Victor Lewis-Smith, who has died aged 65
(Picture: PA Archive)Victor Lewis-Smith, who died aged 65 on Saturday, was the most scathing, most dangerous and most insightful TV critic of his generation. He was also the funniest.
I was TV editor at the Standard for much of the 15 years Victor wrote his review column. Over that time he was consistently brilliant - but also lethal to all those television celebrities he regarded as jumped-up, pompous, talentless nonentities. Which was most of them, to be honest.
He never pulled his punches: Jo Brand was “the televisual equivalent of bromide in your tea”; Lorraine Kelly was “becoming increasingly easy to detest with every passing year”; Richard Madeley had “delusions of adequacy”; and comedian Arthur Smith was “about as funny as an outbreak of rabies in a Guide Dogs for the Blind home”.
Unsurprisingly, he fell out with dozens of stars (a scuffle with comedian Jack Dee outside The Groucho Club became a story in The Sun), but that just spurred him on to further heights of scabrous criticism.
And the readers loved it. They couldn’t wait to see which star Victor was going to skewer each day. Many bought the paper simply for his column. I lost count of the number of times when, getting a black cab outside the Standard’s offices, the driver would say, “Oh, I love that Victor Lewis-Smith. Read him every night.” As I also wrote daily pieces in the TV section at the time, that was particularly galling!
At the beginning of this piece, I was tempted to say that “I had the pleasure of working” with Victor. But - as even he would admit - that wasn’t always the case. Victor’s vitriolic brilliance brought with it problems. There were frequent complaints from the people he wrote about. Whenever Victor filed a column, the lawyers were on standby - and if it had to go back to him to be toned down, none of us wanted to be the one to deliver the news (not least because, given the paper’s print schedule, it was usually 7am). And then there were his repeated attempts to get the f-word into the paper - which he later admitted was an ongoing game he played. He constantly hoped he could get it past “a drunk sub-editor” - but, thankfully, he never succeeded.
Of course, Victor’s success at The Standard meant other Fleet Street papers wanted him. He was offered ever larger sums of money to defect to one of the others but The Standard kept raising his pay to keep him. It got to the point where not only was he the paper’s star columnist, but also its highest-paid journalist. One incoming editor was shocked and irritated to discover that even they were paid less than Victor. But he never let success go to his head. He remained as rude, scathing, and brilliantly brutal as ever.
Today, some 15 years after his final column for the Standard, Victor’s unique critical voice in the world of TV is greatly missed.
