Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Batman, Gay Daleks, Victor Lewis-Smith

A Geeky Memory Of Victor Lewis-Smith, RIP

British comedian, commentator and film producer Victor Lewis-Smith died this week, at the criminally young age of 65, leaving a legacy of radio and television shows, and reviews, that invaded British culture. He may not have been famous to many, but he was famous to the famous, who often hated him for his acerbic reviews. But for me, it was the work that would be then utterly ripped off by the likes of Chris Morris, Edgar Wright, Adam Buxton, Joe Cornish and many more that will live forever. And because no one really cares about them from a corporate level, have been uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo without challenge. Such as Victor Lewis-Smith's Ads Infinitum for BBC 2 from 2000 which gave us a look at superheroes in British TV advertising, from the Ajax Man and the Daz White Knight from the fifties and sixties beyond…

He also created television stunts, getting himself as Batman appearing on local news station Tyne Tees, to drop all manner of day-time sexual innuendo for no other reason than to make him and his friends laugh, and Victor Lewis-Smith fans to eventually track him down and identify him.

And then of course, his late-night Channel 4 show TV Offal from the nineties which gave us the of-their-time "they're camp, they exterminate, better watch your backs, it's the Gay Daleks." Including those early rumours about government minister Michael Portillo. Looking back, Lewis-Smith said "I was concerned that the show might be misinterpreted as anti-gay but I needn't have worried. The healthy postbag demonstrated that these weekly tales of the metallic homonauts quickly attracted a substantial gay audience, who enjoyed the surreal and absurd take on their lifestyle, particularly the scenes set in a public lavatory."

But there was so much more, from creating from scratch the popular urban legend that Captain Pugwash had a characters called Seaman Staines, Master Bates and Roger The Cabin Boy, to making prank calls to That's Life in which he died mid-call, Jim'll Fix It (which alluded to rumours that would one deal be revealed as fact), getting the Christmas party tape of Rainbow out to the public. or calling up BBC security to get a message to Hailie Selassie to meet him in "Babylon And Ting". In recent decades he has also edited the Funny Old World newsclips compilation column in Private Eye magazine, which has generally made me weep with laughter every fortnight.

I once bumped into him during a London Troopers pub meet, just after discussing his work with other comics creators, and mentioned I'd just been talking about him to friends. "Well stop it", he told me, "or you'll make me popular". That, of course, would never do.

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