Ned Sherrin presents We Interrupt This Week

In a career of astonishing fertility that burgeoned dramatically with the subversive satirical TV programme That Was The Week That Was in the early 1960s, Ned Sherrin made a distinctive mark on British broadcasting, performing arts and entertainment for more than half a century. TW3, as it became known, was his “wake-up call”, as it were, to a nation that may not have realised it was about to be dragged kicking and screaming into the irreverent, as well as Swinging, Sixties. It cast an unsparing gaze on the hidden corners of British political life. It is scarcely too much to say that the standing of politicians and the business of governing have never been quite the same since.

Yet Sherrin never rested on his laurels. In whatever he did over the next 45 years, whether as film producer, theatre director, wit, radio presenter, adapter of plays, novelist and occasional performer, he consistently set new standards for himself as well as for the entertainment industry, so that a production of the late 1980s such as the Keith Waterhouse play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell could tap into a vein of sheer irreverent and irresponsible delight, and make it seem as fresh and surprising as work he had overseen 30 years before.

Sherrin might justifiably have said with Shakespeare’s Falstaff (though he never did) that he was not only a wit himself, but was also the cause of wit in other men. From TW3 onwards he gathered around him the best of the brains and talent available to journalism, broadcasting and entertainment and saw their careers flourish. In the process he was a part of the progress of many writers, broadcasters and performers from being merely reasonably well-known names to becoming well-nigh iconic in their fields.

After a career that had begun in commercial television in the mid-1950s, and had included a creative phase with the BBC on its Tonight programme, it was with TW3 that Sherrin definitively put down his marker. After being long stuck in a stultifying stuffiness, BBC TV was beginning to loosen up. With TW3 Sherrin dramatically accelerated the process. TW3 was largely his creation. He thought up the format, recruited the performers and directed the programme, which went out live, from the studio floor.

Sherrin was only 31 when the show first went on the air in November 1962 and it owed much to youthful lack of inhibition. Transmitted late on Saturday evenings, it was like nothing seen on television before. It attacked politicians, business, trade unions, the press and organised religion, sometimes crudely, sometimes unfairly — but hitting the target more often than not.

Yet, paradoxically, the main begetter of TW3 was not an anti-Establishment subversive. Then and subsequently Sherrin was a monarchist and a supporter of the Conservative Party. Having worked on Tonight, another mould-breaking show, he was determined that television should reflect the more liberated attitudes which started to permeate British society during the 1950s.

The emergence of TW3 came at the right time. Sherrin was fortunate that the BBC had recently acquired a sympathetic Director-General, Hugh Greene, who had been impressed by satirical cabaret while working as a newspaperman in Berlin in the 1930s. Sherrin could also count on the backing of his immediate superiors, Donald Baverstock and Alasdair Milne, who had been his mentors on Tonight.

Sherrin’s hand-picked performers included the singer Millicent Martin, William Rushton from the magazine Private Eye (another key element in 1960s satire), the actor Roy Kinnear, the journalist Bernard Levin and, as presenter, a little-known cabaret performer, still only 24, David Frost. Among the show’s regular writers were Christopher Booker, Dennis Potter, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, Herbert Kretzmer and the future MP Gerald Kaufman.

Most programmes brought complaints but from an initial three million the audience rose to 13 million, most of whom relished the mocking of the hitherto unassailable. A scathing attack on an unpopular Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, was reckoned to have hastened his political decline while a Kaufman sketch ridiculed MPs who had not spoken in the House of Commons for years. A “consumer guide to religion” caused predictable offence.

But TW3 was adaptable. The assassination of John F. Kennedy the day before transmission caused Sherrin to scrap the planned schedule in favour of a sombre, admiring tribute to the dead President. Nor was the show exclusively the province of the precocious young upstarts. There was a brilliant contribution from Frankie Howerd, which helped to revive his faltering career. Even more unlikely guests, the product of Sherrin’s growing passion for the playhouse, were the theatre dames Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndike.

BBC nervousness at the approaching general election prompted the decision to drop TW3 at the end of 1963 and it never returned. After the election Sherrin tried to keep the momentum going with with Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, notable for John Bird’s impersonations of the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and of African politicians, and BBC3, where Kenneth Tynan was the first to utter the F-word on television. But satire was losing its edge and Sherrin moved on.