Derek Granger

Derek Granger (23 April 1921 – 29 November 2022) was a British film and television producer, and screenwriter. He worked on Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust, and Where Angels Fear to Tread.

Derek Granger
Born	23 April 1921
Died	29 November 2022 (age 101)

Life

Derek was born in Bramhall, Cheshire, to Winifred (née Ashcroft) and Edgar Granger, on 23 April 1921. When he was 14, the family moved to Eastbourne, where his father managed a chain of confectionery shops. Granger first saw Laurence Olivier as a star in Romeo and Juliet at the New theatre, London, in 1935 when Granger watched the performance. In 1938, after leaving Eastbourne College, Granger joined the Southern Publishing Company as a reporter on the Sussex Daily News and the Evening Argus in Brighton. He was a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve establishing himself as a theatre critic when he returned to work for the papers.

In 1952, he became the Financial Times's newly launched arts pages' first drama critic, as recommended by Laurence Olivier. In 1958, he worked as a researcher for Granada Television and was the head of plays (1958–61) for it. While being the second producer of Coronation Street (1961–1962), a seven-month strike by Equity members meant that only 13 actors on long-term contracts could appear. When Granger’s ruse of using tall children to deliver milk and post failed to impress the union, he put Dennis Tanner (played by Philip Lowrie), one of Coronation Street's characters. in charge of a theatrical agency and filled out scenes with snakes, sea lions, pigeons, dogs and a chimp.

In 1962, he created and produced the sitcom The Bulldog Breed (1962), starring Donald Churchill as the disaster-prone Tom Bowler and Amanda Barrie as his girlfriend, Sandra Prentiss. He returned to Coronation Street with the hit spin-off Pardon the Expression (1966) with Leonard Swindley (Arthur Lowe) being relocated to the branch of a national chain store as assistant manager. However, Turn Out the Lights (1967), a spin-off of the spin-off, with Swindley as a ghost hunter, bombed.

In 1964, Granger executive produced World in Action which featured Seven Up!, which in turn featured seven year olds with Michael Apted, the show's researcher who would subsequently visit the cast members as director of stand-alone programmes every seven years to chart the ups and downs of their lives. He presented Granada’s regional programme Cinema during 1964 and 1965. He later (1968) produced music programmes and executive produced two drama series, The Inside Man (1969), about a psychiatrist-criminologist, and Wicked Women (1970), the stories of female Victorian criminals for the new London ITV company LWT.

From 1969 to 1972, Granger was literary consultant to Olivier, who was artistic director at the National Theatre. He then made the BAFTA award-winning Country Matters (1972-73), based on stories by H. E. Bates and A. E. Coppard, and the anthology series Laurence Olivier Presents (1976-78) for Granada. That show, which he co-produced with Olivier, featured six plays of the actor's choice, all but one starring himself. They included Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Harold Pinter's The Collection. In 1981 he made Brideshead Revisited, starring Jeremy Irons. After leaving Granada in 1982, he made two literary film adaptations with Charles Sturridge, A Handful of Dust (1988) and Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991).

Granger entered a civil partnership with the interior director Kenneth Partridge, his partner from 1949, in 2006. It ended with Partridge's death in 2015. Granger died at the age of 101 on 29 November 2022.

External links

• Derek Granger at IMDb