Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Apted

Apted’s sentence does what good directors do: it cuts between intimacy and industry critique in the same breath. The aside - “you don't want to start crying about these things” - is a quick, self-protective joke, a way to admit how formative the moment was without performing nostalgia. He’s flagging emotion, then editing it down, which is its own kind of British restraint. That restraint makes the next claim land harder: Granada wasn’t just a job, it was a “very, very hot place to be,” a rare pocket of creative heat inside a usually chilly system.

The subtext is about timing and power. Apted frames his early career as “good fortune,” but he’s also quietly describing an ecosystem that made luck usable: Granada in its swaggering era of regional television, willing to back ambitious work, willing to let young people make mistakes on air. Against that, “the BBC was firmly asleep” isn’t merely a dig at a rival; it’s a diagnosis of institutional complacency. The BBC becomes shorthand for establishment comfort - well-funded, culturally central, and at that moment insufficiently curious.

Context matters: the Granada/BBC rivalry wasn’t just corporate; it was aesthetic. Commercial ITV companies like Granada often chased immediacy and bite, while the BBC could drift toward safe consensus. Apted is claiming that his sensibility was forged in the insurgent lane. The line reads like a small memoir, but it’s really a thesis about where innovation comes from: not from the center declaring itself enlightened, but from the edges staying awake.