“Most of all, I love Manchester. The crumbling warehouses, the railway arches, the cheap abundant drugs. That’s what did it in the end. Not the money, not the music, not even the guns. That is my heroic flaw: my excess of civic pride.”</font></p><p align=”left”><font size=”1″></font><br />Hmmmmm Tony Wilson died last night. Tony who? Tony Wilson!<br /><br />Some may know him as Anthony H WIlson (made up name ! made up name!) but to everyone of my generation who grew up with him on the telly&nbsp;he was Tony Wilson.</p><p align=”left”>To be honest, if you came from Manc and are around 35 – 45 you knew him as the presenter of Granada reports and not a lot else. He started out as the roving reporter, the madcap one, the one they sent to do the “funny” story at the end of the report.&nbsp;I remember he did a story once about stunt men and how to get hit by a car. In those days news reporting was a hard life and they actually filmed him being rolled off the bonnet of a ford escort heading towards him at speed. If they had got it wrong at that point then the entire history of Manchester could have been changed.<br /><br />I never really liked him much. I always thought that he had an arrogance that was annoying. I doubt he would have disagreed with me. There were times when, on some of his chat shows, he came across as a supercilious twat. Look at me, I can be “Mr Controversial” and have an argument with people in a TV studio. Big deal.<br /><br />Then, somehow he managed to bring together some off the things about Manchester that I love the most. He was behind the Dry Bar on Oldham street, not a place I went to often, but it was one of the defining moments in the history of the Northern Quarter. The Northern Quarter is an area of manchester that is about art, music, people etc etc.&nbsp;<br /><br />Then there was the music. The Happy Mondays, Joy Division, ….when you look at the list of bands etc, this WAS Manchester, as well as the Hacienda.<br /><br />He never made any money, apparently. The Hacienda closed, Factory records went bust, but he still stayed here. There was something about him that loved Manc. I remember being at the restaurant of the year awards a few years ago, it was at The Pacific restaurant and was held by “City Life” He was sat in the corner and had a gaggle of your journo’s from the magazine crawling up his arse so much it was embarassing.&nbsp;I expect he loved every second of it.<br /><br />In the film “<a href=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/ “>24 hour party people</a>” he was played by Steve Cougan with a small cameo appearence by himself. The film tells the story of MADCHESTER at it’s height. <br /><br />People die…that’s a fact. You can own all the bands in the world, all the nightclubs you could ever imagine, do things that people hate, that people love and that people admire, but you can’t beat death. He was diagnosed with kidney cancer last year but died of a heart attack.&nbsp;<br /><br />Even though he was full of flaws, that he came across like a bastard who never knew when to stop, and that those traits were made worse by the fact that he knew he had them, he was, at the end of the day, someone who really loved Manchester….and that makes him more than worthy!<br /><br /></p>