeting with Martin McGuinness, who at that time was second-in-command of the IRA in Derry. A week later I met with Brigadier Kitson who in the aftermath of the 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’ killings "brutally told Col Derek Wilford that having got so far, he should have pushed on to "sort the whole bloody mess out". Bloody Sunday happened ‘on my watch’
If word got out about what I had been up to then World In Action’s reputation in Northern Ireland would be shattered. Needless to say I didn’t get my staff producer promotion and a year or so later left Granada TV.
Four years on - as ATV’s Head of Documentaries I named our flagship series Viewpoint and introduced a publishing, rather than editorial, ethic to the programmes I commissioned. A decade later I bumped into Gus Macdonald. We agreed that series titles like ‘One Pair Of Eyes’ or ‘Viewpoint’ allow a lot more flexibility, as far as balance was concerned, than‘World In Action’. Recently, four decades la
I still regret not making the Hooded Men although if I had I've little doubt I would have stayed at Granada Television and my next twenty years in television would have been a lot less inspiring.
