Sidney Lewis Bernstein, Baron Bernstein (30 January 1899 – 5 February 1993) was a British businessman and media executive who was the founding chairman of the London-based Granada Group and the founder of the Manchester-based Granada Television in 1954. Granada was one of the original four ITA franchisees. He believed the North's media industry had potential to be cultivated. Although born in Essex, Bernstein became an adopted northerner, building Granada Television, which created a proud heritage of television broadcasting in Manchester; a legacy which continues. He is described by the British Film Institute (BFI) as the "dominant influence on the growth and development of commercial television in Britain". Bernstein was awarded a life peerage by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1969 Birthday Honours List for his services to television, and in 1984 he was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute in recognition of his outstanding contribution to British television culture. Biography Born to a Jewish family, Bernstein left school at 15 and he gradually inherited the property portfolio his father had built. Granada Theatres Bernstein, with his brother Cecil, created a successful circuit of sixty cinemas and theatres. Some of the cinemas were on property he inherited from his father. The Bernstein holdings eventually encompassed interests in publishing, real estate, motorway services, retail shops and bowling alleys, as well as the hugely profitable television-rental business. Bernstein was a co-founder of the London Film Society in 1925, where he met and befriended the young Alfred Hitchcock, who became a lifelong friend and, briefly, a producing partner. He was the first to bring October: Ten Days That Shook the World and other works from the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein, as well as the films of Pudovkin, to London, and sponsored Eisenstein's trip to Hollywood in the early 1930s. He also ventured into theatre, building an elegant new venue which housed the premiere of Private Lives by Noël Coward, the hit which cemented that playwright's reputation. Though his involvement with the live stage was short-lived, he was passionate about the construction of palaces throughout Britain. As early as 1931, he was advising the planning committee for the long unrealised project for a National Theatre to include film projection and television production facilities into its plans for a theatre. Bernstein was an early and ardent anti-fascist, beginning in 1933, when he helped many German actors, such as Peter Lorre, directors, cameramen and other