THE FUNNY OLD WORLD OF VICTOR LEWIS SMITH (320kbs-m4a/129mb/57mins)
BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 25th March 2023
Dom Joly celebrates the brilliant, bonkers, difficult, groundbreaking iconoclast, Victor Lewis-Smith.
Loved by audiences, hated by executives, Victor was a truly original creator of radio and TV, making programmes that could be utterly wonderful or absolutely awful - sometimes both.
From his short stint as a Radio 4 producer, when he substituted Libby Purves with Arthur Mullard in one notorious episode of Midweek, to his marvellous and groundbreaking pieces for Loose Ends, incorporating melodrama, word play and hapless members of the public.
From his prank calls to the Vatican, Mary Whitehouse and That's Life among many others, via his TV series, Inside Victor Lewis Smith and TV Offal featuring a filthy Rainbow spoof and a recurring series Gay Daleks, to his acclaimed documentaries about Peter Cook, Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock.
Outrageous and often cruel, Victor could, like many satirists, be argued to actually be deeply moral. He hated the inanity of much that the media produced and, as the London Evening Standard's TV critic for 15 years, he was required reading, dishing out invective and insight in equal measure, fearless in who he would insult or which TV icons he would demolish - from David Attenborough to Ricky Gervais.
The programme features TV and radio archive clips alongside recollections from friends like Laurie Taylor, his collaborator Paul Sparkes, fans including Jon Holmes, John Yorke and Safraz Mansoor, and colleagues Jake Yapp and Libby Purves (did she really throw a chair at him?!).
The title of the programme is from his Private Eye column.
Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith
A Yada-Yada Audio production for BBC Radio 4
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