Andy Harries

Andrew Harries (born 7 April 1954) is chief executive 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since 2007, Left Bank has produced the television series Wallander, Strike Back, Outlander (TV series), The Replacement amongst many other acclaimed dramas.

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".

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".

Their twin sons, Jack and Finn, ran the JacksGap YouTube channel from 2011 until 2017.

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.

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 (2017) and Broadcast Awards (2018).

Harries is married to filmmaker and writer Rebecca Frayn, daughter of the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn (now married to biographer Claire Tomalin).

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.