Granada Theatres

Bernstein, with his brother Cecil, created a successful circuit of sixty cinemas and theatres. Some of the cinemas were on property he inherited from his father. The Bernstein holdings eventually encompassed interests in publishing, real estate, motorway services, retail shops and bowling alleys, as well as the hugely profitable television-rental business.

Bernstein was a co-founder of the London Film Society^[6] in 1925, where he met and befriended the young Alfred Hitchcock, who became a lifelong friend and, briefly, a producing partner. He was the first to bring October: Ten Days That Shook the World and other works from the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein, as well as the films of Pudovkin, to London, and sponsored Eisenstein's trip to Hollywood in the early 1930s. He also ventured into theatre, building an elegant new venue which housed the premiere of Private Lives by Noël Coward, the hit which cemented that playwright's reputation. Though his involvement with the live stage was short-lived, he was passionate about the construction of palaces throughout Britain. As early as 1931, he was advising the planning committee for the long unrealised project for a National Theatre to include film projection and television production facilities into its plans for a theatre.

Bernstein was an early and ardent anti-fascist, beginning in 1933, when he helped many German actors, such as Peter Lorre, directors, cameramen and other German Jewish and anti-Nazi filmmakers to escape Germany and find work in Britain after they were expelled from the state-run UFA studios when Adolf Hitler came to power and sacked all Jewish state employees. Bernstein travelled to America frequently during the 1930s, where he met with Hollywood studio executives and organised meetings to persuade them to support the anti-fascist cause, and, after war broke out between Britain and Germany, to join the British in their fight against the Nazis. By this point, Bernstein joined the newly formed Ministry of Information, and continued his role of producing and bringing anti-Nazi and pro-British films before the American people during the critical years 1939–1941, when the United States remained neutral while Britain struggled alone against the Blitz and potential Nazi invasion. By 1943, Bernstein was also a member of SHAEF and worked on films which would help the new Allies, Britain and America, to understand each other. He read and advised on early drafts of Mrs. Miniver (1942), the film starring Greer Garson as the heroic mother of a wartorn British family, which MGM made after a meeting of MGM executives with Bernstein in Hollywood.^[7]

As the invasion of France loomed, Bernstein brought his friend Alfred Hitchcock back from Hollywood to Britain to work on two short documentary films for the post-invasion French audience. As the war wound to its close, Bernstein heard the first reports of extermination camps, visited Belsen himself, and was determined to create a film that would be seen by both the German and English-speaking audiences so that they would know the extent of the atrocities of the camps. To this end, he again consulted with Hitchcock to supervise the work of US and British Army cameramen documenting the horrors of the newly liberated camps, under the working title German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. The original plan to complete a feature-length documentary film of the camps was abruptly cancelled in July 1945, as the British Foreign Office claimed the material was too incendiary in light of the need for post-war co-operation from the defeated Germans. Hitchcock had already begun screening and editing the 800,000 feet of film from Allied cameramen and confiscated German documentation in the summer of 1945 when the project was shelved under number F-3080 in the Imperial War Museum archives, not to be seen until it was unearthed by film scholars in 1984 and shown on the BBC as Memory of the Camps. In documenting the camps, Hitchcock suggested the cameramen use the longest takes possible, to show that what the camera was filming was real; this initiated Hitchcock's own involvement in long, uncut takes, which became the raison d'être of Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock's first co-production, the experimental Rope, starring James Stewart.^[8]

Granada Television

In 1954, Bernstein won a franchise licence to broadcast commercial television to the north of England including key urban areas such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield. Bernstein wanted the north of England as this would not have any detrimental effect on viewers at his theatres, which were predominantly based in the south of England. Furthermore, he strongly believed the north of England had a cultural heart that had potential to be cultivated, which would translate itself into good television.

The North and London were the two biggest regions. Granada preferred the North because of its tradition of home-grown culture, and because it offered a chance to start a new creative industry away from the metropolitan atmosphere of London... the North is a closely knit, indigenous, industrial society; a homogeneous cultural group with a good record for music, theatre, literature and newspapers, not found elsewhere in this island, except perhaps in Scotland. Compare this with London and its suburbs – full of displaced persons. And, of course, if you look at a map of the concentration of population in the North and a rainfall map, you will see that the North is an ideal place for television.^[9]

To achieve his aim, Bernstein ordered the building of the United Kingdom's first completed purpose-built television studios (BBC Television Centre began construction several years earlier, but was only opened in 1960, four years after Granada's). Construction of Granada Studios began in 1954. At Bernstein's behest, the studios featured a purely decorative white, lattice tower in the form of a transmitter tower to give the studios an embellished and professional appearance. Paintings from Bernstein's art collection and portraits of Edward R. Murrow and showman P. T. Barnum adorned the interior of the studios to inspire creativity among Granada employees.^[10]

Bernstein's instincts proved to be sound. Despite objections to a commercial franchise being awarded to a company with overtly left-wing leanings, Granada began broadcasting from Manchester in May 1956, proudly proclaiming its origins with the slogan 'From the North' and labelling its new constituency 'Granadaland'. The first night's programming opened, at Bernstein's insistence, with an homage to the BBC, whose public broadcasting pedigree he had always admired, and closed with a public-spirited statement of advertising policy which suggested an ambivalence about the commercial imperative to maximise profits.

As early as January 1957, Granada was responsible for the top ten programmes, by ratings, available in its region. Bernstein's company soon came to be regarded as one of the most progressive of the independent television contractors. One famous series Bernstein was not enthusiastic about was the drama serial Coronation Street. Bernstein's brother Cecil felt the same way about it;^[11] upon hearing the proposal for what was then to be known as Florizel Street, Sidney stated that scriptwriter Tony Warren had "pick[ed] up all the boring bits and strung them together one after another".^[12]

Nevertheless, Coronation Street was approved and soon become a popular programme. Granada also garnered a reputation for producing high-profile current affairs and documentary programmes, such as World in Action, Disappearing World and What the Papers Say, all of which lent Granada prestige and aligned it, unmistakably, with the ideals of its founder.