Granada Television memory

 Janice Finch remembers as a nine year old trying to meet the Beatles at Granada

I forgot to mention that I had of course actually breached the walls of Granada television in 1963 as a nine year old when the Beatles were supposed to be appearing live on their Friday night show. It was a summer holiday so it must have been August 1963 and I’d gone with a girl in the street who was supposed to be looking after my six year old sister and me that day. We decided the three of us were going to go to Granada to see if we could see the Beatles.

Of course every other young girl in Manchester had got the same idea so by the time we got outside Granada it was packed with screaming girls, just packed. Every time anyone went in to the front door they got mobbed by people asking for their autograph or “Have you seen the Beatles? Are they in there?” We would look up and you’d see in the windows of the office block there were people peering out looking at this mass of young girls in the street outside. Finally there was this shout, “They’re in there at the car park!” We all ran, there was a stampede. We ran down Quay Street to the Car Park Lodge entrance and we all started climbing over the wall. People would help you up and you’d get over the top.

My sister was with me and my friend was with me, and there were the Beatles in the car park setting up to do this live transmission of ‘Twist and Shout’. They were there in their black polo neck sweaters and suddenly they looked up and saw this horde of women running after them and had to run for it. The performance outdoors was abandoned and they had to do it inside in the studio.

Years later I was working with Phil Taylor, who had those huge dark eyebrows, on a ‘Union World’ shoot somewhere in the middle of nowhere and we got talking about the Beatles and that particular day. He said, “Were you one of them? I was out there, we were trying to fix them up to do this performance and it was abandoned. All these bloody women!”

It was such a big deal, the Beatles being there. You did feel, you really did feel at the time that the North and the North West was on its way and Granada was all part of that.

*Much thank you to Farshad Arbabi and The Lennon Years Facebook Group for originally posting this story and photographs.