Joe Rigby obituary

Sun, 16 Nov 2025

My father, Joe Rigby, who has died aged 87, was a working-class Catholic boy from Birmingham. He left school at 15, but rose to be a television executive at Granada Television in Manchester.

For 20 years from 1973, he was Granada’s head of programme planning, where he hired, inspired and nurtured the team of scriptwriters who wrote the on-air promotions for programmes. Many of them, including Andy Harries, David Liddiment and Dearbhla Walsh, went on to great success as television producers and directors.