Neil Shand

Those we have lost in comedy, 2018

It had already been a bad year for comedy industry deaths even before the late-breaking news that legend Dame June Whitfield had died.

Obituary: Neil Shand, comedy writer

Neil Shand, who has died aged 84, was a versatile comedy writer best known for his long and fruitful associations with David Frost and Spike Milligan.

A journalist by training, he excelled in topical material, a quality that Frost drew on extensively for 40 years. However, he also proved to be one of the select few, like Eric Sykes, who could keep up with the surreal inventiveness of Milligan, which he did successfully for more than a decade from 1969 on the Q series and, later, There's A Lot Of It About.

His new series Q6 (BBC2) is his best ever - an outstanding comic achievement even in a year which has already produced the prodigious 'Fawlty Towers'. Somebody - either co-writer Neil Shand or Python producer Ian McNaughton, or perhaps both - is holding Milligan's proliferating imagination on line and providing the wherewithal to realise his fantasies. Usually television is too cumbersome a medium to catch what;s going on in Milligan's skull.

A one-off called The Melting Pot (BBC1), written by Spike Milligan and Neil Shand and performed with a copious admixture of improvisation by Spike Milligan and John Bird, was the worst thing to have happened to race relations since Pharaoh went sour on the Israelites. I ought to have hated it, but was left so panic-stricken with laughter that I don't know where I stand. It was in such bad taste it was coming back the other way. Objecting to it was like debating against an attack of flatulence: it was a fart accompli.