Bryan Izzard R.i.p

[plasticjock]

Excellent obit from the Times for Bryan Izzard.

The Times (London)
May 27, 2006, Saturday


Bryan Izzard, television producer and director, was born in
1932. He died on April 27, 2006, aged 74.

Television director and producer whose hit comedy programmes
included On the Buses and Not on Your Nellie.

BRYAN IZZARD was one of the most prolific television
directors and producers during the 1970s.

He directed such top-rating series as the women's prison
drama Within These Walls (1974-78), starring Googie Withers,
as well as a host of comedy programmes, including The Fenn
Street Gang (1973), Not on Your Nellie (1974-75), starring
Hylda Baker, and The Rag Trade (1977-78), the clothing
factory comedy with Miriam Karlin and Peter Jones.

He was one of the original producers of ITV's longestrunning
comedy series, On the Buses.

Bryan Izzard, affectionately known to colleagues as "Izzy",
was born in Dorking in 1932, the son of Marjorie and Frank
Izzard. He read English at Oxford and became a leading light
with the OUDS. He took a teaching diploma but decided on a
career in television and joined the BBC as a trainee
producer, first in radio, then moving to TV.

He produced several current-affairs programmes before
becoming a light-entertainment director, one of his earliest
credits being The Simon Dee Show. In 1969 he became the
producer of On the Buses. This cheerfully vulgar sitcom,
with politically incorrect humour we would now regard as
racist and anti-feminist, regularly topped the ratings for
four years. Izzard produced 30 episodes of the series and
directed a feature film version of the show, Holiday on the
Buses (1973).

Although Izzard had a great affinity with comedians and was
known for his love of music hall and variety, he admitted
that his patience had been tested when he directed the
temperamental Lancashire comedienne Hylda Baker in the ITV
comedy series Not On Your Nellie. "She was a great
comedienne and had been a big star," he said, "but she was
an absolute nightmare to work with."

Izzard's many other TV comedy credits included directing
Doctor in Charge (1972), The Reg Varney Revue (1972), Take a
Letter, Mr Jones (1981), starring Rula Lenska and John
Inman, and The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog (1983),
which celebrated music-hall monologues and starred Barry
Cryer and Leonard Rossiter.

During the 1970s he was offered more dramatic scripts to
direct and he worked on several episodes of the afternoon
ITV drama series Crown Court.

In 1979 he notably produced for Scottish Television Charles
Endell Esq, a spin-off from Adam Faith's popular 1972 Budgie
for the BBC. The cast featured many of the leading Scottish
actors of the day, including Iain Cuthbertson, Annie Ross
and Rikki Fulton.

Izzard lamented the changes in television comedy during the
1980s and the rise of political correctness but in 1991 he
produced the BBC sitcom An Actor's Life for Me, starring
John Gordon Sinclair and Victor Spinetti.

His most recent TV work was directing Julia and the
Cadillacs (1999), a drama that traced the progress of a
small band in Liverpool led by Toyah Wilcox. The cast
included Thora Hird in one of her final performances.

[julian_craster]

Wasn't 'Julie and the Cadillacs' (d. Brian Izzard, 1999) screened in UK cinemas ?

[julian_craster]

From The Independent
Obituaries

Bryan Izzard
Sitcom producer and director
Published: 03 June 2006


Bryan Frank Armstrong Izzard, television producer and director: born
Dorking, Surrey 4 July 1936; died 27 April 2006.

Bryan Izzard's was a distinctive and familiar name on screen at the end of
1970s television sitcoms. These were often of the rumbustious kind and,
during his time as a producer and director at the ITV company LWT, included
later episodes (1972-73) of the long-running On the Buses, starring the
former variety performer Reg Varney as the chirpy bus driver Stan Butler.
The critics panned the programme as vulgar, but audiences grew to 16 million
and three film spin-offs were shown in cinemas, the last, Holiday on the
Buses (1973), directed by Izzard.

He produced and directed all three series of Not on Your Nellie (1974-75),
which featured another former variety artist, Hylda Baker, complete with her
famous malapropisms. She played the brusque Nellie Pickersgill, who did not
approve of drinking or her father's betting and womanising but left her
native Bolton for London to help him to run the Brown Cow pub in Fulham.

Izzard was also responsible for the revival of The Rag Trade (1977-78), with
Miriam Karlin and Peter Jones reprising their roles as the battling shop
steward and hapless boss at the Fenner's Fashions dressmaking workshop.
Although it ran to two series and was scripted by its original writers,
Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, the sitcom never had the spark or
originality of the 1960s programmes.

Then, during his time as head of entertainment at Scottish Television
(1978-81), Izzard stepped slightly outside his remit to revive another
character, in the drama Charles Endell Esquire (1979-80). A spin-off from
the popular Budgie, which starred Adam Faith as a Cockney spiv, it featured
Iain Cuthbertson as the Soho "Mr Big" returning to his native Glasgow after
seven years in prison.

Born in Dorking, Surrey in 1936, Izzard was educated at Wilmorton Junior
School in Derby and Derby grammar school. He studied English at New College,
Oxford, where he acted with the university's dramatic society. After taking
a teaching diploma, he decided on a career in broadcasting and was taken on
by the BBC as a trainee producer, eventually switching from radio to
television and gaining experience in current affairs and light entertainment
programmes.

On moving to LWT, he started by producing and directing two larger-than-life
radio disc jockeys who, at the time, had limited success on television.
There was chat in The Simon Dee Show (1970) and music and mayhem in Kenny
Everett's sketch shows Making Whoopee (1970) and Ev (1970-71).

But sitcom became Izzard's staple at the ITV company. Alongside series such
as On the Buses, he directed episodes of The Fenn Street Gang (1971-73), The
Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs (1974), a spy-spoof sitcom starring David
Jason, and Doctor on the Go (1975, 1977), the fourth sequel in the series
based on Richard Gordon's popular "Doctor" books.

After his stint at Scottish Television, Izzard moved to Southern Television,
where he produced the sitcoms That Beryl Marston . . . ! (1981), starring
Julia McKenzie and Gareth Hunt as a couple successful in business but unable
to make their marriage work, and Take a Letter Mr Jones (1981), with Rula
Lenska and John Inman as the boss and secretary in roles contrary to the
stereotype of the time.

Turning freelance after Southern lost its ITV franchise, Izzard produced the
Granada sitcom Rep (1982), featuring Iain Cuthbertson as the bullying
manager of a shabby 1940s seaside repertory company, and directed the same
company's drama The Starlight Ballroom (1983), with the rock star Alvin
Stardust as a 1940s danceband singer.

After the launch of Channel Four, he became an independent producer with his
own Bright Thoughts Company. The result was two sides of the comedy coin:
The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog (1983), starring Arthur Askey, Cilla
Black, Maureen Lipman and others reciting monologues made famous by
music-hall legends such as Chesney Allen, Stanley Holloway and Joyce
Grenfell, followed byBook 'Em An' Risk It (1983) and Interference (1983),
both featuring alternative comedians.

Izzard found his own style of comedy out of favour in the 1980s but returned
as producer-director of the sitcom An Actor's Life for Me (1991), with John
Gordon-Sinclair playing a struggling thespian convinced that success is just
around the corner.

Although that signalled the end of Izzard's television career as a comedy
producer, he directed episodes of The South Bank Show, including an Alan
Ayckbourn masterclass on writing plays (1996) and a biography of the dancer
Michael Flatley (1997).

He also directed the feature film Julie and the Cadillacs (1999), starring
Tina Russell and Toyah Willcox in the story of a struggling 1960s pop group,
most notable for the 30-second appearance of Thora Hird in her final film
role, playing the grandmother of the title character.

Anthony Hayward