Alan Whicker

Alan Whicker was the quintessence of the glory days of British television, the time between the late 1950s and the late 1970s when there were no more than two or three channels and any notable programme would be seen by more than half the population.

With his drawling, heavily emphasised delivery and trademark spectacles, which looked like twin TV screens, Whicker reported from around the world in a unique, hypnotically watchable style. It was a matter of enormous pride to him that he was lampooned in a famous Monty Python sketch, in which dozens of Whicker lookalikes did earnest pieces to camera about a tropical island in crisis. The cause of the emergency? There were “just too many Whickers on Whicker Island”.

Born in 1925 in Cairo, Alan Whicker was the son of a captain in the Denbighshire Hussars. When he was seven his father died, prompting a move to Britain with his mother and elder sister, who herself died soon afterwards. Whicker’s mother always explained her death euphemistically, saying she had been “lost”.

Whicker maintained that he was a very happy child. One of his earliest memories, an indicator, perhaps, of how his life would turn out, was of going on a junior school camp to Teignmouth. He would sit on the top deck of the local bus, as far towards the front as he could, in order to absorb as much as possible. He also used to send off for glossy travel brochures and then study them for hours. A cousin was a writer and a member of the Institute of Journalists, and inspired the young Alan. By the age of 14 he owned a nine-guinea typewriter and was regularly sending articles and short stories to newspapers – all of which, he said, were rejected.

He went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in north London, about which he was “unenthusiastic”. When he joined the Army – he volunteered early rather than wait to be conscripted – he was filling in a form which asked about siblings. He was about to write, “I had a sister but she got lost in the streets of Cairo” when he realised for the first time that his sister must have died.

His grief only hit him when his mother died in 1948, however. He was, he said, “absolutely destroyed”. Whicker later credited her with teaching him to be “easy around women... the major pleasure in my life”. During the Blitz the only items she would carry with her to the air raid shelter were the letters he had sent from various fronts he covered as a second lieutenant, directing army cameramen in battle, taking photos and writing articles.

After the war Whicker threw himself into a career which would take him from being an agency reporter to appearing on the first black-and-white television screens to being a travel ambassador for AOL Online. His first civilian job was as the “expendable” bachelor or single male reporter for the Exchange Telegraph News, often working in competition with Reuters’ Sandy Gall.

For 10 years he covered natural disasters, royal tours and insurrections in the developing world, and then moved to television, getting a job as one of the reporting team on the BBC’s Tonight programme. His brief was to create such a sensation that viewers would ask “Where the hell will Whicker be next?” He achieved this aim by filming “slice of life” fillers from Britain and Europe on subjects such as dog beauty parlours, the first parking meters and swingers’ parties.

In the 1960s he got his own show, Whicker’s World, which allowed him to travel continually around the globe from Alaska to the Outback and turned him into a household name. By the 1970s Whicker’s World was coming top in the ratings, beating Coronation Street. He worked seven days a week, meeting luminaries such as John Paul Getty, Papa Doc Duvalier, Peter Sellers, Luciano Pavarotti, Sean Connery, Salvador Dali and the Sultan of Brunei. It was a frenetic pace, belied by the smooth, dapper and unruffled persona on screen.

Although he was a seasoned reporter on war and political conflicts, it was as a connoisseur of the lives of the rich and famous in places like Monte Carlo and Palm Beach that Whicker became a living symbol of an age which was already, strictly speaking, a nostalgic memory, when travel was glamorous and monogrammed luggage not quite a thing of the past. He always wore a safari suit or a blazer, whatever the location or the decade. In 2000 he was asked to appear as himself in a feature film set in 1977, and had to reassure the wardrobe mistress, who was worrying about recreating his look from that time, that she was looking at it.

Whicker described his wanderlust as “not so much a case of wanting to escape from as wanting to get to”, arising out of his keenness to meet people from all walks of life, whom he considered to be the true stars of his shows. He was able to travel round the world, he said, because of his “wonderful health”, a “cast-iron stomach” and his ability to be able to “tolerate anything except boredom”.

As well as garnering many television awards – he once flew back to London from Singapore, 16 hours and 8,000 miles, to collect a Bafta from Princess Anne before flying straight back again – he also won the public’s heart. He had an appreciation society of Whicker’s Worshippers, and 22,000 customers of a travel agency once voted him “the person with whom they would most like to travel”.

After 25 years of his being on television, both BBC and ITV celebrated with Whicker retrospectives, and BBC Manchester gave him his own talk show. Such was his standing that in 1978 the IBA banned him from doing commercials for a decade on the basis that “Whicker is a central feature of serious journalism.” This prevented him from doing the “Clunk-Click” safety belt campaign, which had to be fronted instead by Jimmy Savile. When the ban was lifted, Whicker became the face of Barclaycard for six years.

Whicker’s love life always excited much interest. He maintained that this was much to his chagrin, although he did plenty to encourage the image of himself as almost a playboy. When asked by TV Times which six objects he would take to a desert island, he replied “Two blondes, two brunettes and two redheads.”

He had a well-documented three-year affair with the oil millionairess Olga Deterding, daughter of Sir Henri, founder of Royal Dutch Shell. Olga had joined the Whicker unit as a location photographer and travelled with him to Kuwait and the Philippines. Whicker and Deterding were engaged, but decided to go their separate ways “for both our sakes”, pushed apart by his work and her mood swings, which were caused in part by her compulsive eating. Deterding later choked to death on a piece of steak in a Mayfair club. Whicker said simply: “We shall meet no more Olgas.”

Whicker’s next major relationship was with Valerie Kleeman, who lived in the flat beneath his in Cumberland Terrace in London. She had been in the lacrosse team at Queensgate School with Camilla Shand, later Parker Bowles. Whicker and the woman who was to be his long-standing partner met in 1969 in the apartment block lobby as she was going to a ballet lesson. When Whicker bought a house on Jersey three years later, Kleeman moved in and stayed.

Whicker always preferred publicity to focus on his professional rather than his private life. Just as his suave public exterior concealed an often anxious and sharp-tempered man, Whicker’s attitude to women was always a little enigmatic. Although Valerie took many of the photos for both volumes of Whicker’s autobiography, she was dealt with summarily in the first volume, the best-selling Within Whicker’s World (1982), and virtually not at all in Whicker’s World Take 2 (2000) – although there is an entire chapter on his passion for Bentleys.

Socially too, he would talk – and ask questions – endlessly about cars, but would clam up in some embarrassment if the subject of women came up. A few weeks after spending a couple of days with him in the south of France road-testing a new open-topped Bentley – over which he almost purred – I was asked by a magazine to interview him on the subject of “falling in love”.

Clearly unwilling to disappoint, he hummed and hahed, talked about cars again, before finally declining. “I’m terribly sorry, old boy,” he said in those famous mellifluous tones, “I’d do anything to help, but this one’s really not quite my speed, you know.” It was far from the first time that a journalist had drawn a blank in trying to probe more deeply into the private Whicker. It was, perhaps, predictable that one of the finest reporters of all time, whose particular speciality was getting guarded people to open up about their private lives and emotions, strictly guarded his own.

Alan Donald Whicker, journalist and broadcaster: born Cairo 2 August 1925; CBE 2005; died 12 July 2013.

Todd Bennett obituary: Silver medallist at the 1984 Olympics

At 5ft 7in and around 10 stone, Todd Bennett, who has died of cancer aged 51, was not really built for 400 metre running. But his attitude and determination were the equal of any and by the time he retired in 1992 he had played a central part in an era of British success over that distance.

Bennett’s powerful frame, with its low centre of gravity, was ideally suited to the tight, banked bends of indoor tracks, and his individual highlight was an astonishing performance at the 1985 European Indoor Championships in Athens where he set a world indoor record of 45.56sec. Bennett added a world indoor silver that year, and retained his European indoor title two years later in Liévin, France.

Another feature of indoor running is that runners break from their lanes and have to find their place on the inside as best they can – a process which Bennett relished as the elbows flew. Roger Black, the Olympic silver medallist and double European champion who ran with Bennett for Southampton AC and Britain, recalled how his friend loved to mix it on the track. “Todd was a great training partner. He was one of the reasons Kriss Akabusi and I started running at Southampton AC because he was already being coached there by Mike Smith. “In our business of 400m running he was too small, but he had phenomenal leg speed and he was a hard trainer who never, ever complained, a hard man. You didn’t mess with Todd. He loved all the barging and shoving that used to go on a lot more in relay running and indoor athletics, In those days you could bundle around.”

Bennett, who was born in Southampton and brought up in Romsey, Hampshire, announced himself in international running by winning the 1981 European junior title, He was also very proud of the individual silver medal he won in the 200m at the 1986 Commonwealth Games. But it was as a relay runner that he made his main impact outdoors.

In 1983 he was part of the British team which took 4x400m bronze at the inaugural IAAF World Championships in Helsinki, and the following year he won silver at the Los Angeles Olympics in company with Akabusi, Garry Cook and Phil Brown in a British and European record time of 2min 59.13sec. He also won golds from the 1982 and 1986 Commonwealth 400m relay events.

“Todd was in at the start of a new era of success in British 400m relay running,” Black said. “Gradually other runners came into it – myself and Derek Redmond, and a little later Iwan Thomas and Jamie Baulch. It was a very successful time in the event which stretched from 1984 through to around 1998. Everybody knew Todd was a major player in the history of British 400m running. Obviously the highlights of his career were winning the Olympic silver and then setting the world indoor record the next year at the European Indoors. But he was very proud of his 200m silver medal at the 1986 Commonwealth Games. He tore his hamstring soon after that, which was the beginning of the end for him, really.”

Bennett went on to work with Great Britain’s junior athletes and was their team manager for four years. He also trained his own group of athletes and maintained close links with the Southampton club, for whom he was coach and team manager. In 2008 he linked up with the Olympic sprint relay gold medallist Darren Campbell in the Team Superschools’ Challenge, whose aim was to promote sport to schoolchildren. “He put a lot back into the sport,” said Black. “Todd was an athlete through and through.”

Last summer Bennett joined Black, Akabusi and many of his other former team-mates when they stood together as British Olympic medallists to witness the London 2012 Opening Ceremony. “Athletics is not a team sport, so the relay is a special event, and there was a special bond between all of us who were a part of the 4x400 in those days,” Black said. “That was why, when we found out in January that Todd had cancer, so many runners came to see him in hospital – apart from myself and Kriss, there was Phil Brown, Derek Redmond, Brian Whittle and Roy Dickens, all guys who had run with him. Todd was very quiet, very modest and unassuming. For him the most important thing in his life was his family, He had a wonderful marriage to Vanessa, his childhood sweetheart, and two lovely kids whom he saw through to adulthood.

“Kriss and I spent time with him in the weeks before he died. We knew he was dying. He fought it in the way he fought as an athlete, but in the end he was very pragmatic and realistic. He died on his own terms, peacefully at home with his wife and children at his bedside. He was too young. It’s incredibly sad.”

Todd Anthony Bennett, athlete and coach: born Southampton 6 July 1962; married Vanessa (one daughter, one son); died 16 July 2013

Bert Trautmann

Bert Trautmann , who has died aged 89, became the hero of the 1956 FA Cup Final when, in one of the most famous episodes in the history of the competition, he defied the pain of an injury to continue in goal for Manchester City and clinch the trophy, unaware that he had broken his neck.

Bert Trautmann 

The esteem in which Trautmann was held in the blue half of Manchester, and indeed across English football, was all the more remarkable given that he had arrived in Britain 11 years before as a prisoner-of-war — and one regarded by the authorities as a hard-bitten Nazi because of his membership of an elite squad of Luftwaffe paratroops.

Trautmann had in fact lost the zeal that made him a sporting champion in the Hitler Youth after witnessing a massacre of civilians by the SS in occupied Russia, but he remained spiky and competitive. As a PoW he persuaded the camp authorities to let the inmates form a football team, which took on local sides in Lancashire as post-war tensions eased.

He converted from centre half to goalkeeper after taking a knock in one game and refusing to go off. After being signed by non-League St Helen’s Town, in 1949 he went to Manchester City, who were seeking a replacement for the great England international Frank Swift.

The club’s choice, just four years after the war, was controversial, and Trautmann was shocked by the hate mail he received; but the boos and anti-German chants turned to cheers as he excelled on the pitch. He made his mark as a keeper who dominated the penalty area, fearlessly snuffing out threats, instead of staying on his line.

City had reached the 1956 Cup Final — Trautmann’s second — after a series of narrow victories, while their opponents, Birmingham City, had romped to Wembley despite having been drawn away in each round. The Manchester side had also been hit by injury, and were forced to recall their out-of-favour playmaker Don Revie from the reserves.

In the event, Revie proved the match winner — by the 70th minute a string of visionary passes from him had given City a 3-1 lead. But with 16 minutes remaining, Birmingham’s Peter Murphy was presented with a chance.

Out rushed Trautmann (newly voted Footballer of the Year) and, with his customary courage, dived at Murphy’s feet. He succeeded in clutching the ball, but could not prevent his head colliding with Murphy’s leg. Trautmann was left dazed and reeling, but was determined to play on. As he rose to his feet after treatment, the crowd broke into For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.

At the end of the game, Trautmann was helped up the steps to collect his winner’s medal, all the while rubbing his “stiff neck”. He joined the team on the balcony of Manchester Town Hall as the crowd chanted: “We want Bert!”

Four days later his persistent headache forced him to attend a hospital, where X-rays revealed a fracture. The examining doctor told Trautmann that just one jolt of the bus back from Wembley could have killed him. He was forced to spend five months encased in plaster from head to hips, and thereafter played in a protective cap.

Yet Trautmann won back his place in the City team, and when he retired in 1964 (having made 545 appearances) the great names of football — Charlton, Law, Matthews, Finney — turned out for his testimonial match, in front of a crowd of 47,000 cheering him to the rafters. When the Inland Revenue told him to pay tax on the proceeds, he characteristically told them to get lost.

Bernhard Carl Trautmann was born in Bremen, Germany, on October 22 1923, the elder son of a chemical loader at the docks. He grew up during the hyperinflationary period of the Weimar Republic, and as a teenager joined the Hitler Youth. At 17 he volunteered for the Luftwaffe as a communications specialist, but failed his code exams.

When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, Trautmann was maintaining military vehicles; and during a pause in hostilities, he disabled a staff car as a prank so that he and some friends could go foraging once the officers had found another vehicle. When sand was found in the engine, Trautmann was convicted of sabotage and sentenced to nine months in a squalid former Soviet prison at Zhitomir. Providentially, his appendix burst and after recovering from the operation he was allowed to rejoin his unit.

Early in 1942 he volunteered for the Fallschirmjäger, the Luftwaffe’s crack paratroops. He spent the next two years in a small group fighting the increasingly active Soviet partisans — once narrowly escaping capture — as the German advance turned into a slow and bloody retreat.

Shortly before D-Day Trautmann was transferred to France to train new recruits. He fought in several desperate delaying actions across France, and then at Arnhem; by now he had been awarded two Iron Crosses and promoted to corporal.

While regrouping in the German town of Kleve, he was buried alive for three days when the Allies bombed a school where his unit was billeted; most of his comrades were killed.

In the confusion that preceded the fall of the Reich, Trautmann decided to make for Bremen. Briefly held by the Americans, he was finally taken prisoner by a British signals unit whose soldiers greeted him with: “Hello Fritz, would you like a cup of tea?” His lifelong love affair with Britain began at that moment.

Trautmann was dispatched to a PoW camp at Ashton-in-Makerfield, near Wigan, where the government (in contravention of the Geneva Convention) was using German labour to help rebuild Britain. His athleticism in the camp’s football team (when he was not working with a bomb disposal unit) attracted attention, and before long he was turning out for St Helen’s Town, whose club secretary Jack Friar took him under his wing.

His tenacious performances put hundreds on the gate, and soon attracted talent scouts. Friar — soon also to become his father-in-law — negotiated with Burnley, but City made an offer and Trautmann signed for them.

The club’s decision to recruit him inevitably aroused passions in Manchester, with its large Jewish community. Trautmann was subjected to much abuse until the city’s chief rabbi generously gave him his blessing to play. His nationality aside, he also had to overcome the prejudice of City fans who believed that no one could adequately replace Swift. The German’s cause was not helped when, in his first season at Maine Road, City were relegated to the Second Division.

Gradually, however, the blond Trautmann — who stood 6ft 2in tall and weighed almost 14st — began to win the affection and respect of fans and fellow players alike. His wholehearted commitment to the team, as well as his shot-stopping powers, led some observers to rate him not merely a better keeper than the more flamboyant Swift, but almost as good as Lev Yashin, the Russian who was then perhaps the best yet seen.

Bobby Charlton, for one, considered Trautmann responsible for the finest save he had ever witnessed. Trautmann was picked twice for the Football League representative side, but never won an international cap, as West Germany then had a policy of not selecting those who played abroad.

Although City’s league record was indifferent (their best seasons with Trautmann came in 1951, when they were runners-up in the Second Division, and in 1956, when they finished fourth in the top flight), his skills came into their own in close-fought, one-off cup matches. In 1955 City reached the Cup Final, but were forced to play most of the match with 10 men after Jimmy Meadows was injured. Their opponents, Newcastle, eventually won 3-1, but it was only Trautmann’s agility that had kept City in the game.

The following year saw both the zenith and nadir of Trautmann’s fortunes. A month after his heroics in the Cup Final, his six-year-old son was killed while crossing the road. Trautmann struggled to come to terms with his loss, which in time led to the break-up of his marriage.

Trautmann considered quitting football after leaving City, but in 1966 he became manager of Stockport County. The team won promotion to the Third Division and the gates rose, but then he had a row with the chairman and walked out. Thereafter he found it hard to get work within the sport and, angry and despairing, sparked a police hunt when he disappeared from home in 1971. But he turned up safe, and soon afterwards took a post with the German FA, pioneering soccer in developing countries.

Over the years he coached in Burma (taking its team to the 1972 Munich Olympics), Tanzania, Liberia, Pakistan and North Yemen. But there was always a welcome for him in Lancashire.

“My education only began the day I arrived in England,” Trautmann recalled. “People were so kind and decent, they didn’t see an enemy prisoner, they saw a human being. The British made me what I am ... When I visit Germany, they say to me: 'Be honest, you’re English through and through’. And I’m mighty proud so to consider myself. I come back four or five times a year and always think 'Great, I’m home.’”

In 2000 the Football League voted Trautmann one of its 100 Players of the Century, and in 2004 he was appointed OBE for his work encouraging Anglo-German relations. Days later he was presented to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the Berlin Sinfonia, where 66 years earlier he had been honoured by Hitler’s sports minister for coming second in athletics in the whole of the Reich.

Trautmann lived for a time in Germany, then retired to Spain, where he owned a vineyard near Valencia. He followed the Premiership on satellite television, and was a regular visitor to Maine Road and later the City of Manchester Stadium.

He suffered no lasting effects from his broken neck, though from time to time he would feel a twinge whenever he looked sharp left while riding his bicycle.

Bert Trautmann married Margaret Friar in 1950. His second marriage, to Ursula von der Heyde, also broke down. He retired to Spain with his third wife, Marlis, who survives him. He had two other sons by his first marriage, and a daughter from an earlier relationship with Marion Greenhall.

Bert Trautmann, born October 22 1923, died July 19 2013

Mel Smith

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.

Mel Smith

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