On Saturday nights in 1962 and 1963 Britain was unexpectedly quiet; people stayed at home to watch the BBC TV satire That Was the Week That Was, called TW3 for short; restaurants installed television sets to retain their clientele. My friend John Duncan, TW3’s assistant producer, who has died aged 78, said that the team played darts in their office till Thursday, wrote the sketches on Friday, rehearsed and performed them live on Saturday, and watched people re-enact them in the pub on Sunday.
John was born in Newcastle; his father, Norman, was an insurance assessor and his mother, Marjorie, taught art. From Newcastle Royal grammar school he went to study English at University College, Oxford, where he produced several plays, notably Tamburlaine the Great – Kenneth Tynan wrote a rave review in the Observer – and worked part time for the National Youth Theatre. On graduating he ran Tomorrow’s Audience, a touring theatre company for schools, with Mary and Richard Ingrams (who funded the venture from a legacy). They eventually produced The Bed-Sitting Room, which became a West End hit. Despite that, Tomorrow’s Audience folded, bankrupt.
John then lodged with Ingrams’s mother, where the two of them, with Willie Rushton, Barry Fantoni and others, daubed a picture, signed by a fictitious Stuart Harris, for the Royal Academy summer exhibition. It was accepted and even highlighted as the picture of the year by a newspaper art critic. Their cover was blown when a rival critic noted that Stuart Harris’s address was that of the notorious prankster Ingrams.
John did a short stint as assistant director at the Royal Court theatre before taking the TW3 job. Later he became a BBC TV documentary producer and then head of light entertainment at Yorkshire TV, before succumbing to an ambition to be an antiquarian bookseller. While he was buying from other dealers for his start-up stock, an assistant recognised him as a friend of her cousin Ingrams. She was Mary Foster, and they married. His York shop also featured original cartoons, and he later bought Mel Calman’s cartoon gallery in Museum Street, London. He wrote a bawdy comic strip for the Literary Review and a humorous column signed Yorick for the Yorkshire Evening News.
John, who played village cricket for years in Ingrams’s Berkshire team, was twinkling, erudite and funny.
He is survived by Mary and their daughter, Flora; two children, Jessica and Dan, from his previous marriage to Ursula Fearon, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren.
