Tony Wilson 1950 - 2007

Late last night I heard via Twitter that Tony Wilson had died and like a lot of people from my generation felt a great wave of sadness.

Today of course most of the tributes have concentrated on his role in music and in particular the Manchester scene. I grew up in Lancashire and hated just about every band that came out of the area with a passion. While friends were listening to the Happy Mondays I’d be trying hard not to laugh and completely failing to understand how anyone could prefer that crap over Anthrax. 1987 saw the release of ‘Among The Living’ and I was supposed to get excited by muppets from Manchester when guys from New York were singing about Judge Dredd and Stephen King novels? Right.

So if anything Wilson played a great part in winding me up for many years as I tried to avoid coming into contact with the music and fans of just about every band he launched.

But his presence was greater than that. As a local news presenter I’d grown up listening to and watching Tony Wilson. In a world of dull as dishwater programming he always brought a much needed boost of vitality to everything he was involved in. Even when a lot of that stuff was cheap and bordering on the ridiculous. I fondly remember him presenting a terrible game show called Remote Control which I believe involved strapping students to a wheel and then spinning them around for a bit. Much earlier than that he’d presented Flying Start in which nervous would be entrepreneurs vied for a couple of quid to get their fledgling businesses off the ground. He also did a fair bit of World in Action and of course Granada Reports (which also exposed me to that bloke off The Krypton Factor and Richard and Judy before they were Richard and Judy).

So music aside (and I was too young to appreciate his role in So It Goes) Wilson was always a TV fixture. And most importantly to me at the time he was the only person on ‘local’ TV who seemed just as good as the ‘real’ reporters on the ‘real’ news in London.

The last thing I saw him do was a cameo in A Cock and Bull Story. It brought him full circle for me, seeing him interviewing again and this time Steve Coogan, playing Steve Coogan who of course played Wilson in 2002’s 24 Hour Party People (a film I still haven’t seen).

So I can forgive him for unleashing the likes of Bez and Shaun Ryder on the world and I really am sorry to see him go so early. To me he was always one of the good guys.