Tony Garnett

The inspiration behind ‘The Spongers’

I see that Elizabeth Windsor is 90. I congratulate her.

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Football is about family

I wrote this seeing my granddaughter in an Aston Villa shirt. Aila’s three. I wish Barry Hines had read it. He would have understood. Why do so many of us give pain to our children? We knowingly condemn them to suffer, year after year. Then watch this pain with pride. Are you one of the guilty parents?

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Nurturing creativity in filmmaking

Management was one of the biggest con tricks of the Twentieth Century. It was a useless and exploitative artefact, turning a simple job into a “profession”, with its own jargon and meaningless qualifications.

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Steve Hilton Today

Steve Hilton’s defence of capitalism on Today was the mirror image of those Stalinists defending socialism in my youth. He should read Adam Smith:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. – Wealth of Nations, 1776

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Blair, Milburn and Hattersley: a modern morality

Blair, the man who stole the Labour Party and delivered it to Thatcherism, is now in a different frame of mind. A Land Tax, no less. A tax proposed a century ago by the Liberals, taken up later by Labour, and defeated by the land owning Tories in the Lords. It is indeed a no brainer.

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CBEEBIES

Sitting with my granddaughter, 3, happily watching Bing. What, never heard of him? Well, you’re not a parent, a grandparent or around 3, are you? I never miss Bing.

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@yanisvaroufakis – find your answer to Europe vote.

Read him in today’s @guardian. Brilliant. Read “The Global Minotaur” plus “And the Weak /suffer What They Must?. And weep”.
But wait? Democracy in Europe for sure, but what do you think about democracy in Britain?
Probably the same as Gandhi thought when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation. “I think it would be a good idea”.

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On Performance

Although performances have been my life, or at least my profession, I have no answers. The idea of performance is slippery and mysterious to me.

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The Aneurin Bevan Memorial Lecture, 2060

New technology wonder – just arrived, from the future. How do they do that? Here it is:

SICK TO DEATH

The founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, died one hundred years ago.

Under him, after a long struggle, at last Britain had a health service free for all at the point of delivery. It was 1948, just after WW2, and it was a miracle.

The second struggle was seriously engaged around 2020.

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Crisis – Ending Homelessness

I was brought up in Birmingham and now live in London, so I went to Edinburgh with some humility, remembering that from the great Enlightenment thinkers on, Scotland has so often led the way in thinking about social policy. But even there the problem of housing and the homeless persists. I feel privileged to support Crisis’s new policy. A novel ambition. It wants to abolish itself through solving the homeless crisis. I spoke in support at a conference this week,

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Orgreave

Orgreave? Never heard of it, sorry. Under 40, why would you? Here’s why you need to know. It’s your fight too.

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Remembering Jim Allen

The screenwriter, Jim Allen, as the old saying had it, didn’t just want a few reformist crumbs from the table, he wanted the whole bakery.

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The Day The Music Died

Some memories are stuck in aspic, vivid and unchanging, and I play them like tracks on an album. My memoir, The Day The Music Died, is officially in your hands now.

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Google Tax

Jan 31 imminent. The day we own up to the tax man. But did you know MPs don’t even claim all their allowances? It’s immoral, apparently. Tax avoidance, joining illegal tax evasion, as unacceptable behaviour.

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Tracking Changes – BFI Interview 2014

BFI Retrospective, Interviews, Tony Garnett

‘I’ve never got locked up in the idea of “art cinema”. That’s masturbation.’ Never mincing his words, producer Tony Garnett reflects back over his groundbreaking work in television and film, as a two-month celebration of his career – from Cathy Come Home to This Life – plays at BFI Southbank.

Chris Fennell
Updated: 27 January 2014

Born in a working-class suburb in Birmingham, Tony Garnett was one of the first of a generation of revolutionary TV creatives who sought to address serious social and political issues in their influential BBC dramas of the 1960s and 70s.

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On Success and Failure

I’m starting the interviews now, in anticipation of the publication of a memoir. I’m repeatedly told that my life has been one long success and various films and TV series are used as proof. I’m stumped.

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Old books, new blog post

Reading brilliant books I haven’t looked at since 60s, 70s. Seem like new books. Did I just forget? Am I or the times so different?

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Corbyn and Attlee

A man of quiet dignity, courteous to everyone, but a poor public speaker, whose voice does not carry. His intimates swear he has a warm sense of humour and his charm is sincere.

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Kids Company

So Camila and Yentob aren’t going to jail. Fancy that. If it wasn’t such a tragedy for slum kids, it would be a farce.

Kids’ Company worked for years – for kids. Simple as that. Kids were leading lives straight from a Victorian slum. And Camila came along and gave them love and helped them to love life and some of them even, against all the odds, got educated and joined the rest of us privileged people.

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Biography

Tony Garnett was born in Birmingham and read psychology at University College, London where he spent most of his time acting in the Drama Society and on TV. Describing himself as a Jack of all trades, helping to make dramatic fiction for the screen, Tony has had a prestigious and varied career as an actor, script editor, screenwriter, director and producer. He has spent his life telling other people’s stories. Now,

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