Ned Sherrin RIP

[samkydd]

I was sorry to learn of the death of Ned Sherrin at 76, a multi talented man indeed. Although my knowledge of music is minimal, Counterpoint was always a favourite of mine on Radio 4 and also his regular magazine programme Loose Ends. Telegraph obituary at this link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/02/nsherrin202.xml&page=1

I didn't realise that he had been a film director too, amongst his work The Virgin Soldiers.

[julian_craster]

I think more a producer than a director, esp trendy comedies of late 1960s early 70s ....

[julian_craster]

Obituary: Ned Sherrin
Author and beloved broadcaster
02/10/2007
Daily Telegraph London
Ned Sherrin: author and beloved broadcaster - Telegraph

Ned Sherrin, who died yesterday aged 76, rose to fame as the deviser, producer and director of That Was The Week That Was, the programme that launched the satire boom of the 1960s.
He went on to become an all-purpose impresario and boulevardier, with interests ranging from novels and anthologies to theatre, films and broadcasting; he was perhaps best-known as compere of the long-running Radio 4 chat show Loose Ends
The idea for That Was The Week That Was came partly from the then director-general of the BBC, Hugh Greene, who wanted to "prick the pomposity of public figures", but it was Sherrin, with Alasdair Milne and Donald Baverstock, who was responsible for developing its successful format. Taking its lead from the increased liberalism of theatre and cinema, TW3 dissected the week's news and debunked cant and hypocrisy.
Fronted by the virtually unknown David Frost, TW3 provoked outrage and Sherrin and Frost were pilloried as "pedlars of filth and smut and destroyers of all that Britain holds dear".
But it attracted a regular audience of 10 million and acquired some unexpected fans. When Sherrin met Princess Margaret at a party, she suggested that he should "do a sketch about the absurdly reverential way the press reports us". So the next week the team did a skit about the Queen's barge sinking in the Thames.
Sherrin went on to produce 10 films, including The Virgin Soldiers, during one of the most difficult periods of the British cinema; he wrote or edited several books, as well as theatre and restaurant columns; he directed many critically acclaimed plays and musicals including Side by Side by Sondheim, in which he also starred, winning a Tony Award nomination when the show moved to Broadway.
Ubiquitous, suave, and irrepressibly frivolous, Sherrin became a permanent fixture at the star-filled first night, the literary luncheon, the political forum and the restaurant opening. He was a brilliant conversationalist, a fount of celebrity gossip and master of the elegant insult. He was seldom off the airwaves: "Every time I think Ned Sherrin is dead," complained one reviewer, "he crops up on television with some programme in appallingly bad taste which proves only too conclusively that he is still alive."
On Loose Ends, Radio 4's Saturday morning (and then evening) "weekly feast of comedy, live music and lively conversation", Sherrin's plummy voice and quick-fire delivery, punctuated with gasps for breath and sudden gulpings, was a gift to the parodists.
The programme, unkindly described by one critic as "mostly Ned droning on about Binkie Beaumont with the three or four other people left in Britain who know who he was", opened each week with a monologue of tightly-packed, topical jokes delivered at break-neck speed by Sherrin himself. When Rory Bremner impersonated him through a whole programme, few people noticed the difference.
The show was broadcast live, though Sherrin was a past master at smoothing over any awkwardness. On one occasion, the actress Elaine Stritch used a four-letter word. Sherrin harrumphed and she said: "Oh, never mind, that'll come out in the edit."
"It won't, Elaine," Sherrin replied. "This is live radio." "Live radio!" she screeched. "I needn't have bothered with make-up."
Edward George Sherrin was born, the younger of two sons, on February 18 1931 into a Somerset farming family. From early childhood he was a mystery to the rest of his family. He hated getting his hands dirty and liked dressing up and making model theatres out of old Shredded Wheat packets. He collected wild flowers, wrote stories (including one commissioned by the Sparkford Vale Hunt entitled The Spook of Sparkford Vale) and thumped out show tunes on an old Bechstein in the drawing-room. "What use is that to a boy?" his father would ask.
But his parents wanted the best for him: recognising his passion for the theatre, they bought him a model theatre to replace the cereal packets and it became his most prized possession. He got on well too with his elder brother, Alfred, who made a crystal radio set on which they listened to Band Waggon and ITMA. But the big difference between us," Sherrin recalled, "was that Alfred was straight and I was gay."
At Sexey's Grammar School at Bruton, young Ned staged a musical adaptation of Pygmalion for which he wrote a number for Eliza which included the lyric "Emancipation is the New Sensation of the British Nation", which at the time he felt was witty; he also persuaded the school to establish an arts sixth form in which he was the only student. After leaving school, he did his National Service with an Army signals unit in Austria. As Motor Transport Officer, he signed his own driving licence.

He won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where, to placate his father, he read Law, hoping it might lead on to something connected with show business. He got into student theatre, starring as the Fairy Queen in an Oxford University Dramatic Society pantomime and penning the first line a youthful Maggie Smith (playing a cinema usherette in an Edinburgh Festival revue) ever spoke on stage: "It's my premiere tonight."
He was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn in 1955, but as he had already been offered a job by ATV, he never practised. Two years later, he moved to the BBC as director of the Tonight programme. After directing the original That Was The Week That Was in 1962, he went on to direct its successors, Not So Much A Programme More A Way Of Life and BBC3; he also produced a range of television variety shows, panel games and musicals and won three Bafta awards.
Sherrin left the BBC for Columbia Pictures in 1966 and, over the next few years, produced 10 films, including The Virgin Soldiers (with Leslie Gilliat, 1968), The National Health (1972), Girl Stroke Boy (1971), Every Home Should Have One, starring Marty Feldman and Shelley Berman (1969), Up Pompeii and Up the Chastity Belt (both 1971), starring Frankie Howerd, whose comedy career Sherrin had helped to resuscitate on TW3.
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As an author, Ned Sherrin had a long collaboration with Caryl Brahms, and together they produced many songs, three novels, two collections of short stories, a number of radio and television plays, five plays for the theatre - most notably Beecham, with Timothy West (1980) - and six musicals including I Gotta Shoe (1962-63), Sing A Rude Song (1970), Liberty Ranch (1972), Nickleby And Me (1975) and The Mitford Girls (1981). In addition he directed five musicals, including Side By Side by Sondheim (1976) and The Ratepayer's Iolanthe (1984) for which he won an Olivier Award.
On television, Sherrin's We Interrupt This Week was a success on PBS Television in America in 1978 and Song by Song, a series examining the work of famous lyricists, was broadcast by Yorkshire Television and by the PBS network. In addition to Loose Ends, he hosted many radio and television conversation shows, notably Friday Night, Saturday Morning, Midweek, Medium Dry Sherrin, And So To Ned, and Radio 4's musical quiz Counterpoint.
Sherrin was a prolific writer. His autobiography, A Small Thing Like An Earthquake, was published in 1983, and he also wrote Song By Song (with Caryl Brahms, 1984), Cutting Edge (1984, with Neil Shand), Anthology Of Wit (1984), and 1956 And All That (1984, with Neil Shand).
He edited Caryl Brahms's memoirs Too Dirty For The Windmill (1986), published Ned Sherrin's Theatrical Anecdotes (1991) and, in 1993, Ned Sherrin in his Anecdotage. He edited the Dictionary of Humorous Quotations for the Oxford University Press (1995). His own favourite entry in it was Dick Vorsburgh's "I haven't been so happy since Readers' Digest lost my address." A novel, Scratch an Actor, was published in 1996.
Sherrin had openly declared his homosexuality in the 1980s, but in Sherrin's Year (1996) he admitted that he had paid for sex since his 20s, a disclosure motivated by a desire to deter would-be blackmailers: "They say 'send £1,000', and I say, 'look at page so and so'," he explained.
Sherrin returned to the theatre as director of Keith Waterhouse's Mr & Mrs Nobody, starring Judi Dench and Michael Williams, which won critical success in 1987. He directed Victor Spinetti's one-man show, Thoughts From A Very Private Diary, and five more plays by Keith Waterhouse - Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, starring Peter O'Toole, which broke all box office records for the Apollo Theatre; Bookends (Apollo, 1990), starring Sir Michael Hordern and Dinsdale Landen; Our Song (Apollo, 1992), and Bing Bong, starring Dennis Waterman and Patrick Mower (1999).
Among other shows, he directed Stephanie Cole in Kay Mellor's comedy A Passionate Woman (Comedy Theatre, 1994), Julian Slade's Salad Days (1996) and A Saint She Ain't by Dick Vosburgh and Denis King (Apollo, 1999). He also toured with a one-man show An Evening with Ned Sherrin.
A prolific journalist, Sherrin wrote a regular gossip column for a theatre magazine and a restaurant column for the Evening Standard. He was memorial services correspondent for The Oldie and always read the obituaries columns first.
Although Sherrin made his name by satirising the "establishment", he was not anti-establishment. When the novelist Ken Follett asked him to canvass for new Labour, Sherrin had to disillusion him: "I have always been a stern unbending Tory and monarchist," he claimed.
He believed in God, but "avoided" spiritual experiences by regular attendance at church, turning up before the Communion, but after the Peace. He remained unconcerned about the Bible's strictures on homosexuality, noting that the Good Book also forbids the eating of shellfish and pork. He was an energetic campaigner for Aids charities.

Ned Sherrin was appointed CBE in 1997.

[smudge]

Yet another great loss of a cultured and talented performer...

RIP

Smudge

[marker]

A great talent that brought us That was the week That was RIP Ned

[Steve Crook]

He hadn't done Loose Ends on Saturday's on Radio 4 for some time so it's not entirely unexpected. A BBC newsreader has just said that it was throat cancer that got him.

There's a tribute tonight on Radio 4 at 6:30

Steve

[batman]

A talented and witty man ... he will be missed.

Bats.

[smiffy]

He will be sadly missed , another irreplaceable talent gone.
Thanks for the radio 4 tip Steve , for anybody who might miss it it should be available on the listen again feature via the internet

[lordtednfs]

A brilliant comedic wit gone. He takes the good ones.

Ned never appealed to me as being funny in the 60's but as I grew older, with less hair, appealed to me more and will never forget him or his wit. An icon of the 60's has gone. God bless you Ned. RIP

[samkydd]

Originally Posted by lordtednfs A brilliant comedic wit gone. He takes the good ones. Ned never appealed to me as being funny in the 60's but as I grew older, with less hair, appealed to me more and will never forget him or his wit. An icon of the 60's has gone. God bless you Ned. RIP

Even as he advanced in years he still had that look of a mischevious schoolboy about to play a prank on a Master.

Loose Ends also had some colourful guests, and I always remember the man and his motorcycle and sidecar theatre from the early 1980s, who performed The Tempest outside The Tower of London where the street performers gather, and for storm sound effects he revved the motorbike engine up!

[Steve Crook]

Originally Posted by samkydd Even as he advanced in years he still had that look of a mischevious schoolboy about to play a prank on a Master. Loose Ends also had some colourful guests, and I always remember the man and his motorcycle and sidecar theatre from the early 1980s, who performed The Tempest outside The Tower of London where the street performers gather, and for storm sound effects he revved the motorbike engine up!

Was that Desmond Olivier Dingle (& Wallace) as The National Theatre of Brent?
aka Patrick Barlow & Jim Broadbent

Steve

[kelp]

He loved the English language, and to hear his use of words was an absolute delight. Thank you Ned.

[julian_craster]

Obituary: Ned Sherrin
Producer, director, writer, satirist and raconteur whose work spanned television, theatre, film and radio

by Michael Coveney
Wednesday October 3, 2007
The Guardian

It would be hard to think of anyone who embodied the spirit of the modern, non-deferential show business age more thoroughly, or more vigorously, than Ned Sherrin, who has died aged 76 of throat cancer. He was a film producer, satirist, television pioneer, theatre director, raconteur, wit and public speaker of boundless brio and enthusiasm. He was also an extremely funny man, with whom you were unwise to draw competitive swords ("Back in the knife box, Miss Sharp!" was half the title of one of his anthologies): he once accused me of "getting it wrong" yet again at a theatre opening in Chichester. "I'm not paid to be right," I rashly countered, "I'm paid to be interesting." "Oh dear," flashed Ned, "a failure on two counts, then ..."

His place in the television history books is assured: as the producer and director of That Was the Week That Was. The programme, it is hard now to credit, ran for barely a year from the end of 1962 and was one of Britain's most influential media events. Particularly memorable was the programme, for once free of satire, that followed the assassination of President John Kennedy, and the way in which Bernard Levin was allowed to run riot with hapless interviewees. Have I Got News for You on BBC television and The News Quiz on Radio 4 are its obvious, much cosier, successors.
TW3, as it was generally known, was compulsive viewing, following Beyond the Fringe - the revue written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore - in the theatre as the signal that British humour had come of age. Sherrin's original choice of chairman, John Bird, was unable to sit at the desk so cheekily occupied by the young, crew-cut David Frost. Sherrin's background in cabaret and revue enabled him to unearth and unleash the talents of Roy Kinnear, Millicent Martin, Kenneth Cope, Lance Percival and Willie Rushton.
The writers included Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall - they wrote for every single edition of TW3 - Dennis Potter, Herbert Kretzmer, Gerald Kaufman, Bernard Levin, David Nathan, Peter Tinniswood, Peter Lewis, Christopher Booker and Richard Ingrams. Ever since Peter Cook had taken the rise out of Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan in Beyond the Fringe, the gloves were off. Richard Ingrams launched the magazine Private Eye in late 1961: earlier that year, Cook opened the Establishment club in Greek Street, Soho, a few weeks after the London premiere of Beyond the Fringe.
But it was TW3 that alerted the public at large to the sea change in satire. Political sketchwriters these days are routinely rude about our elected representatives; in the early 1960s, it was iconoclastic to be savage about anyone in public life. You simply did not name names. In one programme, David Frost told viewers that Reginald Maudling, the chancellor of the exchequer, had ended a brief interview with a group of unemployed people with the words: "Well, I've got work to do, even if you haven't." And Levin, like a prosecuting barrister, hunched and coiled with sardonic vituperation, would describe Charles Forte's catering company, to Forte's face, as "lazy, inefficient, dishonest, dirty and complacent".
Despite a legal training, Sherrin was a journalist and impresario by instinct at this stage. A chance encounter in the street with an old Oxford friend the day after he was called to the bar in 1955 had diverted him from theatre and the law into television, and he was one of the first backroom boys in commercial television, working as a production assistant with Noele Gordon, later star of Crossroads, on a breakfast show at the Kensington studios of ATV.
He joined the BBC two years later and was part of Grace Wyndham Goldie's current affairs department, alongside Donald Baverstock and Alasdair Milne. He was directing the cameras for the early evening Tonight programme, which featured such luminaries as Cliff Michelmore, Geoffrey Johnson Smith, Alan Whicker, Macdonald Hastings and Fyfe Robertson, when TW3 was hatched. After a couple of pilot shows, the first edition was transmitted live on November 24 1962. "David Frost's debut was extraordinary," recalled Sherrin in his 2005 autobiography: "A triumph, not over adversity, but of diversity. His curious classless accent, sloppy charcoal suit and over-ambitious haircut concealed a man who had come into his kingdom at a bound."
Sherrin was born in Low Ham, Somerset, the second son of a gentleman farmer, Thomas Sherrin, and his wife Dorothy. He enjoyed an idyllic Somerset childhood, and was educated at Sexey's school, Bruton, and - after two years of national service with the Royal Corps of Signals in Catterick, Aldershot and Austria - at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read law. He was prominent in student revues, and indeed made his television debut (with Maggie Smith), claiming a producer credit on a 1954 BBC television programme, Oxford Accents.
During its first run, TW3 attracted viewing figures of 12 and 13 million, but the second series was taken off after just three months. The explanation was that 1964 would be an election year, and TW3 could not survive in a diluted format. But BBC executives found defending the programme a strain. So it ended, but not before the famous Kennedy memorial programme on November 23 1963. I do not exactly remember where I was when I heard about JFK's assassination, but I certainly knew where I was when the programme went out: sitting on a sofa, watching it.
In the wake of TW3, Sherrin devised and produced Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964-65) with a nucleus of performers including John Bird, Eleanor Bron, John Fortune and Willie Rushton and a third satirical sketch and discussion show, BBC-3 (1965-66), on which Kenneth Tynan let loose, sotto voce, the "f" word in a discussion on censorship with Mary McCarthy and Robert Robinson.
One of Sherrin's closest collaborators throughout this period, and indeed in the theatre, was the novelist Caryl Brahms, a small, intimidating woman with a large nose and even larger spectacles who, with her (by then deceased) writing partner SJ Simon, had written one of Sherrin's favourite books, No Bed for Bacon, a sort of dry run for Shakespeare in Love. Sherrin persuaded her to collaborate with him on a stage version, which was first presented at the Bristol Old Vic in 1959.
Their subsequent theatre work included Britain's first black pantomime, Cindy-Ella, or I Gotta Shoe (1962), a lively musical biography of Marie Lloyd, Sing a Rude Song (1970), a solo show, Beecham (1980), about the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham for Timothy West and, just before Brahms died, in 1982, a musical about The Mitford Girls that opened in Chichester and transferred to the Globe in the West End. He also produced nine or 10 films in a packed period at the end of the 1960s, including The Virgin Soldiers, Every Home Should Have One, Up Pompeii with Frankie Howerd and, in 1972, Peter Nichols' The National Health, with a cast including Jim Dale and Eleanor Bron.
From 1986 until illness forced him to step down at the end of last year, Sherrin had been a peerless radio chat show host on his Radio 4 programme, Loose Ends. He often used monologues written by Neil Shand or Alistair Beaton (with whom he also wrote a couple of Gilbert and Sullivan updates and a lavish though unsuccessful 1988 musical, Ziegfeld, at the London Palladium). His finest hours in the theatre were as the co-adaptor, writer and presenter of Side By Side By Sondheim in both London and New York in the mid-1970s and as a stage director of several superior West End entertainments, two of the most notable written by Keith Waterhouse: an affectionate distillation of Pooter-land in Mr and Mrs Nobody (1986), starring Judi Dench and Michael Williams; and Peter O'Toole in the even more brilliant Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (1989).
A tall, well-built man with an imposing physical presence, Sherrin was an inveterate first-nighter, always enjoying a couple of stiff Martinis before the show and a good supper afterwards. His knowledge of theatre folk and lore was legendary and is preserved in two wonderful collections of theatrical anecdotes, as well as in a 1996 novel, Scratch an Actor. He also edited the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations in 1995. He was made a CBE in 1997.
It was a cruel irony that so ebullient and brilliant a speaker - he was the irreplaceable host of the Evening Standard Drama Awards for many years - should be deprived of his voice in the last months of his life. A proud member of the Garrick Club and openly gay, he lived simply, and alone, in a Chelsea mansion flat, always sure to have enough money to pay for what he regarded as life's bare necessities: food, wine and taxis.
Gerald Kaufman writes: When I was watching the first edition of TW3 on a Saturday evening in November 1962, I said, "I can do this", thought up an idea and on the following Monday morning telephoned BBC-TV and asked to speak to the show's producer, Ned Sherrin. Ned had no idea who I was, but took my call immediately, listened to my idea, commissioned me to write a script and, a couple of days later, in those pre-fax and pre-email days, sent a taxi to pick it up.
That was Ned and the secret of his extraordinary success - genial, welcoming, receptive and very, very astute. TW3 was forced off the air by pressure from the Tory government, which rightly thought it was being damaged by the show's lacerating content. Yet Ned was a committed Conservative. But he was also a committed journalist, and he went with the material. When a Tory MP complained in the Commons about my sketch The Silent Men of Westminster, Ned stood up for me and even paid me a fee for research rebutting the complaint.
I worked with Ned intermittently for years, on Not So Much a Programme More a Way of Life, on a one-off TV feature, ABC of Britain, which he commissioned from me, and occasionally as a contributor to Loose Ends. He was one of the most delightful people I have ever known, and, like David Frost, never forgetful of old friends. He held reunions of the TW3 cast and writers, and there was always a feeling of camaraderie even among participants who had not seen each other for years. He had an unfailing eye and ear for talent, and not only Frost but Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, Herbert Kretzmer and Michael Crawford owed him a great deal. His work went far beyond TV and radio. Ned's original Side by Side by Sondheim, staged at the Mermaid theatre in London, established Sondheim as an icon in this country. Ned was a great guy and one of the nicest, as well as one of the most talented, people I have ever had the luck to know.
Alistair Beaton writes: Not long before he died, Ned was lying in a hospital room receiving visitors with his usual cheerful aplomb. As I opened the door, he looked up, issued a cursory hello, and barked: "Champagne, please!" Obediently, I went to the fridge and pulled out one of the many bottles stashed there. "Large one for you and small one for me," he requested. I faithfully followed instructions and passed him his glass. He eyed it balefully. "Not that fucking small!" he said.
Bon viveur to the end, Ned was much more than a cheerful sybarite. We first met in 1979 when I was a guest on one of his many radio shows, and we eventually went on to write five stage shows together, some successful, some not. Ned didn't seem to mind. He got such intense pleasure from his work that success was always more a happy chance than a planned outcome.
Over the years, he became both mentor and friend. His relentless energy was simultaneously daunting and inspiring. He could on occasions be tetchy and impatient, as I picked away at some plot point or obsessed over the scansion of a lyric (about which Ned could be curiously cavalier). But he enjoyed being tested, and liked nothing better than having the opportunity to show off his encyclopaedic knowledge of the theatre. In short, working with him was always an intense experience.
Most of all, I hugely enjoyed the spirit of a man who was often incredibly rude to the rich and famous, but remained immaculately courteous and well-behaved towards ordinary people.
He was a big, generous, funny, clever, irreverent and fearless character, and I wish he'd had the good sense to live till he was at least 100.


Edward 'Ned' George Sherrin, producer, writer, director and performer, born February 18 1931; died October 1 2007


-------------------------------------------------------------

Ned Sherrin
Writer and broadcaster of knife-edge wit who made his name with 'That Was The Week That Was'

The Independent
03 October 2007

Edward George Sherrin (Ned Sherrin), film, theatre and television producer, presenter, director and writer: born High Ham, Somerset 18 February 1931; called to the Bar, Gray's Inn 1955; CBE 1997; died London 1 October 2007.

'I am not a performer, I am a shower-off," Ned Sherrin once said. Although not a singer, actor or entertainer in the classic sense, Sherrin was none the less a consummate and extraordinary man of the theatre. Director, dramatist, anecdotist, writer and after-dinner speaker, he had an ironic, not quite self-deprecating manner, one which relied on an intense urbanity and a knife-edge wit honed on years in his chosen profession – a manner all the more remarkable for a childhood spent chasing chickens and rounding up cows in the rural West Country.
Born at High Ham in Somerset in 1931, Edward George Sherrin was the second son of a smallholding farmer, Thomas Sherrin, and his wife, Dorothy, *ée Drewitt. His father was "a country character . . . an hour-over-a-five-bar-gate conversationalist". Sherrin's childhood memories were full of Empire Days and village cricket. But he also remembered his first visits to the cinema, and listening to the wireless – although his father declared ITMA "a lot of rot".
At 11, Sherrin joined Sexey's School in Bruton as a boarder – he later confessed that after a school visit to Stratford upon Avon, he was seduced by the head prefect in the back of a car. After National Service with the Royal Signals, and a posting to Austria in 1949 he returned to read Law at Exeter College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar in September 1955.
But all this was so much preparation for the Ned Sherrin to come. "In a long career of happy accidents," he wrote, "perhaps the most useful was to have been born in 1931 and to complete National Service, Oxford and Bar exams precisely in time for the opening ofcommerical television." Rather than take up the inevitable course that the law offered, instead he joined ATV as a producer.
The new independent company was experimenting with an early version of breakfast television, which Sherrin floor-managed. The show fizzled out, but Sherrin used his experience to move on to variety television for the station, working with Noele Gordon, ATV executive and future star of Crossroads. He delivered 10-second theatre reviews on air – a discipline which would stand him in good stead for his Radio 4 Loose Ends introductions a generation later.
From there he graduated to planning and directing Tonight, a new early-evening magazine programme. Presented by Cliff Michelmore and, later, Kenneth Alsop, with cameos and interviews by Fyfe Robertson, Alan Whicker and Jonathan Miller, its live format produced the inevitable mishaps: drunken interviewees, bowel-evacuating pigs and Peter Sellers arriving in the flowing robes of an Arab sheikh. It was also good experience for the show which was to make Ned Sherrin's name.
It is difficult now, in an age in which, as Richard Eyre recently noted, "satire has become mainstream", to comprehend the effect of the show which Sherrin assembled. That Was The Week That Was – abbrievated to "TW3" – became a legend in post-war entertainment. It happened at a time when youth culture met clever satire and a new knowingness, and it anticipated much of what was to come in television, and in the wider entertainment world. As Millicent Martin, the show's resident singer, said later, "If I'd known I was going to be part of an era, I'd have taken more notice."
As Sherrin would note, TW3 took television audiences "from a conversation to conspiracy". It was the age of Look Back in Anger and the "kitchen-sink drama", of Beyond The Fringe, Private Eye, and the Establishment Club – where Sherrin found much of the talent for his show. Peter Cook, John Bird, Spike Milligan, Jonathan Miller, Willie Rushton and Christopher Booker all became part of the mix.
He wanted an unstructured, uncontrolled programme, almost deliberately offensive, "necessarily an irritant to some", as Sherrin wrote in his original memo to BBC bosses, dated 7 February 1962, "and if we are going to make people scratch, the object of the programme would be to give them something worth scratching". The audience was part of the act – as were the cameras, which Sherrin showed partly because it was difficult to keep them out of the live shots, partly because it made for more exciting TV. A screen and a live band added to the cabaret style. David Frost, Lance Percival and Millicent Martin were the staple performers.
Sex, politics, royalty and religion were all targeted: the Profumo call-girl scandal segued into Frankie Howerd's comeback, all oohs and aahs. Frost read out the Sunday papers on Saturday night – to the annoyance of Fleet Street editors – and 12 million viewers tuned in. Politicians such as Reginald Maudling and George Brown knew a good platform when they saw one and invited themselves along – just to be seen in the audience was fashionable.
Inevitably, the show suffered from its success. It simply could not sustain its original intensity, and the equivocations of BBC executives. "When the rocket had run its course, it fizzled out," Sherrin said. The climax came in November 1963, the penultimate month of its run, when Sherrin had to follow the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination: famously, Millicent Martin sang "In the Summer of His Years" with tears in her eyes. The last show was transmitted on 28 December 1963, leaving a legacy of glory.
Sherrin followed up with two more satirical series for the channel. Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964), featured Michael Crawford, Patrick Campbell (and his notorious stutter), Eleanor Bron, John Bird's impressions of Jomo Kenyatta, and Gerald Kaufman's parliamentary skits; and later that year, the Saturday night show, BBC-3, whose fame rests on being the platform for Kenneth Tynan's famous utterance of the word "fuck" for the first time on the airwaves.
But Sherrin's attention was now being drawn elsewhere. He had been offered a two-year contract by Columbia Pictures to produce a satirical film, Goldilocks – but, with his inexperience of the film business, failed to secure a suitable "package" for the company. None the less, bitten by the movie industry, he successfully produced The Virgin Soldiers (1968) based on Leslie Thomas's best-selling humorous novel set in Malaysia. The film, which featured a bit-part for the future rock star David Bowie, as well as roles for Hywel Bennett, Wayne Sleep and Nigel Patrick, was filmed on location in Singapore.
Every Home Should Have One (1969), with Marty Feldman, was another film success for Sherrin; followed by three film spin-offs from Frankie Howerd's Up Pompeii TV series, Up Pompeii, Up the Chastity Belt and Up The Front, all scripted by the "Carry On" writer Talbot Rothwell, and each costing a paltry £200,000 to make.
With an energy that was – and would remain – almost hyperactive, Sherrin was also collaborating in his "spare" time with the novelist, dramatist and ballet critic, Caryl Brahms. They'd met in 1954, when Sherrin was just 23, and Brahms 53. The result was 30 years of collaboration, three novels, two collections of short stories, 15 radio plays, five plays and six musicals.
Over snatched moments in coffee bars and restaurants, they worked on radio plays and musicals. Parasol, a Viennese effort with Malcolm Arnold as composer, made it to transmission as a 75-minute live musical in 1959, with the Canadian William Hutt in the lead role, supported by Peter Sallis. It was Sherrin's first professional cast.
Brahms analysed her writing partner succinctly, if honestly: "[his] insecurity takes the form of never admitting to being in the wrong . . . He is lucky in that he soon starts believing his own lies, and this I find half infuriating and half touching . . ."
Many of their projects were produced. The Little Beggars was a retelling of The Beggars Opera for children, and aired on both radio (with David Hemmings as its child lead) and television. No Bed for Bacon, a Shakespearean musical, made its appearance at the Bristol Old Vic in 1959; and Cindy-Ella, a black version of the fairy story with Elisabeth Welch and Cleo Laine, opened at the Garrick Theatre in 1962, and subsequently appeared on television and on record. Benbow Was His Name, based on the story of Admiral Benbow, saw the legendary Shakespearean, Donald Wolfit, cast as the lead, allowing Sherrin to gather a fund of the old-style tragedian's whims – "Lad," Wolfit said to Sherrin in a aside during his death scene, "I don't have to die with my face dirty, do I?"
Other Sherrin/Brahms productions included a musical on the life of Marie Lloyd, starring Barbara Windsor, at the new Greenwich Theatre in 1969; The Great Inimitable Mr Dickens on BBC TV, in 1970; and Nickleby and Me, which took years to get produced for the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.
But Sherrin's first real theatrical success came in 1977 with Side by Side by Sondheim, a clever collage of Sondheim tunes performed by Millicent Martin, Julia Mackenzie and David Kernan, linked by a witty narrative read out on stage by Sherrin. Stephen Sondheim himself flew over to coach the cast, and after a hugely successful London run of 18 months, it transferred to Broadway despite American Equity complaints about the English cast. Sherrin enjoyed the fame – although disconcerted by the closeness of the public. He once watched as one member of the audience died, the body was removed, and the companion of the deceased returned to his seat. "You pay too much to waste a ticket in New York."
Other productions were not such great successes. Only in America (1980), at the Roundhouse, based on the rock songs of Leiber and Stoller, was a failure, and "a major regret". Beecham (1980, based on the life of Sir Thomas Beecham, with Timothy West, did better; Hush and Hide, a thriller written with Brahms, was an out-and-out turkey. But in 1980, Sherrin alighted on the idea of a musical based on the lives of the Mitford sisters, with each "slipping in and out of character and in and out of song". The surviving Mitfords were more than encouraging – they even created Mitfordian nicknames for Sherrin and his composer/arranger, Peter Greenwell: "Plotless" and "Perf" respectively. "Sounds like a marvellously comic caper," Jessica Mitford wrote from California.
The Mitford Girls – starring Patricia Hodge as Nancy Mitford – opened at Chichester in June 1981, and transferred successfully to the Globe in Shaftesbury Avenue – despite last-minute reservations from Jessica Mitford on the way Sherrin had supposedly "romanticised" the Fascist aspects of her sisters' stories. It was the last show Sherrin and Brahms wrote together. Brahms died the following December of a stroke, alone in her flat. Sherrin found her there.
Sherrin moved on to a new creative relationship with Keith Waterhouse, with whom he wrote and directed Mr and Mrs Nobody, a "two-hander" based on the Grossmiths' Diary of a Nobody, with Judi Dench and Michael Williams. Its run at the Garrick was entirely sold out. And in 1984, Sherrin had won an Olivier award for his stage production of The Ratepayers Iolanthe, a GLC-era Gilbert and Sullivan skit on mid-1980s politics written with Alistair Beaton, and which was paired with another on the same theme, The Metropolitan Mikado.
But it was in 1989 that he achieved his greatest success of the period, with Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, written by Waterhouse from Jeffrey Bernard's infamous "Low Life" columns for The Spectator. Sometime boxer, barman, actor and drinker, Bernard was a permanent installation in the Coach and Horses in Soho and other establishments. Peter O'Toole played Bernard in a tour de force. One cartoon by Michael Heath depicted an exiting theatre-goer saying, "That was wonderful – a sort of two-hour suicide note." Bernard himself would take up position in the theatre bar and solicit drinks at the interval.
Sherrin moved to the United States to chair We Interrupt This Week, a characteristically subversive topical quiz show, a forerunner of Have I Got News For You, and a prelude to his most successful reinvention in 1985, as the presenter of Radio 4's Saturday morning show, Loose Ends.
At its peak, it was the must-listen show of the week; a latterday TW3, with performances by the likes of Stephen Fry (whose aged Oxbridge aesthete, Professor Trefusis, was a delight and a nod to Alan Bennett's Virginia Woolf monologue for BBC-3), Robert Elms, John Sessions, Emma Freud and Carol Thatcher, and surprisingly cutting-edge live band appearances.
I had the honour to appear on it myself one morning, promoting my biography of Noël Coward. It was a terrifying experience, not least because Sherrin knew so much more about the subject than I did, and in person he looked more than ex-Guards officer, with his six foot-plus stature and his short back and sides. But afterwards, the entire staff and guests relocated to the nearby pub where an alcove was traditionally reserved for Sherrin and his guests. There he held forth, expansively and generously – a much kinder figure than when he was "on".
As an elder statesman of the profession, Sherrin took up a new column as Memorial Services critic for The Oldie – "I like a good theatrical service," he said. "I am the only critic in the entire world who reviews memorial services." In 1996, Sinclair-Stevenson published his novel Scratch an Actor, a theatrical romp set in the 1950s, about "Sir Martyn Milman", a famous actor, and the complicated, farcical lives of his family and friends. Drawing not a little on Coward's autobiographically-tinged works such as Present Laughter and his lesser-known short stories, and with flashbacks to the 1920s and 1930s theatrical and movie worlds, it was an adept and wittily entertaining work.
In 2005, Sherrin published The Autobiography, an honest examination of an extraordinarily driven and industrious life. He was also exceedingly open about his sex life, confessing in an interview with The Independent's Deborah Ross – among others – that he had often paid for sex, and had done so up to 1997. Ross asked if that wasn't a little sordid. "No," Sherrin replied cheerily, "Some of my best friends are, or were, prostitutes." He admitted to having once been confronted with blackmail by a "trick" who threatened to talk to the press: "I simply told him it would come as no surprise to most people."
There were two "sustained" relationships in his life, he claimed, "both disasters. In both instances I was left for someone else." And whilst he claimed never to feel lonely, there was a sense that the sharpness of his wit was, like Coward's, a mask behind which to hide. Sherrin was content to live his bachelor's life in his ground-floor, mansion-block flat in his beloved Chelsea, where he liked to cook, and tend to his window boxes.
Latterly he had to cede his presenter's chair on Loose Ends when throat cancer took hold; although a repeat of his adaptation of E.F. Benson's "Mapp and Lucia" stories received a welcome re-run on BBC Radio 4 in May.
Asked by a journalist what the best thing about his job was, he replied, "I was brought up on a farm and I didn't like getting my hands dirty. Most of the time I can keep my hands clean." And the worst? "I can't think of a bad thing about it. If I wasn't being paid for it, I would be doing it as a hobby."

Philip Hoare

[julian_craster]

From The Times
October 3, 2007

Ned Sherrin
Broadcaster who rocked the Establishment with the satirical TV programme TW3 and went on to produce films and plays

In a career of astonishing fertility that burgeoned dramatically with the subversive satirical TV programme That Was The Week That Was in the early 1960s, Ned Sherrin made a distinctive mark on British broadcasting, performing arts and entertainment for more than half a century. TW3, as it became known, was his “wake-up call”, as it were, to a nation that may not have realised it was about to be dragged kicking and screaming into the irreverent, as well as Swinging, Sixties. It cast an unsparing gaze on the hidden corners of British political life. It is scarcely too much to say that the standing of politicians and the business of governing have never been quite the same since.
Yet Sherrin never rested on his laurels. In whatever he did over the next 45 years, whether as film producer, theatre director, wit, radio presenter, adapter of plays, novelist and occasional performer, he consistently set new standards for himself as well as for the entertainment industry, so that a production of the late 1980s such as the Keith Waterhouse play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell could tap into a vein of sheer irreverent and irresponsible delight, and make it seem as fresh and surprising as work he had overseen 30 years before.
Sherrin might justifiably have said with Shakespeare’s Falstaff (though he never did) that he was not only a wit himself, but was also the cause of wit in other men. From TW3 onwards he gathered around him the best of the brains and talent available to journalism, broadcasting and entertainment and saw their careers flourish. In the process he was a part of the progress of many writers, broadcasters and performers from being merely reasonably well-known names to becoming well-nigh iconic in their fields.
After a career that had begun in commercial television in the mid-1950s, and had included a creative phase with the BBC on its Tonight programme, it was with TW3 that Sherrin definitively put down his marker. After being long stuck in a stultifying stuffiness, BBC TV was beginning to loosen up. With TW3 Sherrin dramatically accelerated the process. TW3 was largely his creation. He thought up the format, recruited the performers and directed the programme, which went out live, from the studio floor.

Sherrin was only 31 when the show first went on the air in November 1962 and it owed much to youthful lack of inhibition. Transmitted late on Saturday evenings, it was like nothing seen on television before. It attacked politicians, business, trade unions, the press and organised religion, sometimes crudely, sometimes unfairly — but hitting the target more often than not.
Yet, paradoxically, the main begetter of TW3 was not an anti-Establishment subversive. Then and subsequently Sherrin was a monarchist and a supporter of the Conservative Party. Having worked on Tonight, another mould-breaking show, he was determined that television should reflect the more liberated attitudes which started to permeate British society during the 1950s.
The emergence of TW3 came at the right time. Sherrin was fortunate that the BBC had recently acquired a sympathetic Director-General, Hugh Greene, who had been impressed by satirical cabaret while working as a newspaperman in Berlin in the 1930s. Sherrin could also count on the backing of his immediate superiors, Donald Baverstock and Alasdair Milne, who had been his mentors on Tonight.
Sherrin’s hand-picked performers included the singer Millicent Martin, William Rushton from the magazine Private Eye (another key element in 1960s satire), the actor Roy Kinnear, the journalist Bernard Levin and, as presenter, a little-known cabaret performer, still only 24, David Frost. Among the show’s regular writers were Christopher Booker, Dennis Potter, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, Herbert Kretzmer and the future MP Gerald Kaufman.
Most programmes brought complaints but from an initial three million the audience rose to 13 million, most of whom relished the mocking of the hitherto unassailable. A scathing attack on an unpopular Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, was reckoned to have hastened his political decline while a Kaufman sketch ridiculed MPs who had not spoken in the House of Commons for years. A “consumer guide to religion” caused predictable offence.
But TW3 was adaptable. The assassination of John F. Kennedy the day before transmission caused Sherrin to scrap the planned schedule in favour of a sombre, admiring tribute to the dead President. Nor was the show exclusively the province of the precocious young upstarts. There was a brilliant contribution from Frankie Howerd, which helped to revive his faltering career. Even more unlikely guests, the product of Sherrin’s growing passion for the playhouse, were the theatre dames Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndike.
BBC nervousness at the approaching general election prompted the decision to drop TW3 at the end of 1963 and it never returned. After the election Sherrin tried to keep the momentum going with with Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, notable for John Bird’s impersonations of the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and of African politicians, and BBC3, where Kenneth Tynan was the first to utter the F-word on television. But satire was losing its edge and Sherrin moved on.
He was born Edward George Sherrin into a Somerset farming family. From Sexey’s School in Bruton, where he was a weekly boarder, he did National Service, spending an agreeable year in Austria with the Royal Corps of Signals. From there he went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read law. The choice of subject was a concession to his father, who insisted that Sherrin should pursue a proper profession.
But showbusiness, in the form of student revues, soon beckoned and one of Sherrin’s productions, which featured the young Maggie Smith, made it to television. He was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn but had no serious intention of practising and in 1955 he became one of the first graduate trainees to join the new commercial television.
Working for ATV in Birmingham as a production assistant and floor manager, he gained a reputation for handling tricky live programmes. The first show he could call his own was Paper Talk, in which a tabloid journalist, Douglas Warth, harangued studio guests. It was a forerunner of Bernard Levin’s spot on TW3. In 1957 Sherrin switched to the BBC, joining Tonight, where he directed the cameras and brought a showbusiness flavour to the programme by devising tributes to famous songwriters.
During the 1950s Sherrin began a long association with a writer and critic 30 years his senior, Caryl Brahms. It started with Sherrin’s ambition, hatched during his university days, to make a stage musical out of Brahms’s No Bed for Bacon, a comic novel about Shakespeare. Attempts to realise this project occupied several years and there were several productions, none of which reached the West End.
Brahms and Sherrin collaborated, with varying success, on many other ventures for radio, stage and television. A series of one-hour farces adapted from Georges Feydeau and starring Patrick Cargill went out on the BBC in the late 1960s and the pair assembled televised tributes to Charles Dickens and Sir Donald Wolfit. Brahms was also a key contributor to TW3, often writing the topical lyrics for Millicent Martin’s opening song.
Towards the end of the 1960s Sherrin decided to try film production. His first venture, The Virgin Soldiers, from Leslie Thomas’s ribald novel of National Service life, did well but the subsequent record was patchy. The television series Up Pompeii spawned three indifferent vehicles for Frankie Howerd; a worthier film was an adaptation of Peter Nichols’s astringent stage comedy, The National Health. For every picture that got made at least as many were aborted, and Sherrin eventually found film-making a frustrating activity from which he was glad to escape.
He made his bow as a theatre director in 1967 on the musical Come Spy with Me, which starred Danny La Rue. But his first success came almost a decade later with Side by Side by Sondheim. Sherrin devised and directed the show, an anthology of Stephen Sondheim songs performed by Millicent Martin, David Kernan and Julia Mackenzie, and appeared as the dinner-jacketed narrator. It opened at the Mermaid, transferred to the West End and later played in New York.
Sherrin’s other big stage hit was Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, created by Keith Waterhouse from the writings of the the celebrated journalist and Soho habitué whose Spectator column often failed to appear, owing to its writer’s self-inflicted indisposition. Peter O’Toole, Tom Conti and James Bolam played the title role during a long West End run. Sherrin later took the production to Australia and revived it in London in 1999. He directed four other Waterhouse plays, as well as A Passionate Woman, an early piece by the television dramatist Kay Mellor, and in 1996 a West End revival of the musical Salad Days.
On radio Sherrin hosted two long-running programmes which began in the mid-1980s. Loose Ends, which occupied a Saturday morning slot on Radio 4 for many years until being switched to the evening, saw Sherrin as a witty and avuncular headmaster in charge of a slightly unruly set of bright young protégés who included Robert Elms, Craig Charles, Emma Freud and, later, Arthur Smith and Graham Norton.
Intended as a gap filler, the programme acquired a loyal cult audience significantly younger than the Radio 4 average and was still running well into the 21st century. Counterpoint, a music quiz, achieved similar longevity. Again Sherrin’s urbane chairmanship had much to do with the success of the programme, which covered all facets of music from high opera to the newest chart-toppers.
Sherrin’s several literary ventures included a volume of memoirs called A Small Thing — Like an Earthquake (1983); a novel, Scratch an Actor (1996); a book of theatrical anecdotes; and a further volume of memoirs, The Autobiography (2005). He also compiled The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. He wrote a column for The Times and was a restaurant critic for the London Evening Standard.
Sherrin openly discussed his homosexuality in interviews. He admitted that he found difficulty making lasting relationships and that for many years he had used male prostitutes. He lived alone for years in a flat in Chelsea. Among his passions were cricket, with a special affection for the colourful characters of his native Somerset, and the television show Blind Date. He was appointed CBE in 1997.

Ned Sherrin, CBE, producer, director, broadcaster and writer, was born on February 18, 1931. He died of cancer on October 1, 2007, aged 76