Mel Smith, who has died aged 60, made his name as one of Britain’s funniest comedians when he forged a “head-to-head” partnership with Griff Rhys Jones in a double-act that became a mainstay of television comedy in the 1980s; later, he directed comedy films in Hollywood and made a fortune from selling the independent production company he and Jones founded together.
Although they had worked with each other before, appearing with Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson on the fast-paced and irreverent Not The Nine O’Clock News (1979-82), Smith and Jones made their two-handed television debut with Alas Smith and Jones (1984-87), a sketch show performed in front of a studio audience. Between extended filmed spoofs, often sending up a current television series or even an entire genre, the pair introduced their famous “head-to-head” sequences.
Framed in profile, Smith and Jones faced each other like two men across a saloon bar table, earnestly pursuing abstract conversations about life, Smith, the chubby one with the plump lower lip, usually cast as the smug but often ignorant know-all against the bemused and sometimes boneheaded Jones. The dialogue, meandering through a maze of misunderstandings and misconceptions, regularly produced some of the funniest exchanges on television, inviting comparisons with the Pete and Dud format developed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore 20 years earlier.
Typical of Alas Smith and Jones was a rambling exchange about sperm donors.
Jones: Well, where is this woman when you’re …?
Smith: Don’t know, might be anywhere … probably shopping.
The pair carefully calibrated their humour to position it between traditional variety patter and the more astringent and anarchic “alternative” comedy genre exemplified by performers like Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and Eddie Izzard. Unlike some familiar double-acts like Morecambe and Wise or Little and Large, however, Smith and Jones made the roles of funny man and foil interchangeable, and often varied the dynamics of their on-screen relationship, so that each could adopt a persona tailored to the material, in the manner of Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker in The Two Ronnies.
In 1988 the pair starred in The World According to Smith and Jones for LWT before returning to the BBC for a series of playlets Smith and Jones in Small Doses (1989) and Smith and Jones (1989-97), the latter tilting at the favourite targets of “alternative” humour, police and other authority figures, as well as emerging phenomena such as squeegee-toting windscreen washers at traffic lights. But although the show earned Smith and Jones a British Comedy Award, some critics detected a falling-off in quality as it went into a fifth and final series in 1997.
Off screen Smith and Jones formed their own successful production company, TalkBack, in 1982, starting in a single room above the Round House at Chalk Farm, north London, making radio commercials. They soon diversified into television production, nurturing a stable of upcoming comedy stars like Sacha Baron Cohen and Steve Coogan, and producing several popular comedies, among them Da Ali G Show, I’m Alan Partridge and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
A clubbable figure, Smith lived large, maintained a 15-cigars-a-day habit and, as a bookie’s son, was a prolific (some said furious) punter, following horse racing on television almost daily and at one stage falling into debt after losing money heavily. Having once lived with the comedienne Ruby Wax, until she threw him out for alleged infidelity, by the time he married a former model in the late 1980s he was on the verge of becoming a successful Hollywood film director.
Although described by friends as naturally funny, Smith was also a restive figure, and could never quite shake off his reputation as a man on a short fuse, always ready to rant at what he considered to be the peskier aspects of modern life. He relished enormous cigars, and in 2006, playing a cigar-puffing Winston Churchill on stage at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was forced to abandon a scene because of Scotland’s antismoking laws which forbid smoking in enclosed spaces.
In 1998, Jan Moir, interviewing Smith for The Daily Telegraph, was at a loss to pinpoint the root of Smith’s professional rancour. “His dissatisfaction seeps into almost every part of our conversation. Responding to the most innocent piece of Mel chitchat is an experience akin to swimming alongside a particularly bad tempered jellyfish; make the slightest contact and out lashes the stinging tentacle.
“He is clearly a man who is remorseless in his dislikes, although lavishly tolerant of his own intolerance. But, really — what on earth has he got to gripe about?”
Melvyn Kenneth Smith was born on December 3 1952 in Chiswick, west London. His father had worked down the coal mines of Co Durham, supervising pit ponies, before moving to London after the war and opening a string of betting shops.
After winning a scholarship to Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, where he was captain of rugby, Smith studied Experimental Psychology at New College, Oxford, and became president of OUDS, the university’s drama society, before dropping out to work as a “terrorised” dogsbody to the director Lindsay Anderson.
Having already directed a play as a 15-year-old schoolboy, Smith spent six years as a theatre director at venues including the Royal Court, Sloane Square; the Bristol Old Vic; the Oxford Playhouse; the Crucible, Sheffield; and the Young Vic.
He appeared briefly in a comedy sketch at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe towards the end of the 1970s, but was on the point of abandoning showbusiness to take over his father’s betting shop when the radio producer John Lloyd invited him to join the team he was putting together for Not The Nine O’Clock News, a groundbreaking television sketch show which parodied the authentic bulletins, chat shows and commercials of the time. In one of the most memorable skits, Rowan Atkinson appeared in a monkey suit as Gerald, an intelligent, languid and urbane gorilla lured into captivity by Smith.
Smith: When we captured Gerald, he was wild.
Gerald: Wild? I was absolutely livid.
When the Not The Nine O’Clock News team disbanded after series four in 1982, Smith and Jones remained together to devise Alas Smith and Jones. Much of the material — the title was a pun on the popular Western series Alias Smith and Jones — was written by Smith and Jones themselves, supported by a large team of other writers, and scripts and production values were of a consistently high standard..
Smith embarked on a fruitful parallel career as a director of television commercials, winning an award at Cannes for his campaign for Carling Black Label, but in the late 1980s, he diversified into acting, notably in the television series Muck and Brass (1982) and the cult hit The Princess Bride (1987).
But he remained intent on becoming a director of full-length feature films and, moving to Hollywood, directed several film comedies, starting with The Tall Guy (1989), a rom-com written by Richard Curtis and starring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson. Although his second Hollywood film, Radioland Murders, failed, he fared better with Bean — The Ultimate Disaster Movie (1997) starring Rowan Atkinson, which took $270 million at the box office. His more recent films included High Heels and Low Lifes (2001) and the bowling comedy Blackball (2003).
Smith and Jones sold their TalkBack company in 2000 for £62 million. When his love of gambling generated tabloid headlines, he stopped making bets and moved into buying shares in racehorses. Another brush with notoriety came with his confession, in 1999, to an addiction to painkillers, the result of suffering from chronic gout.
He wrote the Not the Nine O’Clock News Diary (1982); and (jointly with Griff Rhys Jones) The Smith and Jones World Atlas (1983); The Lavishly Tooled Smith and Jones (1986); Janet Lives with Mel and Griff (1988); and Smith and Jones Head to Head (1992).
Smith, who had been ill for some time, apparently died of a heart attack in his sleep.
He married, in 1988, Pamela Gay-Rees, who survives him.
Mel Smith, born December 3 1952, died July 19 2013
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