Ned Sherrin: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. He once accused a critic of "getting it wrong" yet again at a theatre opening in Chichester. "I'm not paid to be right," the critic countered rashly, "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.
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.
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.
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 ATV television.
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.
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 - 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. During its first run, TW3 attracted viewing figures of 12 and 13 million, but the second series was taken off after just three months.
BBC executives found defending the programme a strain. 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 the novelist Caryl Brahms, his 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.
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. 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: 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 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.
Edward "Ned" George Sherrin: born February 18th, 1931; died October 1st 2007