Andy Harries
Andrew Harries is chairman and co-founder of Left Bank Pictures, a UK based production company formed in 2007. In a career spanning four decades he has produced television dramas including The Royle Family, ''Cold Feet, the revivals of Prime Suspect and Cracker, as well as the BAFTA-winning television play The Deal.
In 2006 he received an Academy Award nomination as producer of The Queen, which saw Helen Mirren win Best Actress for her role, and in 2007, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him the Special Award in Honour of Alan Clarke. 2011 saw the Royal Television Society confer a Fellowship on Harries for outstanding contributions to the broadcasting industry. He has been described by Broadcast Magazine as "one of the UK's most outstanding drama producers".
Since 2007, Left Bank has produced the television series Wallander, Strike Back, Outlander and The Replacement amongst many other acclaimed dramas.
In 2016, they released The Crown, the first American-British television series produced exclusively for Netflix. The Golden Globe, SAG and Emmy winning series, written by Peter Morgan, has been very well received by critics and audiences.
Their fourth feature film, Dark River'' was released on 23 February 2018. It was written and directed by Clio Barnard, stars Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, and Sean Bean. It screened in the Platform section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
Left Bank Pictures has won numerous industry awards, including Best Independent Production Company at the Edinburgh TV Awards and Broadcast Awards.
Family
Harries is married to filmmaker and writer Rebecca Frayn, daughter of the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn. Their twin sons, Jack and Finn, ran the JacksGap YouTube channel from 2011 until 2017.Early life and education
Andy Harries was born in Inverness, Scotland, on 7 April 1954 and grew up in Peterborough, England, receiving primary education at West Town Primary School until 1961, and secondary education at the public Oakham School. He grew up aspiring to be a war correspondent in Vietnam, or an investigative journalist; his idols were Harold Evans, Jon Swain and John Pilger. He left college at the age of 17 with poor A Level results and became a trainee reporter on the Peterborough Evening Telegraph newspaper. His time on the newspaper raised his awareness of politics, and he sought to further his understanding of it by studying at university. He applied to various northern universities to break away from his southern middle-class lifestyle, and was accepted at Hull University.Harries stayed at Hull until he was 21, though continued to work at the Evening Telegraph during holidays. At university he developed an interest in music journalism and found an outlet for this by writing reviews for Melody Maker.
Early career (1976–1981)
After leaving Hull, Harries moved to London to work for the Southern News Service news agency, writing diary pieces for the Daily Mail and News of the World from 1975 to 1976. On the advice of a friend, he applied for a position as a researcher for Granada Television in Manchester. He did not understand the appeal of television production, and as a result he was turned away at two interviews before being hired in 1976.Shortly after being hired he was taken aside by the news producer and asked to read the on-air bulletin for the nightly broadcast. He read the news for three months until one night when he condensed a six-minute bulletin into three minutes. He attributed this to stage fright, which caused him to speak too fast. The rest of the production crew were not ready to move on to the next news items, leaving Harries standing in silence for several minutes. Harries recalled in a 2007 interview that Steve Morrison, the producer of the bulletin, called him into his office and berated him, telling him he did not deserve to be on television and that he would no longer be reading the news. Morrison's remarks angered Harries to such a point that he assaulted the man. Aware that he was going to lose his job, he contacted a Granada colleague who got him a new job at Granada's London centre, which he took up at the age of 23.
Pursuing his interest in investigative journalism, Harries worked as a researcher on the current affairs programme World in Action, where he met Paul Greengrass. While Greengrass achieved success in exposing alleged corruption involving Manchester United F.C. chairman Louis Edwards, Harries investigated irregularities in the British Singles Chart. Greengrass's investigation was a success, though Harries admits his own programme "didn't make a blind bit of difference".
Freelance and Channel X (1981–1992)
In 1981, Harries left Granada and moved into freelance producing and directing. He directed the documentary series Africa in 1984 before beginning a collaboration with Paul Yule, with whom he made four films in Peru between 1985 and 1989—Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas, Our God the Condor, Iquitos, and Mario Vargas Llosa: The Novelist Who Would Be President—and working on editions of The South Bank Show and Arena. While directing a corporate video for BT he met Jonathan Ross, who was his assistant for the day. Ross invited Harries to direct a pilot for a chat show he and Alan Marke had developed that was based on Late Night with David Letterman. The pilot was a success and Ross found a television audience with The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross, which first aired in 1988.Harries formed a production company called Sleeping Partners with Greengrass in the latter part of the decade, which produced Ross's The Incredibly Strange Film Show and comedian Lenny Henry's Lenny Live and Unleashed film. The latter was directed by Harries and was edited together from a number of performances by Henry at the Hackney Empire in 1989. The Guardians film critic called the direction "unobtrusive".
The 1990s began with more direction and production for Ross and Marke's Channel X production company; in 1991 he made the documentary Viva Elvis! and executive produced Middlemarch Films' The Ghosts of Oxford Street, a musical about Oxford Street's history. The script for Ghosts was written by Harries's wife, Rebecca Frayn. The same year, he developed a script with Peter Morgan called Bhundu Beat, a film described by Variety as "a bizarre remake of A Hard Day's Night featuring the briefly fashionable Zimbabwean band the Bhundu Boys and Brit comic Lenny Henry". With a development budget of £2,000, Harries sent Morgan on a research trip to Zimbabwe, taking a circuitous route that lasted for three days. Bhundu Beat was never made.
Second Granada career (1992–2007)
Controller of Comedy
At the 1991 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Harries personally bought the television rights to An Evening with Gary Lineker, a comedy play written by Arthur Smith and Chris England based around a group of England fans at the 1990 FIFA World Cup. Smith bet Harries £100 that he would not be able to get the adaptation on television before the next World Cup. Harries tried selling Smith and England's screenplay to the BBC, Channel 4, LWT, Yorkshire Television and Central Independent Television to no avail. The BBC offered to produce it as a studio play but Harries wanted a full-length film to distinguish it from the original play, which was by then playing at London's West End. He was reluctant to offer the script to Granada because of his previous experience with the company. However, in 1992 he was accepted the position of controller of comedy at Granada and An Evening with Gary Lineker was made. Harries was disappointed that pressure from Granada's management had forced him to replace so many of the original stage cast; England was replaced by Paul Merton, leaving Caroline Quentin as the only original actor. The Edinburgh Fringe played an important role in Harries's early commissions at Granada; he was not fond of traditional styles of comedy and was always looking for alternative comedians. These included Caroline Aherne, Steve Coogan and John Thomson. After the failure of Bhundu Beat, Harries commissioned Peter Morgan to write "Mickey Love" in 1993, one of a series of short comedy films for the Rik Mayall series Rik Mayall Presents.In 1994, after turning down an offer for "the number three position" at Channel 4 and extending his contract with Granada to become controller of entertainment and comedy, he commissioned The Mrs Merton Show from Aherne. In negotiating a second series with the BBC a few years later, another series from Aherne was included; The Royle Family, a sitcom featuring a working-class northern family, aired on BBC One from 1998 to 2000. The first two episodes were filmed with a studio audience, something Harries did not approve of. He scrapped these episodes and had them refilmed without a laugh track. The Royle Family returned for a one-off special in 2006, an achievement Harries described as giving him no greater pleasure. A spin-off of The Mrs Merton Show was commissioned by Harries from Aherne in 1999; Mrs Merton and Malcolm was based around Mrs Merton and her son Malcolm, played by Craig Cash. The programme was Aherne's first critical failure, which Harries blamed on the BBC One schedulers.
In 1995 he commissioned a comedy drama on spec from Mike Bullen, a BBC radio producer and first-time writer. Like An Evening with Gary Lineker, The Perfect Match was based around football and received respectable reviews. Harries was interested in producing more comedy dramas, based on the success of American programmes like Thirtysomething, and assigned Granada producer Christine Langan to work with Bullen. Langan and Bullen developed Cold Feet, which was broadcast in 1997 and was commissioned for a full series in 1998. It won the British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series in 2002, which Harries collected with Bullen and Spencer Campbell. Harries executive produced two more series of Bullen's; Life Begins and All About George.
His first panel show produced came in 1999 with Mel and Sue's Casting Couch. The show was Mel and Sue's first programme made for ITV following the success of Light Lunch for Channel 4. Casting Couch had low viewing figures and was not recommissioned. It was one of several comedies commissioned by Harries in 1999 that were produced by Justin Judd. Others included Dark Ages and My Wonderful Life. Judd and Harries began developing Dark Ages—a sitcom set at the turn of the 2nd millennium—in 1997 but could not make it work with the writer at the time. They proposed it to Red Dwarf writer Rob Grant, who liked the idea, and wrote all six episodes. Dark Ages aired nightly during the Christmas 1999 period. A second series was proposed—Harries said it would "hit its stride" then—but ITV did not recommission it. My Wonderful Life was another ratings disaster. Harries blamed ITV Network Centre and publicly criticised the network, courting the ire of its director of channels David Liddiment.