Norman Frisby, head of publicity at Granada who spent many years looking after the stars of Coronation Street – obituary

Norman Frisby, who has died aged 94, spent nearly 30 years as head of publicity for Granada Television in Manchester, spending much of his time dealing with Coronation Street; he was thought to be the longest-serving publicist in British broadcasting.

Having joined Granada in 1959, the following year Frisby became involved in the project that would become Coronation Street. A pilot was made, but the network was anxious.

“Some of the metropolitan people who were then working on drama were a bit nervous that it was too northern, that people wouldn’t understand the Lancashire dialect,” Frisby recalled. “So television sets were installed in the canteen and around the building and we all had to sit down and watch [a pilot] and then write a piece on what we thought, whether the accents were too strong or whatever. I think probably as a result of that it was a bit watered down.”

Frisby was instructed to keep the launch low-key, and the show was initially restricted to the Granada region, then “crept on to the network”, as he recalled.

As the programme gradually established itself in the nation’s affections, Frisby found himself having to gate-keep the continuous slew of press stories – many of which had no basis in reality. He found it all rather pathetic: “I used to consider myself something of a professional and I didn’t like to see newspaper men reduced to such a level.”

He had a crown of thorns in his office, presented to him by a colleague who told Frisby that anyone doing his job was in permanent danger of being crucified by the tabloids.

Perhaps his favourite Street person to deal with was Pat Phoenix, who played the siren of Weatherfield, Elsie Tanner (“She was wonderful but she got into some terrible, terrible scrapes”). On one occasion she was chosen as their pin-up girl by the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, and they asked her to attend their last-night booze-up before they departed for Borneo.

Pat was as fun-loving as Elsie, and, Frisby recalled, “she gave them a wonderful show dressed to the nines. She leapt up on to a table and shouted, ‘Boys, the drinks are on me!’ ” There were 700-800 of them, he reckoned. “I said to the adjutant: ‘She can’t afford it, and I certainly can’t, so you’d better send the bill to Granada.’ ”

He got the bill passed by presenting a sheaf of adoring press cuttings from the evening.

While Pat Phoenix was very much like her on-screen character, Frisby was often amused by the disparity between the actors and actresses and their roles. “Margot Bryant was a mistress of the four-letter word. Little Minnie Caldwell. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth in the show but she’d been a chorus girl in her day and she certainly knew how to toss around the four-letter words.”

Norman Frisby was born at East Retford in Nottinghamshire on January 9 1928 and educated at King Edward VI Grammar School in the town; his mother was Edith, née Bossingham, while his father Sydney was a guard on the railways. Norman was called up for National Service in 1946, serving as an instructor with the Parachute Regiment in Palestine until the end of the British Mandate, then in Tripoli.

He began his journalistic career with the Newark Advertiser in 1949, subsequently moving to the Lincolnshire Echo and the Liverpool Evening Express – for whom, in 1956, he covered the launch of Granada Television.

It was, he recalled, “an absolute shambles because nobody seemed to know what they were doing. It was all cobbled together. Quentin Lawrence, who presented the first programme, was drunk.”

After the Granada launch he joined the Daily Express, filing two reviews a night as TV critic, one for the first edition and one later on. But he was subsequently informed that the paper had “fallen out” with ITV – he thought it may have been because of a thwarted takeover bid – and were going to carry no more reviews of their programmes, only “knocking copy”. He was accordingly banned from the premises.

He was switched to the Express newsdesk – “where I was spending my time in the middle of the night ringing up clergymen saying ‘Did you know your daughter has run away with a black man?’ and that sort of thing.” But he was snapped up by TV Times as a feature writer and sent back to Granadaland. “They had to put a notice up on the noticeboards saying that ‘Norman Frisby is no longer persona non grata’.”

After joining Granada as Manchester press officer, one of the shows he dealt with was the sitcom The Army Game. Just before Christmas 1960, after the CO of a barracks had banned his troops from watching the show on their 6d-in-the-slot TV sets, Frisby arranged a march through the streets of Pontefract and a “siege” of the barracks by the cast, accompanied by a Yorkshire colliery brass band. It all ended with an invitation to lunch in the Mess and the rescinding of the CO’s order.

With the Street up and running, Frisby was asked to arrange some short films about life in northern England to fill gaps when advertising fell short, and he had the idea of presenting contrasting musical styles in the region.

Accordingly, he arranged to film the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band and intercut it with footage of an up-and-coming new beat group. The Beatles – with their new drummer of four days, Ringo Starr – were duly filmed at the Cavern.

But an accountant figured that if they were paying the soon-to-be Fab Four £12 apiece, the two dozen brass band members would each have to receive the same. “We couldn’t have done that,” he recalled, “it would have blown the budget.” So the film was shelved, though it has been viewed on YouTube many times since.

In 1974 Frisby was appointed Granada’s chief press and PR officer, and he went on to serve as chairman of the ITN PR Group, as well as writing and/or editing a number of communications industry publications, including Television in the University, What is a TV Centre and The Granada Years.

He had been involved in the hospice movement since helping to launch an appeal for St Ann’s Hospice in Manchester in 1969. He went on to be chairman of the Council of St Ann’s, and also became a trustee of the Springhill Hospice in Rochdale.

He was a JP from 1973-94, chairman of the Courts Training Committee, and founder and co-editor of Manchester Justice magazine. He was actively involved with Rochdale Parish Church, and was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Greater Manchester in 1992.

Norman Frisby married Iris Atkinson in 1951; she died in 2017 and he is survived by their two daughters and a son.

Norman Frisby, born January 9 1928, died June 8 2022