The writer, broadcaster and satirist Victor Lewis-Smith, who has died aged 65 after a short illness, once climbed the scaffolding outside York Minster in the early hours of the morning. At the top, he stood on a ledge singing Qur’anic invitations to prayer, before being arrested for causing a public disturbance.
Magistrates fined the then music undergraduate £20, and asked if he had anything to say. “Yes,” replied Lewis-Smith. “All my leftwing friends told me they were beaten up by the police when they were in custody. But nothing of the sort happened to me. What am I to tell them when we next meet?”
If he had been asked for other offences to be taken into account, he could have cited an earlier performance of I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside on the minster’s organ. He was, among other things, an accomplished jazz pianist.
However, he was best known as the London Evening Standard’s waspishly off-message TV critic for 15 years, from 1992, during which time he damned Ricky Gervais’s The Office, arguing that its editing could not hide “the vacuity of both dialogue and what passed for a plot”, while hailing Mrs Brown’s Boys: “Every scene brimmed over with so much innocent joy it’s hard to fathom why critics have accused the show of misogyny, homophobia, and even racism.”
He was also a prolific columnist for publications including Time Out, the Mail on Sunday, Esquire and the Sunday Correspondent. In the last of these he, along with his longtime collaborator Paul Sparks, claimed that the children’s TV show Captain Pugwash was peopled with characters called Master Bates, Seaman Staines and Roger the Cabin Boy. It wasn’t. Nor was it true that another children’s programme, Mary, Mungo and Midge, had a title that “would shock any scholar steeped in Chaucerian slang”, as the pair alleged.
For friends and admirers, Lewis-Smith was a heroically scabrous cultural disruptor. For foes and detractors, however, whether those who filled letters pages with complaints, or celebrities who sued for libel, he was something else.
In 2006 Gordon Ramsay obtained a £75,000 payout after suing over a Lewis-Smith review in the Evening Standard accusing the chef and his production company of “gastronomic mendacity”, wrongly claiming they had fabricated culinary disasters for the TV show Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.
In the same year, Paul McKenna sued the Mirror over a 2003 article claiming the hypnotist’s La Salle University doctorate was a sham. Lewis-Smith wrote: “I discovered that anyone could be fully doctored by La Salle within months … just so long as they could answer the following question correctly: ‘Do you have 2,615 dollars, Sir?’” McKenna told the court that Lewis-Smith had made him a “laughing stock” and was awarded damages of £25,000, the judge finding that he had not been dishonest.
Lewis-Smith was also a virtuosic hoaxer. In 1996, he impersonated Stephen Hawking during an 18-minute phone call to Diana, Princess of Wales, using the same voice technology as the professor. When he asked about “Wills’s welfare”, Diana replied: “Oh, he’s doing very well at Eton.” The fake Hawking replied: “No, I meant Will Carling.” At the time, it was alleged that Diana had had an affair with the then England rugby captain. Lewis-Smith only released a clip of the call in 2015, when it was aired on Radio 4 Extra.
Born in Essex, Lewis-Smith grew up in Chadwell Heath, the son of a surgeon, but never publicly disclosed details of his family. He did his A-levels at Barking College of Technology, then began his broadcasting career at Radio Medway before studying music at York University in the late 1970s.
In the early 80s, after having worked on BBC Radio York’s Snooze Button, Lewis-Smith began working as a Radio 4 producer on Start the Week and Midweek. The Midweek host Libby Purves reportedly threw a chair at him for inviting a “dwarf thrower” as a guest. It is not clear what Purves threw at him when, in 1986, Lewis-Smith hired Arthur Mullard, the endearingly gormless Cockney star of such comedies as Yus, My Dear and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate, as a stand-in presenter.
The BBC’s listeners’ complaints log filled up and Lewis-Smith received one of many official memoranda, this time from David Hatch, then controller of Radio 4, which concluded: “Consider this a serious slapped wrist.”
Instead, he quit. “I was getting bored with Midweek anyway,” he said. “If I had booked a drug-dealing Mexican junkie who came into the studio on a Harley-Davidson, Libby would have had him knitting a jersey in the corner by the end of the show.”
He went on to develop a comedy-writing collaboration with Sparks, a fellow former York music student. The pair worked on pieces in which layers of music and special effects were woven around schoolboy japes and lavatorial gags. Their first commission was in the late 80s on Radio 4’s Loose Ends. “We worked for days on [those] pieces,” Lewis-Smith recalled. “At BBC rates it worked out at about 30p an hour.” Making surreal radio adverts for clients such as the Midland Bank proved more lucrative.
However, the Loose Ends pieces led to them being commissioned to make the Victor Lewis-Smith Radio 1 show, which won best comedy radio programme in the 1990 British Comedy Awards, though also got them another wrist-slapping. “Dinner party sketch all right,” read a management dispatch. “Though I would have preferred not to have it so near the front of the programme in view of the graphic description of the turd with the sweetcorn on top of it.”
“It is funny,” Lewis-Smith reflected. “They say they want dangerous radio, but they would prefer it not to be actually dangerous.”
His first TV work was in 1989 on the Channel 4 arts and music show Club X, presenting a segment called Buygones, which featured droll meditations on cancelled consumer items such as the Aztec chocolate bar. In 1990, he acquired the rights to the Associated Rediffusion Productions Limited name, under whose aegis he made satirical programmes including TV Offal (Channel 4, 1997-98).
One segment, called Honest Obituary, featured devastatingly critical death notices of living people whom Lewis-Smith did not care for, including Noel Edmonds and Vanessa Feltz. The show also aired the infamous “twangers” episode of the pre-schooler TV show Rainbow, which was made by the cast and crew as a joke and was never meant to be aired, as it featured Bungle, Zippy and Geoffrey communicating entirely in filthy double entendres. This was followed by Ads Infinitum (BBC Two, 1998-2000), on which Lewis-Smith ridiculed old TV and cinema commercials.
But he could also do serious work. He was an executive producer for the Sky Arts series In Confidence (2010-14), consisting of one-to-one interviews by his friend Laurie Taylor with such luminaries as André Previn, Richard Dawkins and Kathy Burke. His last production for Sky Arts, Hitler’s Jazz Band, was screened on 14 December.
For 30 years Lewis-Smith compiled Private Eye’s Funny Old World column. He was also a restaurant critic, including, briefly, for the Guardian, for whom he reviewed L Manze’s pie and mash shop in 2003: “I’ve only just started in this job and I’m already becoming a fat bastard, as was brought home to me forcefully when I struggled to extricate myself from the narrow bench table, having just consumed an order of double pie and triple mash, and left the premises high on carbs, filled with self-loathing. I’ve let Dr Atkins down, I’ve let you down and, most of all, I’ve let myself down.” He hadn’t though, not really.
Lewis-Smith is survived by his wife, Virginia (nee Duff), and his daughter, Lucia.
• Victor Lewis-Smith, writer, broadcaster and producer, born 12 May 1957; died 10 December 2022
