Stephen Garrett

Merton College 1975, Law

My day job is executive chairman of Kudos Film and Television – we're a film and television production company. I am also currently News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford. I was at Merton between 1975 and 1978, studying Jurisprudence.

I was fairly conventionally middle class. My dad was a self-made man; he himself had left school at 16, worked his way up in the early days of the advertising business in television in the late 50s, early 60s. My mother was a film editor who, again, left school at 16. Neither of them had any higher education – there's no history of that in either of their families. And they did well enough to be able to afford to send me to a fairly privileged education: I went to a prep school – Westminster School in London – and then to Merton College.

The choice of Jurisprudence was an eccentric one and flew in the face of all advice from my teachers at school who, alternately, wanted me to read History or English, both of which I was good at, and really liked, but rather doggedly, stubbornly and strangely, I decided I wanted to be a barrister. I'd seen a film called 'Witness for the Prosecution', starring Charles Laughton. He seemed to make a good and interesting living with his tongue. I felt myself to be reasonably articulate at that tender pre-teen age, and thought that would be a fun thing to do.

When I arrived at Oxford I obviously made a beeline for Freshers' Fair. And I think I knew I wanted to be involved in journalism, I wanted to write about film, and straightaway was working for ISIS, reviewing films, and slowly worked my way up into a position where I was also writing features. I became features editor and then editor.

I think my time at Oxford benefited me hugely in ways that weren't at all clear to me at the time. Although I haven't become a lawyer, and knew very early on in my time at Oxford that I wasn't going to be a lawyer, I think there was an intellectual discipline that studying Jurisprudence gave me that's had an extraordinarily wide application in my life.

It gave me a range of intellectual abilities that were about structuring and organising thought. I became a producer, which involves a huge amount of organisation, and much of what I do in the world of television drama and film drama production is underpinned by contracts. So, actually understanding how they work in a lot of very detailed ways is incredibly helpful.

I think the only – I hesitate to say – 'disappointment' was that I realised the value of Oxford as I was leaving. Literally as I was leaving, I thought, “I get it. I know why I was here.” And I actually wished then that I could have spent a bit more time there, and came to envy the post-war generation – Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin – who arrived in their mid to late twenties, and had a level of intellectual maturity.

But it was extraordinarily valuable. Being able to write the full lectures that I now have to deliver in my capacity as Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media, I wouldn't have been able to do that without my time here.

As editor of ISIS I had to organise people and raise money. These are things that are very much part of the grown-up world. The finances of ISIS were fragile. If we didn't deliver a certain number of advertising pages, we simply couldn't go to press. It was incredibly hard work to deliver that advertising, and unbelievably satisfying when we pulled it off.

I think one of the remarkable things about Oxford is the fact that it is seemingly effortless in how remarkable it is, and I think it's very easy to take that for granted. There's no doubt that the one-on-one tutorials were a kind of intellectual luxury, that again, as I think I said earlier, I only came to realise the value of as I was leaving. We had access to some very fine minds two or three times a week, one-on-one, people who'd immersed themselves in a particular subject for the entirety of their lives, and I learnt a huge amount from them.

My tutors had quite different theories of the Philosophy of Law. It felt exciting, and you felt you were at the heart of a very heated intellectual debate that wasn't just about something within Oxford, but that spanned the globe, really.

I think it felt special being at a college. You felt a strong sense of identity. I developed some very good friendships there. I once played rugby for Merton, having not played for nearly 10 years, and was soundly kicked into touch by a South African international I found myself playing against who was at University College. There are friendships that I forged at Oxford that remain with me to this day. I think that melting pot that is this University – people from all walks of life, literally all race, colour, creed, class – is extraordinary, and that certainly hadn't happened to me in my education up to that point.