The Guardian (06/Feb/1993) - Obituary: Lord Bernstein
(c) The Guardian (06/Feb/1993)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Gaumont British Picture Corporation Limited, I Confess (1953), Rope (1948), Sidney Bernstein, Under Capricorn (1949)
Granada's hard core -- Obituary: Lord Bernstein
Lord Bernstein, the impresario of the 1930s and 1940s and creator of Granada Television, who has died aged 94, looked like a Savile Row-suited cross between a prize fighter and a Roman emperor, and, in fact, had many of the temperamental traits of both.
The second son of a prosperous Swedish-born Jewish entrepreneur, Sidney Bernstein was a creative business organiser more ready than most to support creative people against the "functionaries", a friend of poets and writers - Bernard Levin was one of the closest - and a remorseless litigant who could (and did) sue even an aerial photography firm for infringing the air space above his Kent farmhouse home.
He left school at 15 after spending his teens cutting lessons in favour of visits to music halls, including his father's Edmonton Empire. He went into an engineering apprenticeship but found it too tame. At 23, after the death of his father and his elder brother, he took command of the family chain of theatres, paying himself the then flashy salary of pounds 5,000 a year and opening up the Granada cinema chain with the growth of talkies in the 1930s, after merging with Gaumont British.
By 1935 a new Granada cinema was opening every three months. These pleasure palaces of stylish outrage decked out in marble, glass, glitter and gold were the creation of Bernstein and Komisarjevsky, a Russian theatre director and designer, he had met in Paris.
He had the egotism but not the flamboyance of the archetypal showman. He always dressed conservatively in almost identical dark suits and white shirts, a habit he was to keep up throughout his long life, together with a passion for having files on other people and maintaining his own secrecy and privacy.
He married twice but kept all reference to his first wife, the journalist Zoe Farmer - their marriage fell apart in the second world war - out of Who's Who because it was "not relevant." His second, and successful, marriage to the woman who gave him three children was not oppressively publicised even to close colleagues, whom he preferred to keep at arm's length.
After the war, he had looked set to become a film producer. (Certainly, with his Klees, Noldes, Modiglianis and Frinks, he would have made an unusually cultivated member of that tough caste.) He had been one of the first to visit the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Belsen. This experience led him to recruit his friend Alfred Hitchcock to direct a documentary film about the Holocaust - a film which has still never been shown.
Bernstein went to Hollywood for a few years and produced three feature films with Hitchcock as director. They were three of Hitchcock's least successful in the cinema - Rope, I Confess, and Under Capricorn. The partnership, never a likely one between two such strong-willed men despite their personal friendship, was quietly allowed to lapse.
Instead, back in England, the aloof showman set about creating Granada Television at Manchester in 1955, which set new standards in programme-making. It was Bernstein's Granada which gave television World In Action, University Challenge, and The Best Play Of...
It was one of the first ITV stations to be started, and 30 years later was the only one of the four still in existence. The fact that he advised a previous (Labour) government that Britain would be better off without commercial TV did not prevent him running a lucrative business based on the principle of a "tight ship".
He was a Labour Party supporter almost all his life, a member of the party and member of Willesden Council for Labour as a young man, and a substantial donor of funds later on. But he ran his businesses, including Granada (for which he had latterly been president) as an autocrat, while prescribing egalitarianism for others. At one stage Granada executives were not supposed to have office titles because Granada was said to be "a team", though it was notable that when Bernstein returned from visits abroad, deferred decisions tended to get taken.
There were sceptics of his close and relentlessly probing style of leadership, and he gave them ammunition. As a young man, he was apt to turn up at his cinemas at any time, asking why foyer ashtrays had not been emptied. Later he would go into Granada roadside cafes and ask why sauce bottles had been allowed to become empty. It was his way of fighting slovenliness, a fault which struck at his puritanical and fastidious heart.
Yet beyond this attention to detail was an employer who filled the corridors, reception areas and rooms of his offices with works of art for all to enjoy. He had bought paintings all his life and believed they should be seen. New employees to Granada might walk into their office and find along with desk and chair, a John Bratby here and a Patrick Heron there. If their wall was bare, they could make a phone call and ask if there was a painting going spare. For the corporate collection (responsibility was later taken over by his nephew Alex), he concentrated on contemporary British artists - among others he bought a Francis Bacon (Study For A Pope, 1955) and two Ben Nicholsons. But his private collection, described by his biographer as "eclectic", included Bonnard, Modigliani, Paul Klee, Barbara Hepworth, and a Breughel that once hung in his penthouse flat above the Granada studios.
Some of his critics affected to be amazed when the staunch Labour supporter accepted a peerage from Harold Wilson in 1969. They were even more amazed when he seemed reluctant to use it as a platform for his own views on politics and business. But friends always remarked that there was something retiring about him, a reluctance to swim in the deepest waters or the biggest ponds unless it was strictly required for his own enterprises. He made substantial donations to charity, but preferred other people not to know about it: if there was one thing he would have hated to seem, it was soft.
