Controversial, highly-opinionated and very funny. A real one-off. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituar...th-writer-producer-broadcaster-whose-caustic/ Victor Lewis-Smith, writer, producer and broadcaster whose caustic and scabrous diatribes offended and delighted in equal measure – obituary He revelled in causing outrage but cared passionately about British broadcasting By Telegraph Obituaries 12 December 2022 • 9:00pm Victor Lewis-Smith Credit: Television Stills Victor Lewis-Smith, who has died aged 65, was an outspoken, abrasive and brilliant television critic who built his reputation savaging anybody and everybody who dared to appear on the small screen; while actors, presenters and directors were torn to shreds with little mercy, his columns provided riveting reading for London’s bored commuting classes, generating acres of angry responses to pad out the otherwise turgid letters page of the Evening Standard. His writing was scabrous, vulgar and hilarious, and few were spared his sharpened pen. “At least a whore will stop screwing you when you’re dead; three years after her death, the lawyers are still taking their pleasure with Princess Diana,” he mused in a Daily Mirror column in 2000. A recurrent subject in his television reviewing was cookery. He once lambasted Heston Blumenthal, who in “poaching his bangers made them look as anaemic as those disgusting weisse sausages that middle-aged Bavarian women consume in restaurants, swallowing them whole as though they were porn stars in a remake of Deep Throat”. Occasionally a foolish producer allowed Lewis-Smith in front of the cameras such as in TV Offal, a satirical Channel 4 show best remembered for its “honest obituary” slot, a biting account of the lives of not-yet-dead celebrities including Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jeremy Clarkson and Vanessa Feltz. One episode included a previously unbroadcast adult-humoured sketch from the ITV children’s show Rainbow in which Zippy peels a banana saying: “One skin, two skin, three skin…” before being interrupted by George. Even when behind the microphone, Lewis-Smith was a liability. As producer of Radio 4’s Start the Week he was involved in rudely silencing a 12-year-old piano prodigy, while on another occasion listeners were treated to a blasphemous ditty about a dog called Jesus Christ. This taste for excess enraged his superiors, one of whom burst into the studio mid-programme declaring: “This is awful.” Arriving at the memorial service for Peter Cook in Hampstead in 1995 Credit: PA/Alamy Some took his assaults in good part. Esther Rantzen appeared to relish being compared to a tube of mustard topped by Shergar’s teeth, telling her would-be tormenter that it was the perfect warm-up line for the That’s Life! studio audience. Prank phone calls were another part of Lewis-Smith’s repertoire, the most notorious being when he used a robotic voice simulator to pose as Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, to persuade Diana, Princess of Wales, to discuss her former husband and the Clinton family. A brilliant mimic, he changed his accent with the same ease as a chameleon changes colour and once fooled a Broadcasting House receptionist into putting out a Tannoy announcement for a Mr Haile Selassie. Yet as with all caricaturists, there was a point. “How can you tell a man attended Oxford?” he joked in one of his less-exaggerated lines. “Because he’ll tell you in the first sentence.” He cared passionately about British broadcasting. When the television executive Peter Bazalgette brought Big Brother to Britain in 2000, Lewis-Smith spoke for much of the nation by accusing him of “doing more to debase television over the past decade than anyone else”. Victor Lewis-Smith was born in Essex on May 12 1957 and never knowingly gave an interview discussing his parents, background or childhood. He worked at Radio Medway before studying music at York University, where he was known as Damien Filth, the persona he adopted when presenting Intimate Freshness, a bizarre student TV show. He soon became a regular caller to The James Whale Show on Radio Aire in Leeds, usually pretending to be in an unlikely location. One was supposedly his hospital bed. “I’ve got a drip up my nose,” he said in a nasal whine. “Really?” Whale replied. “Yes, he’s called Brian.” Lewis-Smith in 1997 Credit: Richard Bond/Evening Standard/Shutterstock On one occasion he climbed the Chapter House of York Minster, chanted the Arabic call to prayer, Allahu Akbah, and was arrested disguising himself as a gargoyle. Fined £20 by the city’s magistrates, he promptly lodged a complaint: “All my Left-wing friends told me they were beaten up by the police when they were in custody, but nothing of the sort happened to me.” His next stunt was duping Thames Television into filming his band of “Arab” musicians. “I claimed to be an Arab gynaecologist,” he said. “You should have seen Judith Chalmers’s face when she realised she’d been fooled.” Nevertheless, with no sense of irony the BBC made him co-presenter of Modern Manners on Radio 4. Soon he was combining his anarchic style with the cerebral good humour of Ned Sherrin on Loose Ends. In 1993 he played himself in Inside Victor Lewis-Smith, the first television comedy series to be fronted by a man in a coma, bandaged from head to toe, combining the fast and furious archive-fuelled monologues that he made his own with a barrage of other sketches and observations, all wrapped up in the framework of a peculiar hospital drama. He often got himself into hot water. In June 2006 Gordon Ramsay accepted a £75,000 settlement from the Evening Standard after Lewis-Smith wrongly alleged that the television chef had faked scenes in his shows. A month later Paul McKenna successfully sued the Daily Mirror over an article in which Lewis-Smith falsely claimed that the hypnotist’s PhD was a fake. Yet for all Lewis-Smith’s intemperate and juvenile outbursts, those who knew him described him as a thoroughly decent person, a compliment that he would have no doubt hated. At a party in 2005 celebrating 20 years of the Groucho Club Credit: Richard Young/Shutterstock In the acknowledgements to his unimaginatively titled collection, TV Reviews (2012), he warmly acknowledged “all the disgusting, fat, bloated, money-grabbing and corrupt Establishment scumbag lawyers who have tried, and – more often than not – failed to neuter my writing, or otherwise incommode me over the news (you know who you are and f*** you all)”. Lewis-Smith was a man of many parts, and at various times had columns in Time Out, The Guardian and Harpers & Queen. He compiled the Funny Old World column of bizarre news items for Private Eye, wrote a handful of books including Buygones, an entertaining collection of products from yesteryear with witty captions, and bought the Associated-Rediffusion name to make programmes such as The Undiscovered Peter Cook (2016) for BBC Four, having been the first person in 20 years to be granted access to the comedian’s archive. Others followed, uncovering the archives of Peter Sellers, Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock. He never relented, and once claimed to have been a founder of the Impolite Society, whose members have dinner parties where they “sit around in string vests, drink and fart”. After he poured scorn on people who believe in ghosts, the chairman of The Ghost Club wrote: “Really, Victor, you shouldn’t scoff at ghosties – you might be one yourself one day.” On another occasion he upset a pensioners group with a diatribe about their demands. “One day Victor Lewis-Smith may be a pensioner, by which time the seeds of this ageism could have grown into a huge backlash,” retorted Jack Sprung, their general secretary. Determined to prove them wrong, Lewis-Smith, one of the few white men to get away with wearing his hair in Caribbean-style dreadlocks, died in Bruges before collecting his pension. He is survived by his wife, Virginia Stewart Duff, and their daughter, Lucia. Victor Lewis-Smith, born May 12 1957, died December 10 2022
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/dec/13/victor-lewis-smith-shocking-dangerous-pugwash ‘Nobody was safe’: the shocking, dangerous brilliance of Victor Lewis-Smith He was an acerbic satirist with a maverick streak – and he would happily target everything from Captain Pugwash to Jimmy Savile. His legacy is enormous Victor Lewis-Smith, writer and broadcaster, dies at 65 ‘Like a rich man’s you’ … Victor Lewis-Smith. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy Tim Worthington If you’ve ever wondered why so many people are so insistent that the BBC children’s show Captain Pugwash featured characters with rude names – it didn’t – then look no further than Victor Lewis-Smith. The details are characteristically vague, but for whatever reason, Victor repeated the obscene, fictitious names in one of his newspaper columns – part of his ongoing fascination with the odd, the arcane and the now completely unacceptable in bygone popular culture. This resulted in a legal rebuke from Captain Pugwash’s creator John Ryan. The urban myth stuck, however, and this unexpected turn of events inadvertently underlined every point Victor tried to make with his comedy. In Victor’s comic world nobody was safe – including him and often, it felt, even the audience. With his regular co-writer Paul Sparks he was one of the few practitioners of what could genuinely be labelled “dangerous” comedy, and more than happy to make the joke and deal with the consequences later. Never far from controversy, he found himself in hot water over everything from a tasteless gag about a terrorist attack which allegedly saw him suspended from local radio to constant tabloid uproar over his contributions to Channel 4 arts show Club X. Late one night on Radio 1, he even alluded to certain rumours about Jimmy Savile directly in a phone call to the Jim’ll Fix It production office. Surprisingly, the host did not see fit to launch legal action on this occasion. Victor began his career as a pop DJ at BBC Radio York, before moving to Radio 4 as a producer. Bored and frustrated by the formulaic nature of the shows he worked on, his maverick streak soon began to show, most notoriously when he booked thickly accented actor Arthur Mullard as a holiday stand-in for regular presenter Libby Purves on the magazine show Midweek. His sharp wit did not go unnoticed for long and he was invited to join the regular contributors to Ned Sherrin’s new Radio 4 show Loose Ends. With a combination of sonic trickery, caustic wit, disdain for celebrity culture and above all mastery of pointed crank phone calls – all of it presented in a distinctive comic universe occupying a weird postwar world of pop-culture references – he somehow managed to stand out as the loose cannon even on a show that already featured Stephen Fry. Charlie Brooker has a character in one of his shows describe Lewis-Smith as being ‘like a rich man’s you’ Adored by audiences, even if they sometimes could not believe what they had just heard, Victor’s Loose Ends contributions led to a short but hugely influential stint at Radio 1, the album Tested on Humans for Irritancy, and longstanding columns for publications as diverse as the Evening Standard, Esquire and Private Eye. Despite a strong start on Club X, where his “Buygones” led to a bestselling book, he never really managed to break through to a wider television audience, although shows such as Inside Victor Lewis-Smith, Ads Infinitum, and TV Offal were never less than original and wickedly funny. Behind this abrasive edge, however, Victor cared deeply about uncelebrated areas of popular culture and after retiring from performing he produced acclaimed documentaries about, among others, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Jake Thackray and Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth. His unwillingness to compromise, liking for virulently acerbic put-downs and refusal to tolerate media hypocrisy won him few friends in the industry. He also felt – with some justification – that others had taken aspects of his act and enjoyed greater success without affording any credit to him. Some did acknowledge his influence, however, and Charlie Brooker having a character in one of his shows describe Victor as “like a rich man’s you” ably demonstrates the affection in which he was held. Meanwhile, contrasting sharply with his views on his comic peers, Victor was only too happy to share theories on his cultural obsessions with anyone else writing about them. If you ever had cause to contact him to try to resolve a mystery surrounding, say, George Martin’s comedy albums or early electronic instruments, chances are you would receive a lengthy reply with the information in question surrounded by tons of gags and topical observations and – inevitably – the closing line”: “I’m afraid I don’t normally do this, of course – sorry I can’t help.” Perhaps most significant, however, was his influence on a generation of listeners. While the legacy of his tendency to push comedy to shocking extremes is more debatable, his high speed make-do-and-mend approach to presentation – which somehow managed to appear hazardously rough-edged and impossibly technically slick at the same time – had a profound effect and in many regards anticipated the energy and ingenuity of internet creativity. Sometimes, it really is possible to simply arrive too early – but you can bet there’s a meme about those nonexistent Captain Pugwash names going around right now.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2005/apr/02/foodanddrink.shopping1 Little Chef, A65 near Clapham, Lancs. Food Victor Lewis-Smith Sat 2 Apr 2005 00.47 BST Telephone 01524 251230 Address: A65, near Clapham, Lancaster, Lancs. Open: All week, 7am-10pm. Price: Around £10 per head (without drinks). Despite spending millions on the design of aspirational corporate logos, companies often choose one that unintentionally betrays their true base nature. When BT created the Yellow Pages "let your fingers do the walking" logo, you needed only to invert it to reveal two fingers telling you what BT really thinks of its customers. I've long suspected that the National Lottery's crossed fingers are simply Camelot's way of excusing itself for giving people unrealistic expectations of acquiring wealth beyond the dreams of bingo halls (although maybe it's arthritis). And let us spare a thought for the now-defunct Happy Eater chain of roadside diners, which was doomed from the start for two reasons: first, because its logo was a bald, fat, crapulent chef with his fingers down his own throat (seemingly in an attempt to induce vomiting); and second, because John Major frequented them. As for the podgy cook logo of Little Chef (Happy Eater's runt twin), he reveals the grim truth about what you can expect should you be reckless enough to venture inside. Indeed, he's become such a corpulent liability to the corporate owners (Permira) that last year they tried to slim down his stomach, and recently decided to slim down the company instead by selling off 120 of its 235 outlets and keeping only those located next to a Travelodge (with its captive clientele). In 1958, when the first 11-seater branch opened in Reading, the tubby chef had some appeal to the British public (who'd lived through years of rationing and were getting their first taste of mass car ownership), but Little Chefs are in decline - and deservedly so, because they offer the worst of both worlds, by combining the disadvantages of fast food (it's fried) and of waiter service (they're slow). A while back, I broke down outside a Little Chef near Hull (not emotional collapse, just ignition failure), so I went inside and thought I couldn't go far wrong with an omelette. But I was wrong, because the waitress told me, "Sorry, we haven't got any omelettes ... head office haven't sent any in the post today." What I had requested was the simplest dish known to man, yet the "chefs" in these "restaurants" can't prepare it, and rely on reheating prefabricated, vacuum-packed extruded kapok made into Frisbees and sent via the Royal Mail. Ah well, at least it's the only place in the world where people can make an omelette without breaking eggs. Being fond of an occasional coffee and bickie, I try to stop (whenever I'm on the A65 near Lancaster) at a charming cafe in the village of Clapham, but with this column in mind I recently visited the nearby Little Chef instead, and stood obediently by the ghastly "Wait Here To Be Seated" sign, listening to what sounded like a Soviet-era TB ward but was actually the "smoking section" (as I've said before, you may as well have a "******* section" in a swimming pool). When I was finally seated, I perused the photographic menu and ordered "The Olympic" breakfast. In the time it takes a microwave to ding, there it was on my table, served by someone dressed in a garment that was more stain than uniform and who looked as if she was depriving a village somewhere of its idiot. The food looked exactly as it did on the laminated menu, and therein lay the central problem. It even tasted laminated, being coated with stale vegetable oil that acted as a barrier between it and my tongue. Two insipid eggs, two rashers of unsmoked bacon, two tomatoes, two slices of toast (doubtless from a 40ft-long sliced cotton wool loaf) and two sad, sad sausages, surely the wurst I've ever eaten, with less flavour than roadkill stuffed into a condom. The textures were unnatural, too, from the dry potato to the mushrooms that smacked of the Chesswood's tin (what a pity they don't do a range of magic mushrooms - at least I could have driven home as a mile-high duck). Looking up from the glumness on my plate, I observed the equally glum clientele. The sort of people who regard Angus Steak Houses as dangerously bohemian and are unperturbed by the stink of rancid vegetable oil and stale cigarette smoke that hangs in the air like a low cloud over a mountain. As industrial-strength disinfectant was sprayed on to the tables around me (and the mist floated on to my plate), I noticed one spotty youth in the smoking section whose protracted nose-picking session became so involved that I feared his head would cave in. Like everyone here, he wasn't living to eat, just eating to live, and being ripped off in the process, but neither he nor they could apparently give a damn. When I got this job, my mate Kev (who's very high up at Channel 4) told me, "Don't just go to all the poncy places. Review Little Chefs, too." OK, Kev, I've done it, and it was dreadful. But things don't have to be like this, because there are hundreds of cheap, unfussy diners (Banners in Crouch End, for one) where they serve great fry-ups with efficiency, vigour and top-quality ingredients. How dare Little Chef describe itself on its website as being "synonymous with serving good food"? Never again. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. However, you can make a dog drink; quite easily, in fact. Just put him in a blender, give a quick zazz, pour and enjoy. It's not on the Little Chef menu. Yet.
. He was one of a kind. You need to take a laugh at some of the conventions in society. Laughing again quite violently.
Met Ned Sherrin and Mycroft. They died soon afterwards. Causal link ? VLS and Sherrin would have made for an interesting half hour....
I dug out the Funny Old Word VLS tribute in Private Eye from a few issues ago. Some fantastic anecdotes.
