Quote: Jack Massey @ July 19 2009, 10:10 PM BSTI've not seen Bottle Boys
Perhaps that's an indicator!
Although I suppose AYBS? is quite a hit in the colonies, so there'd have still been the interest in John Inman.
Vince Powell RIP Page 3
Quote: Jack Massey @ July 19 2009, 10:05 PM BSTTwo In Clover for me. His worst - Odd Man Out, shocking stuff.
Odd Man Out, I've heard of that. John Inman works in a seaside gift shop. Made Are You Being Served? seem the height of subtlety apparently. He also did another show I've never seen entitled Take A Letter Mr. Jones....
Take A Letter Mr. Jones is available on DVD.
See Amazon product listing
[p=http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/8780821/-/Product.html]
[h=928351]
https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/take_a_letter_mr_jones/
Odd Man Out gave me a giggle, but somewhat guiltily so, I seem to recall. It may be largely forgotten, but it's not exactly a classic.
Today The Times published the following obituary...
'Vince Powell, with his longtime writing partner, Harry Driver, was responsible for one of television's most notorious, if at the time highly popular, comedies, Love Thy Neighbour, which ran on ITV from 1972 to 1976, was intended to debunk racial stereotypes but came to be widely condemned for doing exactly the opposite.
Jack Smethurst played Eddie, a white bigot who is dismayed to find himself living next door to a black family headed by Bill (Rudolph Walker). Powell and Driver tried to balance things by making Eddie a trade unionist and Bill a Tory and making sure that Bill gave as good as he got. The respective wives, moreover, got on well.
But while both the central characters were racist in their own ways, it was Eddie's invective which dominated, with the persistent use of words such as "nignog" and "sambo" amid a general tirade of crude colour prejudice, which seemed to be cheered on by the studio audience. To the disgust of its critics the show was a huge ratings success and it spawned a feature film and versions in Australia and the US.
Powell and Driver were not racist, they merely tried to poke fun at racial bigotry in an era before political correctness would have made such a show impossible. Walker, and Nina Baden-Semper, who played his wife, always defended Love Thy Neighbour as an attempt to confront racist attitudes and insisted that they had not been demeaned by it.
Love Thy Neighbour was in any case untypical of Powell and Driver, whose prolific output (ended by Driver's early death) was firmly in the mainstream of well-crafted, uncontentious shows which may not have gone down as classics but gave much pleasure. They helped to establish Arthur Lowe as a comedy actor and wrote particularly well for veterans such as Sidney James, Jimmy Jewel, Wilfred Pickles and Irene Handl.
Powell was born Vincent Smith in the Manchester district of Miles Platting in 1928 and followed his father into the tailoring business. While working as a tailor by day, in the evenings he performed on the Manchester amateur comedy circuit where he met Harry Driver. They played the clubs as a double act called Hammond and Powell.
Their performing partnership ended in 1955 when Driver contracted polio, which meant he was unable to move his arms or legs. During a year spent in hospital in an iron lung Driver started dictating stories and scripts and was later able to type with a knitting needle clenched between his teeth.
Powell and Driver moved into television in 1960 when the BBC commissioned them to write a series for the then relatively unknown Northern comedian Harry Worth. Here's Harry ran for five years, establishing the calamity-prone Worth as a national figure and launching Powell and Driver as a professional writing team.
Although they would make their reputation in comedy, from 1961 Powell and Driver wrote scripts and storylines for the early episodes of Coronation Street. They also contributed to the crime series Villains and wrote five episodes of the BBC fantasy adventure Adam Adamant Lives! starring Gerald Harper.
After Here's Harry the first of 11 comedy series they created was Pardon The Expression (1965-66), a spin-off from Coronation Street in which Arthur Lowe reprised the pompous haberdasher Leonard Swindley. It was followed by George and the Dragon, in which Sidney James and Peggy Mount played the chaffeur and housekeeper of John Le Mesurier's retired colonel.
Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width (1967-71) was set in an East End tailoring business run by a Jew (John Bluthal) and an Irish Catholic (Joe Lynch). The writers were drawing on their own backgrounds, for Driver had grown up in a Jewish area of Manchester and Powell was a Roman Catholic, and the comedy of ethnic difference foreshadowed Love Thy Neighbour.
In 1970 Powell and Driver brought together Wilfred Pickles and Irene Handl as senior citizens who find romance in For the Love of Ada. It was one of the happiest Powell-Driver collaborations, a perfectly scripted relationship engagingly played by the two leads. The mistake was transferring it to the cinema, where the intimacy was lost.
Other sitcoms created by Powell and Driver were largely written by others. Nearest and Dearest featured Jimmy Jewel and Hilda Baker as a brother and sister who own a pickle factory, and Bless This House (1971-76) was a domestic comedy vehicle for Sidney James.
Running parallel with Love Thy Neighbour was Spring and Autumn in which Jewel was a widower who moved in with his daughter and son-in-law.
After Driver's death in 1973, and by this point in his early forties, Powell continued writing for the series they had set up together before going on to create several sitcoms of his own, though without his partner the inspiration seemed to flag.
Mind Your Language (1977-79) about overseas students learning English, had its moments, though it was criticised for relying on jokes about stupid foreigners.
Other shows have deservedly been forgotten. The Wackers set in Liverpool and another comedy of ethnic differences, was dropped after one series, while Powell's final creation, Bottle Boys, featuring Robin Askwith from the smutty Confessions films as a football-mad milkman, was one of his feeblest.
Powell's last writing job was on Never The Twain, which had Windsor Davies and Donald Sinden as rival antique dealers. The show was created by John Mortimer, but Powell became one of the principal writers, contributing to every episode from 1989 to the end of the run two years later.
Powell was comedy adviser to Thames Television for eight years and programme associate on Cilla Black's Blind Date for London Weekend Television. He later became a popular after-dinner speaker, regaling his audience with anecdotes about "sharing cocktails with Noel Coward, Dom Perignon with Cilla Black and fish and chips with Morecambe and Wise".
He is survived by his third wife, Geraldine, and three children.
Vince Powell, comedy writer, was born on August 6, 1928. He died on July 13, 2009, aged 80.'
Primary reference: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/1057974/
And there's no exclamation mark on Pardon The Expression. Idiots.
Quote: Aaron @ July 24 2009, 11:31 PM BSTAnd there's no exclamation mark on Pardon The Expression. Idiots.
EDIT-ed: Have removed the exclamation mark. I typed this obit out verbatim from the newspaper and it is indeed their mistake.
Sadly his widow didn't get a reef as the Pakistani man down at Interflora mistakenly sent it to Vin's Pal.
And despite shouting slowly and precisely at the French woman down at the undertakers: 'need coffin for Vince,' she handed over 20 Gauloises.
The funeral was conducted by a black man and was called the Reverend Enoch - how we laughed.
Quote: youngian @ July 31 2009, 3:10 PM BSTSadly his widow didn't get a reef as the Pakistani man down at Interflora mistakenly sent it to Vin's Pal.
It's what Vince would've wanted.
Quote: youngian @ July 31 2009, 3:10 PM BSTAnd despite shouting slowly and precisely at the French woman down at the undertakers: 'need coffin for Vince,' she handed over 20 Gauloises.
Quote: youngian @ July 31 2009, 3:10 PM BSTThe funeral was conducted by a black man and was called the Reverend Enoch - how we laughed.
And him say, "Hashish to hashish, mon." in a true Powellesque manner. 
