HOWZAT

He was born Edward George Sherrin into a Somerset farming family. From Sexey’s School in Bruton, where he was a weekly boarder, he did National Service, spending an agreeable year in Austria with the Royal Corps of Signals. From there he went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read law. The choice of subject was a concession to his father, who insisted that Sherrin should pursue a proper profession.

But showbusiness, in the form of student revues, soon beckoned and one of Sherrin’s productions, which featured the young Maggie Smith, made it to television. He was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn but had no serious intention of practising and in 1955 he became one of the first graduate trainees to join the new commercial television.

Working for ATV in Birmingham as a production assistant and floor manager, he gained a reputation for handling tricky live programmes. The first show he could call his own was Paper Talk, in which a tabloid journalist, Douglas Warth, harangued studio guests. It was a forerunner of Bernard Levin’s spot on TW3. In 1957 Sherrin switched to the BBC, joining Tonight, where he directed the cameras and brought a showbusiness flavour to the programme by devising tributes to famous songwriters.

During the 1950s Sherrin began a long association with a writer and critic 30 years his senior, Caryl Brahms. It started with Sherrin’s ambition, hatched during his university days, to make a stage musical out of Brahms’s No Bed for Bacon, a comic novel about Shakespeare. Attempts to realise this project occupied several years and there were several productions, none of which reached the West End.

Brahms and Sherrin collaborated, with varying success, on many other ventures for radio, stage and television. A series of one-hour farces adapted from Georges Feydeau and starring Patrick Cargill went out on the BBC in the late 1960s and the pair assembled televised tributes to Charles Dickens and Sir Donald Wolfit. Brahms was also a key contributor to TW3, often writing the topical lyrics for Millicent Martin’s opening song.

Towards the end of the 1960s Sherrin decided to try film production. His first venture, The Virgin Soldiers, from Leslie Thomas’s ribald novel of National Service life, did well but the subsequent record was patchy. The television series Up Pompeii spawned three indifferent vehicles for Frankie Howerd; a worthier film was an adaptation of Peter Nichols’s astringent stage comedy, The National Health. For every picture that got made at least as many were aborted, and Sherrin eventually found film-making a frustrating activity from which he was glad to escape.

He made his bow as a theatre director in 1967 on the musical Come Spy with Me, which starred Danny La Rue. But his first success came almost a decade later with Side by Side by Sondheim. Sherrin devised and directed the show, an anthology of Stephen Sondheim songs performed by Millicent Martin, David Kernan and Julia Mackenzie, and appeared as the dinner-jacketed narrator. It opened at the Mermaid, transferred to the West End and later played in New York.

Sherrin’s other big stage hit was Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, created by Keith Waterhouse from the writings of the the celebrated journalist and Soho habitué whose Spectator column often failed to appear, owing to its writer’s self-inflicted indisposition. Peter O’Toole, Tom Conti and James Bolam played the title role during a long West End run. Sherrin later took the production to Australia and revived it in London in 1999. He directed four other Waterhouse plays, as well as A Passionate Woman, an early piece by the television dramatist Kay Mellor, and in 1996 a West End revival of the musical Salad Days.

On radio Sherrin hosted two long-running programmes which began in the mid-1980s. Loose Ends, which occupied a Saturday morning slot on Radio 4 for many years until being switched to the evening, saw Sherrin as a witty and avuncular headmaster in charge of a slightly unruly set of bright young protégés who included Robert Elms, Craig Charles, Emma Freud and, later, Arthur Smith and Graham Norton.

Intended as a gap filler, the programme acquired a loyal cult audience significantly younger than the Radio 4 average and was still running well into the 21st century. Counterpoint, a music quiz, achieved similar longevity. Again Sherrin’s urbane chairmanship had much to do with the success of the programme, which covered all facets of music from high opera to the newest chart-toppers.

Sherrin’s several literary ventures included a volume of memoirs called A Small Thing — Like an Earthquake (1983); a novel, Scratch an Actor (1996); a book of theatrical anecdotes; and a further volume of memoirs, The Autobiography (2005). He also compiled The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. He wrote a column for The Times and was a restaurant critic for the London Evening Standard.

Sherrin openly discussed his homosexuality in interviews. He admitted that he found difficulty making lasting relationships and that for many years he had used male prostitutes. He lived alone for years in a flat in Chelsea. Among his passions were cricket, with a special affection for the colourful characters of his native Somerset, and the television show Blind Date. He was appointed CBE in 1997.

Ned Sherrin, CBE, producer, director, broadcaster and writer, was born on February 18, 1931. He died of cancer on October 1, 2007, aged 76