Frank Kelly, actor

Frank Kelly as Father Jack Hackett

Frank Kelly, who has died aged 77, was the actor best known for playing the irascible, foul-mouthed Father Jack Hackett in the sitcom Father Ted, which was broadcast on Channel 4 from 1995 until 1998.

Kelly’s acting career spanned some 60 years and he was already well known in his native Ireland for his work on the satirical television comedy show Hall’s Pictorial Weekly

(1971-1980), before his role as Father Jack brought him to a wider audience. Father Ted followed the hapless adventures of three priests who have found themselves exiled – for various misdemeanours – on Craggy Island, a fictional island off the west coast of Ireland, along with their chaotic and batty housekeeper, Mrs Doyle.

Much of the success of the series lay in the fond irreverence of the writing (by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan) and the interaction between the amiable but somewhat wayward Father Ted Crilly (Dermot Morgan – who died in 1998, shortly after the series ended), the doltish Father Dougal McGuire (Ardal O’Hanlon) and Kelly’s Father Jack, best known for his liberal use of the word “feck” (as well as “arse”, “girls” and “drink”).

Kelly and his wife Bairbre in 2012  

With his wall eye, wild grey hair, alcoholic incoherence and occasional lapses into mindless violence, Father Jack delighted viewers and became something of a cult figure. The reason behind his enforced exile was, as with his fellow priests, somewhat unclear, but seemed to be connected to his behaviour at a wedding. Once ensconced on Craggy Island, however, he was always treated with benign tolerance by Fathers Ted and Dougal.

Despite his appalling antics (including, in his attempt to get hold of some “drink”, downing both Toilet Duck and Windolene), Father Jack somehow retained a grandfatherly presence in the series. Kelly later said that he was occasionally approached by young priests who would tell him that they too were taking care of a much older man. “They’ll say, 'how do you know about ours?’” he explained in 2015. “[He’s] not without foundation in reality.”

Kelly himself could not have been less like his character. Softly spoken, genial and conservative in temperament, he was modest about his own achievements in the show (“Every raised eyebrow is in the script”) and did not seem to mind that other professional achievements were often overshadowed by his role as the outrageous old priest. He treasured one particular page of the script, which he kept for years after the show ended. It read: “Caution. It is very dangerous to approach Father Jack.”

Frank Kelly was born Francis O’Kelly in Dublin on December 28 1938, one of six children of the Irish cartoonist and satirist, Charles E Kelly, and educated at Blackrock College, where he was a schoolboy opera star, before going on to read Law at University College, Dublin. He was called the bar at King’s Inns but decided to switch to acting as a career.

The cast of Father Ted  

His first film role was as a prison officer in The Italian Job (1969), and from 1968 until 1982 he appeared in the RTÉ children’s series Wanderly Wagon. His work on Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, made his name in Ireland. The show’s satirical take on the country’s politics was such that it was said to have played a part in bringing down the Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition government in 1977.

From 1999 to 2001 Kelly starred in the RTÉ series Glenroe. Other parts included a role in 2003 as John Smith, leader of the Labour Party, in the Stephen Frears drama The Deal.

In 2010, he joined the ITV soap Emmerdale, but left after five months because he missed his family and Ireland. He also appeared as the judge in Mrs. Brown’s Boys D’Movie.

He married Bairbre Neldon in 1964. She survives him with their seven children.

Frank Kelly, born December 28 1938, died February 28 2016

Maurice White

Maurice White on stage in New York in 1979 

Maurice White, who has died aged 74, was the singer, songwriter, producer and guiding force behind Earth, Wind & Fire, the biggest black music act of the 1970s and the most popular group in the history of American soul, funk and R&B.

Incorporating disco-friendly elements of jazz, rock, pop, Latin American and African music styles, and with White’s tenor alternating on vocals with Philip Bailey’s falsetto, E,W&F notched up some 26 gold and platinum hits, including September; Boogie Wonderland; Fantasy; After the Love Has Gone; Shining Star; and a cover of the Beatles’ Got to Get You Into My Life.

E,W&F was the first black American group to champion its African cultural heritage, through extravagant stage costumes, mystical album cover art and the introduction of the kalimba, a small African thumb-piano that added a traditional element to their sound.

With the help of the choreographer George Faison and “hippie magician” Doug Henning and his assistant, a young David Copperfield, the group were also known for their elaborate shows – full of laser lights, flying pyramids and levitating guitarists – reflecting White’s interest in astrology and Egyptology.

The extravagance, however, was strictly confined to the stage; band members never succumbed to the drink and drugs lifestyle that brought a premature end to many other R&B careers. According to White’s brother and fellow band member Verdine White, it was Maurice (known to band-mates as “Reece”) who kept them on the straight and narrow. “We had fun but not like crazy,” Verdine recalled. “[Maurice] was a great taskmaster, a great visionary.”

By 1987, however, White was showing signs of the Parkinson’s disease that would force him to retire in 1994. While his fellow band members continued to enjoy success, at least White did not have to put up with the inevitable jokes prompted by the revelation that their 30th anniversary tour in 2001 was being sponsored by Viagra.

Maurice White in 1979

Maurice White was born on December 19 1941 in Memphis, Tennessee, and brought up by his grandmother, though he made frequent trips to stay with his mother and stepfather, a doctor, in Chicago.

As a boy, he sang in a church choir and was inspired to become a drummer by watching local marching bands. “I saw the guys in the band playing drums – they had on shiny suits and were getting all the attention from the girls,” he recalled. “So I decided: that’s what I want to do.”

White attended Booker T Washington High School, Memphis, where he was in the drum corps and formed a “cookin’ little band” with his friend Booker T Jones (later of Booker T and the MGs). After leaving school he studied at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and played drums in local nightclubs. By the mid-1960s he had become a session player at the city’s Chess record company studios, backing stars such as Etta James and Muddy Waters.

By 1966 he had joined the Ramsey Lewis Trio, replacing Isaac “Red” Holt on drums. Over the next three years he played on nine of the jazz trio’s albums, including Wade in the Water (1966). White described Lewis as his “mentor”.

He left the Lewis trio after three years to form the Salty Peppers with Wade Flemons and Don Whitehead. Moving to Los Angeles the next year, he renamed the band Earth, Wind & Fire (after the three elements in his Sagittarian astrological sign), adding his brother, the bassist Verdine White, and others to the line-up, and signing with Warner Bros. The group recorded two albums for Warner, neither of which sold well, and then disbanded. Then White recruited a new band, retaining only his brother Verdine and including the percussionist and vocalist Philip Bailey.

The new line-up signed with Columbia Records, changed their musical direction from what White described as “kinda wild, almost avant-garde,” and went on to stardom; nearly all their 1970s hits were produced and most were written or co-written by White.

“I’ve got gospel in me, I’ve got blues, I’ve got rhythm & blues, rock, pop,” he explained. “I’ve got all of those inside me.”

Maurice White at Wembley in 1978

After reaching the US Top 40 in 1974 with Mighty Mighty, E,W&F broke through to a wider audience with the soundtrack to the otherwise forgettable That’s the Way of the World (1975), a film featuring Harvey Keitel as a scheming record label boss and the band as his dupes. The album produced two hits, Reasons, and Shining Star, turning the group into one of the most popular bands of the decade.

Even the death in 1976 of Charles Stepney, White’s co-producer on three albums, could not slow their momentum. In the late 1970s they had five double platinum albums, and a multi-platinum “best-of” collection that yielded the hit single September, which reached No 3 in the UK chart in 1978. It was one of four Top 10 hits the group enjoyed in Britain, the others being After the Love Has Gone (No 4) and Boogie Wonderland (No 4) in 1979, and Let’s Groove, No 3 in 1981.

After that, however, sales started to decline. Their 1983 album, Electric Universe, an attempt to keep pace with synthesiser technology, failed to produce a hit and the group disbanded.

White broadened his horizons by producing both Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, but a solo album flopped and in 1987 E,W&F reformed, making a triumphant return with the album, Touch the World, which went gold. A second greatest-hits package went gold the following year.

By the 2005 album, Illumination, White had left the stage, although he continued to write and produce for the band.

Earth, Wind & Fire was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 and White into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 2010.

Maurice White is survived by his wife and two children.

Maurice White, born December 19 1941, died February 4 2016

Sir Terry Wogan

Sir Terry Wogan at the microphone 

Sir Terry Wogan, who has died aged 77, was the most popular and best-loved broadcaster in Britain for more than three decades, confecting a middlebrow, old-fashioned brand of gentle Irish whimsy that barely concealed his forthright and often antagonistic views about the BBC and the people who run it.

For Wogan’s wit and wisdom worked against the grain of the organisation that had plucked him from obscurity in Dublin, where he had read the radio news and announced the programmes, and magicked him into a broadcasting superstar.

He loved what he had become, considered his abundant rewards to be richly deserved but (a well-worn symptom of a familiar syndrome) often felt unloved and insufficiently cherished, as when he agreed to present awards to the craftsmen of his trade – cameramen, sound technicians and the like – for no fee, merely the price of a hotel room. When he discovered that the deal was just that – room only, no breakfast (the price of which he had to stump up himself from his reported £800,000 salary) – he considered himself badly done by.

While there was something in what the prime minister, Gordon Brown, had to say when Wogan finally laid down his crown on his Radio 2 breakfast show in December 2009, crediting him with having shaped the popular imagination of British viewers and listeners, it was Wogan’s fellow early morning presenter, John Humphrys of Today on Radio 4 who perhaps put his finger on the Irishman’s secret: “It is just that he puts his audience at ease. That’s why they want to listen, because they feel better about themselves after they have listened to him. He has made the nation feel at ease with itself and that’s a great gift and we owe him a lot for that.”

Terry Wogan and Dolly Parton before the recording of his chat show  

Wogan confessed to a certain laziness but, as an enthusiastic reader of PG Wodehouse, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, could lay claim to a certain erudition. One newspaper complimented the broadcaster on his cleverness in not letting on how clever he really was, but Wogan himself confessed to having only “a butterfly brain” and the knack of trotting out small bursts of Greek, Latin, Gaelic, French and German while being fluent in none.

“His style on radio is fantastical, allusive and mildly subversive,” noted Sebastian Faulks in The Sunday Telegraph in 1982. “Wogan is bland; he is old-fashioned; his Italian suits are expensive without being classy; his patter is witty without being arresting; and his hairstyle a doomed attempt to be all things to all ages.” Yet, Faulks conceded, Wogan was a phenomenon, or, as Ray Moore who preceded him in the dawn slot liked to say, a “cosmic megastar”.

Listeners wrote drifts of letters to him on subjects such as haggis-curling in Dubai, senna-pod tea, cinema usherettes, double-gusset knickers and old bicycle lamps. But beneath the bromide lay a reservoir of bile. His pungent views on the BBC ranged from the sometime director-general John Birt – “This focus group mentality is terrible” – to the “madness” of moving the sports department to Salford “just in time for the London Olympics” and “risible” breakfast television.

Nor was his disrespect for the BBC boss class confined to the man he called “Bert” Birt; he mercilessly sent up any incumbent director-general – “I see the D-G isn’t up yet. I can see his teeth in a glass on the windowsill” – and his response to a warning in 1975 to lay off was to turn up the heat. His pat answer to the risk of being fired was to point out that it was he, not the BBC, who wielded the ultimate sanction. “I can walk out.”

Wogan was the purveyor of irony to the masses, and as The Daily Telegraph leader column noted on the morning he wound up Wake Up To Wogan in December 2009: “For millions of radio listeners, breakfast time will never be the same again.”

Terry Wogan on his popular televison talk show with Audrey Hepburn

But it was the television game show Blankety Blank that transformed Wogan into a household name. Launched in 1979 it proved an instant hit with some 20 million viewers, while even the BBC’s annual report praised the show’s “harmless fun handled skilfully by Terry Wogan”. He ad-libbed, waved his strange wand-like microphone and inexorably sent up the proceedings.

By 1981, he had achieved the double, presenting the most popular programmes on British radio and television; Tatler had proclaimed him “Britain’s Best-Known Face”. A year earlier he had launched What’s On Wogan, a live Saturday teatime show, which eventually metamorphosed into Wogan. First shown in Michael Parkinson’s former Saturday night slot of 10pm, in 1985 Michael Grade moved it to weekdays at 7pm, a thrice-weekly curtain-raiser to the evening’s viewing.

It drew an average eight million viewers a night and crowned Wogan king of television. After an unfortunate start – he tripped over while introducing Elton John in the first edition – Wogan picked himself up to become the most popular and highest-paid man on television with a salary at the time of £350,000, and 3,000 letters a week.

His guests, mainly drawn from the entertainment world, included Hollywood royalty – Raquel Welch, Mel Brooks, Sophia Loren and Bob Hope among them – as well as the traditional British variety: Wogan was undaunted when the Duke of Edinburgh, booked to explain the finer points of carriage driving, rudely accused him of reading other people’s questions off cards.

There were other lows: Anne Bancroft was incandescent with rage when she discovered that Wogan would be interviewing her live, Freddie Starr spat sweets at him, and George Best turned up paralytically drunk. By the 250th edition, Philip Purser in The Sunday Telegraph detected that the show was flagging, calling it “a limp parody of a bullfight”, and another critic was unkinder still, finding it “a visible mess of self-inflicted love bites”.

Wogan himself admitted the show was nothing more than “chewing gum for the eyes” and cheerfully endured a growing sniping campaign in the press. Looking increasingly bored by his guests, it became evident that prising stories, or indeed much of any interest at all, out of them was not his strongest suit. But perhaps the point was that Wogan was a bigger star than the people he had on the sofa. “That, of course, is the essence of the show,” he explained. “That’s why people watch.”

The run of Wogan ended in 1992 to make way for the disastrous soap opera about British expatriates living in Spain, Eldorado. Having become the pre-eminent television personality of the 1980s, Wogan returned to radio and his old slot on Radio 2.

In the 1970s and early 1980s Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show had earned him a cult following and established his distinctively witty, self-effacing microphone style. Features like Fight the Flab (slimming advice) and Wogan’s Winner Racing Tips characterised the show, and Wogan’s incessant digs at the imported American television soap opera Dallas guaranteed that it became a hit. His trip to America to visit the cast of Dynasty earned the ire of Sir Robin Day, who considered it the BBC’s most humiliating moment – “awful, awful”.

As his fame grew, Wogan recognised that the 1970s were “not a great time to have an Irish accent in Britain”. Once, when he was on holiday, a bomb addressed to him arrived at the BBC, and stopped the traffic in Portland Place. But throughout the so-called Troubles, he claimed never to have received a single word or letter of condemnation or abuse. “Even allowing for the good nature and tolerance of the British,” Wogan wrote in his memoirs, “it is surprising that I have not been the butt of anti-Irish hatred.”

He had co-hosted the BBC’s annual Children in Need charity telethon since 1980 and every year assailed the entries while presenting the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual ordeal that he likened to “a numbing of the frontal lobes”. He also compèred Come Dancing, Miss World, Do The Right Thing and Auntie’s Bloomers.

His listeners liked to be known collectively as TOGS (Terry’s Old Geezers [or Gals]), with subgroups dividing into IDIOTS (I Dream Incessantly of Terry Society), TWITS (Terry Wogan Is Tops Society) and, most improbably, TWINKLETOES (Terry Wogan Is Not Kinky Like Everyone Thinks Or Everyone Says). The Queen told him she listened each morning.

A 2013 picture of Sir Terry Wogan with a collection of Pudsey Bears designed by celebrities which were auctioned for Children in Need  

Michael Terence Wogan was born on August 3 1938 in Limerick, Ireland’s third largest town, where his father was a grocer. The family were lower middle class Catholics with neither car nor telephone. But they did possess a radio set, and young Terry grew up listening to the classic programmes of the 1950s on the BBC’s Light Programme, such as The Goons and Workers’ Playtime. Towards the end of the decade, as he later recalled with affection, he first heard Elvis Presley.

After Ferrybank prep school, run by Salesian nuns, he attended Crescent College, Limerick, and later (after a family move to Dublin) Belvedere College, both Jesuit-run; he was regularly and soundly thrashed with a leather strap for the non-observance of Lenten Regulations and thinking impure thoughts, which he endeavoured to suppress by becoming an enthusiastic rugby player.

At Belvedere he and his young brother Brian starred in Gilbert and Sullivan productions, an experience that led to his joining the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical and Dramatic Society and appearances in shows like Naughty Marietta and Bitter Sweet at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. He also sang as an extra in productions by the Dublin Grand Opera Society.

When he spotted a newspaper advertisement for announcers at Radio Éireann, the Irish national broadcaster, in 1963 he applied – along with nearly 10,000 others – and was astonished to be offered a four-week evening training course to learn the basics of broadcasting. After passing an audition reading out the fatstock prices, he was offered a full-time post and resigned his bank job.On leaving school Wogan joined the Royal Bank of Ireland – the republic’s smallest – as a £5-a-week clerk, first at the branch in Cornmarket in the oldest part of Dublin, and later at the Phibsborough branch near the cattle market. The hours were short and his duties not onerous: sorting florins from half-crowns, exchanging soiled banknotes for new ones, and knotting and sealing lodgement dockets; nevertheless, after four years the life palled.

As well as reading the news, Wogan presented a hospitals request show and commentated on the funeral of the second president of Ireland, Sean O’Kelly, and, in June 1963, the visit to Ireland of the young American president John F Kennedy. When the fledgling Irish Television Service RTE recruited newsreaders, Wogan was hired to present the main half-hour bulletins. He once struggled to contain a nosebleed on air, to the amusement of the elderly Special Branch man, armed with a Smith and Wesson revolver, who guarded the studio on the other side of a locked door.

Having sent an audition tape to the BBC in London, in 1965 Wogan was offered Midday Spin on the Light Programme, which he presented down a line from an RTÉ studio in Dublin. Two years later another tape – of his Radio Éireann show Terry Awhile – landed him an audition for the BBC’s new nightly show Late Night Extra on the newly-launched Radios 1 and 2; Wogan was offered a six-week contract to present it every Wednesday, which meant flying from Dublin to London, returning the next day, for an all-in fee of £35 to cover air fares and hotels. .

Terry Wogan with his wife Helen on their wedding day  He resigned his RTÉ job to move, with his wife and baby son, to England, where the BBC offered him a second weekly shift on Late Night Extra. He stood in for Jimmy Young on his morning show on Radio 1 in July 1969 and in October took over the afternoon show broadcast simultaneously on Radios 1 and 2. One of his early innovations, the Fight the Flab feature, became something of a national institution and led to his promoting Playtex women’s underwear in newspaper advertisements.

Wogan took Fight the Flab with him when in 1972 he succeeded John Dunn as presenter of Radio 2’s breakfast show. Later that year he landed his first television chat series, Lunchtime with Wogan, for ATV, shown live from studios at Elstree. The critic Nancy Banks-Smith in The Guardian was unimpressed. “The built-in hazard of such a show,” she noted, “is not that someone in the audience may drop off, but that they may drop dead ...” but in the Daily Mirror, Mary Malone admired his “warm, hot-water bottle voice”.

In April 1970 Wogan returned to Dublin to commentate for BBC radio on the Eurovision Song Contest, inaugurating a relationship that would endure for another 30 years. He covered Olympic Games for radio from Montreal (1976), Los Angeles (1984) and Barcelona (1992). In 1978 Wogan himself enjoyed a Top 40 hit with his rendition of the Cornish folk song The Floral Dance, which he performed on Top of the Pops.

He wrote a column in The Sunday Telegraph for many years and published several books, including the autobiographies, Is It Me? (2000) and Mustn’t Grumble (2006).

Having been appointed OBE in 1997, Wogan took British citizenship in 2005 and was knighted the same year. He was the recipient of numerous broadcasting awards, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Limerick. He was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Buckinghamshire and was a freeman of Limerick and of the City of London. In Who’s Who he listed his occupation as “jobbing broadcaster”.

Apart from Children in Need he almost never prepared for a programme or an interview, owned five wigs, but was more embarrassed by the psoriasis on his hands. In person he was a generous host, thoughtful, kindly, and good company. His eyes had irises of brilliant turquoise.

Terry Wogan married, in 1965, Helen Joyce, one of Ireland’s leading Balmain models. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter. Their firstborn daughter died at the age of three weeks.

Sir Terry Wogan, born August 3 1938, died January 31 2016

Edgar Mitchell, astronaut

Edgar Mitchell, who has died aged 85, was the sixth man to walk on the Moon, a feat that has still only been accomplished by 11 other humans.

Apollo 14 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on January 31 1971. The crew consisted of Colonel Stuart Roosa, Mitchell – a commander in the US Navy – and Commander Alan Shepard, who in 1961 had been the first American into space, soon after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight.

On the launch pad on that occasion, Shepard had reflected that each part of his craft had been built by the lowest bidder. The 1971 mission was the first since the near-fatal accident to Apollo 13 the previous year.

All went well, however, until it neared the Moon, when a faulty switch began to tell the main computer to abort the landing. Frantically inputting a software fix via his keyboard, Mitchell was able to correct the problem with seconds to spare.

With Roosa staying in orbit, Mitchell and Shepard then had to operate a circuit breaker when the radar vital to the descent of their lunar module Antares began to play up. As it was, they made a perfect touchdown on February 5. The previous two missions to have landed had concentrated on the effects of space travel on the astronauts, so Shepard and Mitchell were instead chiefly instructed to study the Moon itself.

In what proved to be the longest stay on its surface, of nine hours, they also made the two lengthiest moonwalks, retrieving 94lbs of rocks which they hauled in a cart. Famously, Shepard hit two golf balls, which he claimed flew “miles and miles”, while Mitchell threw a javelin after them, improvised from a staff.

Edgar Mitchell on the lunar surface on February 5 1971

He also took a celebrated photograph of Shepard raising the American flag. The trio all returned safely to Earth on February 9, splashing down in the South Pacific.

Edgar Dean Mitchell was born on September 17 1930 and grew up on a cattle ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. He made his first flight when he was four after a barnstorming pilot landed in a field and asked his parents for petrol. At 13 he was washing aircraft in return for flying lessons, and got his licence at 16.

After taking a degree in industrial management – he later studied for a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT – Mitchell joined the US Navy in 1953. He flew from carriers during the Korean War and was on active service when in 1957 he heard news of the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik, the first satellite.

Realising that manned space flight would follow, he began to seek opportunities to become involved in exploring the final frontier. In 1965 he graduated in first place from the Aerospace Research Pilot School and was assigned to the Apollo programme.

Mitchell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970 for his part in the rescue of Apollo 13’s crew. After mission control at Houston was told that it “had a problem”, he flew the simulator which showed it was possible to manoeuvre the conjoined lunar and command modules.

The prime crew of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission (left to right): Roosa, Shepard and Mitchell  

His voyage to the Moon transformed Mitchell’s life. He found the accompanying celebrity, which impacted on his personal relationships, “a pain in the ass”. Yet the experience of seeing the world from space had afforded him, literally, a new perspective on existence.

During re-entry, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of being at one with the universe. “It was the recognition,”’ he told the Daily Telegraph’s Mick Brown in 2007, “that the molecules in my body, and the molecules in the body of the spacecraft and in my partners had been prototyped or maybe even manufactured in some ancient generation of stars.

“This suddenly became damn personal. It wasn’t intellectual – it was visceral. And it was accompanied by this sense of… wow!” This prompted, he said later, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world. “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch’.”

Mitchell had long had an interest in the workings of the subconscious and during the return journey secretly carried out experiments to see if recipients on Earth picked the same shapes that he was thinking about; apparently one in four did. After leaving Nasa in 1972, he opened a business consultancy and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, devoted to exploring the power of the mind. He later expressed his belief that aliens had visited Earth, telling Kerrang Radio in 2008 that governments had covered up the truth.

His three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by the two daughters of his first marriage and the son and two daughters he adopted from the second. His son by his third marriage pre-deceased him.

Edgar Mitchell, born September 17 1930, died February 4 2016