Beryl Vertue changed popular culture in half-hour instalments

Television producer went from making tea for Spike Milligan to creating an international star of Benedict Cumberbatch.

From left to right: Comedian Eric Sykes, Ray Galton, comedian Spike Milligan and Alan Simpson, typist Beryl Vertue looking resigned (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

OBITUARY

Beryl Frances Vertue

Television producer. Born Croydon, England, April 8, 1931; died London, February 12, aged 90.

Beryl Vertue said she understood the power of television when the British government asked the BBC not to air a show on which she was working – Hancock’s Half Hour – because it might keep people away from polling booths at the 1959 election. Tony Hancock’s show had successfully moved from radio to TV, and so had Vertue.

Radio had been an accident. She’d known Alan Simpson from school days, after which he contracted tuberculosis, meeting a young Ray Galton in hospital who also had TB. While recuperating they did spots on the hospital radio system, and then became comedy writing partners for 50 years. They wrote many BBC shows together, including Hancock’s.

Needing someone to type up the scripts, Simpson called Vertue, but it was another writer who interviewed her for the job – Spike Milligan. He was wearing braces but no shirt and asked her what made her laugh and what tea she preferred. She didn’t want the job, it was on the other side of London. Milligan asked how much she would want to be paid each week. She decided to “price herself out of it” by asking for £10. “That’s £2, 10 (shillings) each,” Milligan said (comedian Eric Sykes also was there). “My whole life was transformed from that day,” she said years later.

Associated London Scripts, as the collective was called, became busier and would be bought by Australian businessman Robert Stigwood.

Galton and Simpson developed and wrote the father-and-son rag-and-bone men TV series Steptoe and Son for 13 years. Johnny Speight joined and for a decade wrote the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. But many of the writers lacked confidence about dealing with the BBC management, so Vertue found herself renewing and renegotiating their contracts as their shows, many of which she produced, became firmly ensconced in mid-1960s English – and Australian – popular culture. Stigwood made Vertue deputy chairman.

While the shows worked readily here, Vertue was aware they would not in the US. “If you take Till Death Us Do Part, I thought they’ll never be able to understand that (with) the dialect, our prejudices or whatever. But I thought the idea was strong and so I sold the idea.” It was reworked as All in the Family, with Carroll O’Connor playing the Alf Garnett role as the bigoted, politically incorrect patriarch, and becoming the highest-paid actor on US TV. Steptoe and Son was adapted as Sanford and Son and ran six seasons.

Vertue’s years with Stigwood were frantic. “I found Robert an amazing person. I wanted to produce more and I needed to meet someone – and at the same time he wanted to move into film and television and he wanted to meet someone.”

Stigwood sent his convertible white Rolls-Royce to drive her to his office. “The man was impressive, an extremely visionary, clever man.” Together they worked on making a theatrical production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, and the Ken Russell film of the Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy.

Then Lloyd Webber and Rice came back “and said they wanted to write a musical about Eva Peron and we all went ‘good lord, what’s that going to be like then?’ ”

Vertue formed her own production company, Hartswood Films, but her marriage was failing and for a few years she sat around trying to think of ideas for a film, but none seemed up to scratch.

Then she stumbled on a novel by first-time author Simon Nye that she believed had the makings of a movie. By the time she made contact with Nye she had changed her mind and thought it better as a TV series, and she encouraged him to script it.

Men Behaving Badly, featuring dysfunctional flatmates who drink beer, watch TV and chase women, developed a cult following but was dropped by ITV after the second series. Vertue persuaded the BBC to pick it up and it flourished through the 1990s.

Both Vertue’s daughters joined Hartswood as producers, as did a son-in-law, Steven Moffat, who wrote the series that have been her two most successful – Jekyll and, more recently, the award-winning Sherlock, which made an inter­national star of Benedict Cumberbatch.

“When I joined Robert Stigwood,” Vertue told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2013, “he looked after the Bee Gees, who I’ve adored ever since. I knew them all and now there’s only one.” She chose as one of her discs a lesser-known Bee Gees song, Morning of My Life, written by Barry Gibb in Wagga Wagga in 1965.