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.
