Sidney Bernstein was one of Britain’s first television “barons,” the least flamboyant but probably the most enduringly influential of a select number of show business entrepreneurs who won the first independent commercial television franchises in the 1950s. As founding chair of the London-based Granada Group, and later of its famous subsidiary the Granada Television Network Ltd., Bernstein earned a considerable reputation as a man sensitive to the frequently contradictory ideals of popular entertainment and public service. Today, Granada Television continues to thrive, nearly 50 years after its creation, reconciling its twin roles as a powerful purveyor of regional culture and a majority participant in a vigorous national network. It is one of the most profitable and highly respected television companies in Europe and the only British Channel 3 contractor still surviving in anything like its original form. In 1956, the first year of Granada’s transmissions, the Granada Group posted pretax profits of $364,930 (£218,204); by 1980 that figure had grown to over $72 million (£43 million), while the operating profit for 2001 was around $334 million (£200 million). Sidney Bernstein, socialist millionaire and “benevolent despot,” is the visionary who brought this empire into being. As a consequence of TV ownership deregulation, Granada had, by 2001, acquired control of seven major British independent television (ITV) licenses, covering 35.7 million viewers in over 60 percent of homes.

Bernstein had developed a considerable show business organization long before his controversial entry into television. Inheriting from his father a modest interest in a handful of small London cinemas while in his early 20s, he went on to build, with his brother Cecil, a successful circuit of some 60 cinemas and theaters on the way to creating a diversified leisure group with interests in publishing, property, motorway services, retail shops, and bowling alleys, as well as the hugely profitable business of television rentals. It is said he chose the name Granada for his cinema chain, and later for his television company, because its Spanish reference connoted sun-drenched gaiety and flamboyance, the qualities he sought to have associated with his entertainment establishments, which tended in the early days of cinema to be decorated in the Spanish baroque style. Another story suggests that Bernstein, rambling in Andalusia while looking for a name for his company, visited the city of Granada and its exotic splendor suggested the name. Always considering himself first and foremost an unashamed showman (an attitude underlined by his unqualified admiration for Phineas T. Barnum, whose portrait hung symbolically in various parts of the Granada empire), Bernstein nevertheless possessed a seriousness of purpose. He introduced serious foreign films into his cinemas at a time when distribution outlets for them were scarce and was a founder of the British Film Society. More significantly for the future of independent television, he fought a crusade to equate popularity and accessibility with quality and depth.

Bernstein had been aware of the commercial potential of television from an early stage but his socialist principles prevented him from questioning the BBC’s monopoly. From 1948 he had been lobbying the government to give the cinema industry the right to produce and transmit television programs, not to individual homes as the BBC did, but to collective audiences in cinemas and theaters. Indeed, the evidence of Granada Theatres Ltd. to the Beveridge Committee of Enquiry into Broadcasting (report published 1951) fully acknowledged the sanctity of the public monopoly principle with respect to domestic broadcasting. All the same, Granada and Bernstein were quick to overcome their reservations when the resulting Television Act of 1954 signaled the end of the BBC’s monopoly and permitted private companies to apply for the first regional commercial franchises.

The London-based Granada group surprised the establishment by bidding, not for a lucrative contract in the affluent southeast, but for the northern weekday license centered on Manchester in the industrial north and embracing an area which then extended geographically right across the north of England and Wales. Granada’s evidence to the Pilkington Committee of Enquiry into Broadcasting in 1961 justified this decision thus: “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.” Bernstein himself shrewdly put it another way:

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.

Despite certain objections to a commercial franchise being awarded to a company with overtly left-wing leanings, Granada commenced broadcasting from Manchester in May 1956, proudly proclaiming its origins with the slogan “From the North” and labeling its new constituency “Granadaland.” The first night’s programming began, at Bernstein’s insistence, with a homage to the BBC, whose public broadcasting pedigree he had always admired, and closed with a worthy, public-spirited statement of advertising policy that suggested an initial ambivalence surrounding the commercial imperative. Already by January 1957, Granada was responsible for all the top-ten rated programs receivable in its region, and, in 1962, it became the first station to screen the Beatles to the British television audience. Bernstein’s company soon came to be regarded as one of the most progressive of the independent television contractors and more consistently identifiable than most with the aspirations of its region. Its reputation for quality popular drama in the long-running serial Coronation Street and for high-profile current affairs and documentary in programs such as World in Action and What the Papers Say gave it early prestige and aligned it unmistakably with the ideals of its founder.

In the 1970s, Lord Bernstein finally relinquished stewardship of the television company and moved over to the business side of the Granada Group. He retired, after a long career, in 1979, and died in 1993, aged 94.