Obituary extract – The Independent, 30 August 2001
From an obituary piece on Jeremy Wallington, head of documentaries at Granada TV, 1972-77
At any time in the middle 1970s a rather remarkable collection of talent could be found working, arguing and socialising in the London offices of Granada Television, in Golden Square in Soho. It was then arguably the most adventurous and in its way the most serious centre of television journalism anywhere outside the BBC. The cast included the present Lords Birt and Macdonald, one to become Director-General of the BBC, the other, after a successful business career with Scottish Media, transport minister in the second Blair cabinet.
Others who worked for Granada's flagship current affairs show, World in Action, or for the corona of documentaries and special programmes that surrounded it, included Barry Cox, now an elder statesman of commercial television; Norma Percy, then a researcher, now, with The Death of Yugoslavia and other documentaries, one of the most admired film-makers of her generation; other brilliant film-makers such as Roger Graef and Leslie Woodhead; and a floating population of television producers, journalists and film-makers with enough awards between them to fill anyone's silver cupboard.
Presiding over this ministry of all the talents for a decade between 1967 and 1977 was the debonair figure of Jeremy Wallington. His job title varied in the course of the fierce internecine struggles that were only to be expected when so many able and intensely ambitious young people were thrown together like cats in a sack. But many of his staff called Jeremy "the General" because of his remarkable gifts as a leader of gifted journalists, many of them more radical than he was.
His style was that of the Fifties, rather than the Sixties. He was a child, not of the Mersey or the Clyde, but of the suburbs: he could have been more easily imagined in a 1940 flying jacket with a polka-dotted foulard than in overalls and workboots. But his dandyish manner and light touch covered fierce commitment, great journalistic skill, and a relentless ambition, not to move up the executive ladder, but to stir up the complacent with great stories.
(Extract ends)
