Vince Powell: Prolific sitcom writer who co-created 'Love
Thy Neighbour' and 'Bless This House'

By Anthony Hayward
Saturday, 18 July 2009

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/vince-powell-prolific-sitcom-writer\
-who-cocreated-love-thy-neighbour-and-bless-this-house-1751593.html

With Harry Driver, Vince Powell formed one of British
television's most prolific and successful sitcom writing
partnerships.


At their height in the 1960s and 1970s, the pair created
some of ITV's most popular comedies, from George and the
Dragon and Nearest and Dearest to Never Mind the Quality,
Feel the Width and For the Love of Ada, which featured some
of Britain's biggest stars, such as Peggy Mount, Sid James,
Hylda Baker, Jimmy Jewel, Joe Lynch, Irene Handl and Wilfred
Pickles.

But the extremes of Powell and Driver's comedy - and of what
was deemed acceptable in those less politically and socially
aware times - were exemplified by two of their most
archetypal domestic sagas. Bless This House starred Sid
James as Sid Abbott, who found himself in a generation-gap
battle with his teenaged son and daughter (played by Robin
Stewart and Sally Geeson) while being hounded by his wife
(Diana Coupland), who invariably outsmarted him. Although
Sid's interests were ABC - ale, birds and Chelsea FC - the
comedy was essentially harmless.

At the same time, Love Thy Neighbour was being screened.
What is most startling is that there was apparently little
controversy about such a sitcom, featuring Jack Smethurst
and Kate Williams as Eddie and Joan Booth, a white couple
living next door to the black Bill and Barbie Reynolds
(Rudolph Walker and Nina Baden-Semper), and exchanging
racist insults. "Nig-nog", "sambo", "white honky" and
"snowflake" were among those traded, but Powell and Driver
insisted they were simply mocking prejudice itself - on both
sides of the racial divide.

Powell was born Vincent Smith, the only child of poor
Catholic parents, in the Manchester suburb of Miles Platting
in 1928. His mother died when he was five and his tailor
father remarried two years later. The young Smith, who
attended St Bede's Catholic College, regularly played truant
to watch films at the local cinema and visit the theatre,
where his love of comedy was fostered by variety acts such
as George Formby, Gracie Fields and Jewel and Warriss.

On leaving school at the age of 15, he became an apprentice
at an engineering works, where he met Kevin O'Flaherty. The
two friends both wanted to be singers and attended a talent
show at the New Manchester Hippodrome. Seeing the quality of
opposition, they decided to form a comedy double act and
performed locally in the evenings.

After service in the Royal Navy as a probationary sick berth
attendant on HMS Mauritius (1945-47), Powell decided to
follow his father into the tailoring trade and found a job
with Hector Power, in Manchester.

Keen to resume his stage act, he advertised in a newsagent's
shop window for a straight man. Harry Driver responded and,
together, they became Hammond and Powell, Smith deciding
that his surname was not appropriate for a variety
performer. The duo performed in clubs by night while both
continuing their day jobs, Driver working as a trainee
manager with Marks & Spencer.

The double act appeared to be finished when Driver
contracted polio in 1955, spent 18 months in hospital and
was paralysed from the neck down. But, as Powell continued
his day job, the pair switched to writing, with Driver at
first dictating his words but later hitting the keys of a
typewriter with a knitting needle clenched between his
teeth. After Driver was solely commissioned to contribute
scripts to Granada Television's airport drama series
Skyport, the pair were among the writers of the sitcom
Here's Harry (1960-65), which established the comedian Harry
Worth as a star.

Then, Powell and Driver were hired as Coronation Street's
first storyline writers, once the decision had been made to
extend Tony Warren's folk opera about the residents of a
Northern terrace after the first 13 episodes. They also
wrote scripts themselves for the serial, with Powell
responsible for 32 alone and four jointly with Driver
between 1961 and 1967.

With another of the soap's writers, John Finch, Powell also
wrote a stage play, the comedy Coronation Street on the Road
(1964). Powell and Driver then scripted separate episodes of
another Street spin-off, the television sitcom Pardon the
Expression (1965-66), which transplanted the pompous Gamma
Garments haberdashery manager Leonard Swindley (Arthur Lowe)
to a branch of the national chain-store Dobson and Hawks as
assistant manager.

They teamed up to write five episodes of the fantasy
adventure series Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67), starring
Gerald Harper as the Edwardian hero Adam Llewellyn De Vere
Adamant, before establishing themselves as a successful
partnership with George and the Dragon (1966-68), which they
created together. The sitcom starred Peggy Mount, cast to
type as the fire-breathing Gabrielle Dragon, housekeeper to
the country gentleman Colonel Maynard (John Le Mesurier),
with Sid James playing the chauffeur, George Russell, whose
amorous advances she fended off - loudly.

Powell's experience as a tailor was useful when he and
Driver then created Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width
(1967-71), starring John Bluthal and Joe Lynch as the Jewish
jacket-maker and Irish trouser-maker running a business in
London's East End. The comedy came from the two men's
differing beliefs, with tailoring being their only common
bond, and a film version followed in 1973.

The writing partnership was by now working at full throttle,
also creating Nearest and Dearest (1968-73), which teamed
the music-hall comedians Jimmy Jewel and Hylda Baker as the
warring brother and sister Eli and Nellie Pledge, who
inherited a Lancashire pickle factory. Soon, other writers
were brought in to script episodes, as happened with Powell
and Driver's future creations.

Next came Two in Clover (1969), with Sid James and Victor
Spinetti as two insurance company clerks-turned-farmers, For
the Love of Ada (1970-71), starring Irene Handl and Wilfred
Pickles in a comedy of twilight-years love, Bless This House
(1971-76) and Love Thy Neighbour (1972-76). The last three
were all spun off into feature films.

The death of Driver in 1973, as a result of weakened lungs
caused by polio, was a blow to Powell, who finished the
sitcoms they had begun for ITV, which also included Spring
and Autumn (1972-6), starring Jimmy Jewel as a cantankerous
widower.

Thames Television had put the pair on an exclusive contract,
earning £50,000 a year between them. Powell's salary then
doubled as a result and, for tax reasons, he lived for a
year in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, in the South of France, near
Villefranche-sur-Mer, which had been his regular holiday
destination since visiting it with the Royal Navy.

He found it difficult to carry on alone, without Driver to
bounce ideas off, but had mild success with his next
creations, The Wackers (1975), featuring Ken Jones and
Sheila Fay as father and mother in a half-Protestant,
half-Catholic Liverpool family, My Son Rueben (1975), with
Lila Kaye and Bernard Spear as a Jewish mother and her
ageing bachelor son both running a dry-cleaning business,
Rule Britannia! (1975), about English, Scottish, Irish and
Welsh shipmates reuniting after 25 years, and Odd Man Out
(1977), starring John Inman as the inheritor of a stick-rock
factory.

Powell found a winning formula again with Mind Your Language
(1977-79, 1986), featuring Barry Evans as the teacher of
English to mature foreign students - although it was
eventually cancelled by Michael Grade, then LWT's deputy of
controller of entertainment, who considered the racial
stereotyping offensive. The series was briefly revived seven
years later.

Other Powell creations included Young at Heart (1980-83),
with John Mills and Megs Jenkins as the pensioners
struggling to come to terms with retirement, and Bottle Boys
(1984-85), starring Robin Askwith as an inept milkman.

The writer also contributed scripts to the David Jason
sitcom A Sharp Intake of Breath (1980-81), Full House
(1985-86) and Slinger's Day (1986-87, featuring Bruce
Forsyth as a supermarket manager). He wrote almost half of
the episodes in the long-running Johnnie Mortimer-created
Never the Twain (1981-91), which starred Donald Sinden and
Windsor Davies as rival antiques dealers.

For many years, Powell penned Cilla Black's scripts for
Blind Date and Surprise Surprise. He also wrote an
Australian version of Love Thy Neighbour (1980) and
co-devised the celebrity charades game-show Give Us a Clue
(1979-97).

Powell's autobiography, From Rags to Gags: The Memoirs of a
Comedy Writer, was published last year. His first two
marriages ended in divorce. He had a son with his second
wife, Judi Smith, and a son and a daughter from his third
marriage, to Geraldine Moore, who survives him.

Vincent Smith (Vince Powell), writer: born Manchester 6
August 1928; married three times (two sons, one daughter);
died Guildford 13 July 2009.