In the 60s, during the rise of Granada, its output ranged from Coronation Street to Laurence Olivier in King Lear, leading to this culture clash, as recalled by Maureen Lipman when interviewed by Michael Grade for On the Box:
“There was a fantastic moment when Laurence Olivier in the corridors of Granada encountered Doris Speed, Annie Walker. And he went down on one knee and he said, ‘My darling, darling Miss Speed. You know, over the years you have given us so much pleasure. I can’t tell you how wonderful you are, what a great actress you are in every conceivable sense. And Doris looked at him and said, ‘And the same to you Sir Laurence, many fold.’”
Olivier’s fabulous luvvie enthusings were rather dampened by Doris Speed’s steely reply, how very Annie Walker of her!
Michael Grade’s history of TV, On the Box, is on Radio 2 on Mondays.
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3 comments:
Olivier was very good and very nice at making comments of this nature to his fellow actors who were involved in productions that some might have considered at being at a lower end of the cultural scale. He made similar nice comments to Jean Alexander and once went out of his way to tell Patrick Macnee how much pleasure The Avengers had given him.
I'm more bothered that Michael Grade is presenting a history of television when he, more than most, has been responsible for the dumbing down of British television from the heights it enjoyed in the days when Annie Walker stood behind the bar of the Rovers.
Wasn't it Laurence Olivier that was once going to make a cameo appearance on the Street as a tramp? Apparently he was all up for it, but couldn't make the filming in the end as he was busy with something else...
On that Des O'Connor tribute show a few years ago his version of the story was that he dashed off before she could reply and she didn't know who he was.
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