Beryl Vertue

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Publication: The Times
Date: 2022-02-16
Author:
Page: 49
Language: English

Grand dame of British showbusiness who was an agent for comedy greats and late in life produced Men Behaving Badly and Sherlock

Cowed by the prospect of persuading Ike Turner to agree to his wife Tina appearing in the 1975 film Tommy, the impresario Robert Stigwood sent Beryl Vertue instead.

Short, unassuming and rather "mumsie" looking, Vertue did not come across as the most powerful woman in British showbusiness, which she was in the 1970s, but even the abusive, paranoid, cocaine-addicted Ike Turner learnt not to underestimate her.

"I was driven to a hut outside LA by a girl whom I later discovered was Ike's girlfriend. She had a gun in her handbag," recalled the British comedy script agent turned film producer. "When we arrived, Tina Turner appeared and dragged me to the ground — because there were surveillance cameras everywhere — and begged me not to make him cross.

"His office was like a bordello, maroon everywhere, and there he was, in a white suit, looking immaculate. He got out a cigarette and she [Tina] shot from one side of the room to the other to light it for him. I decided to be very British; I was wearing white gloves that day, and I told him not to worry, that we were going to take such good care of Tina. Well, he didn't quite know how to react."

The woman who had regularly calmed Spike Milligan during manic episodes, mollified Tony Hancock in foul, drunken moods, and persuaded the head of the mafia-linked Teamsters union in Boston to let her make a film in the US city, got the deal done. Tina Turner went on to give a pulsating performance in Ken Russell's Tommy as the Acid Queen. "I never asked his permission [to hire her] but thanked him when he hadn't quite given it," she said.

She had started in the mid-1950s as a secretary for Associated London Scripts (ALS), a writers' co-operative founded by Eric Sykes and Milligan. Entirely by default she evolved into a highly effective agent for them and many other British comedy writers and actors in their fast-growing "fun factory". After moving into films in 1966, she formed a partnership with Stigwood and invented a lucrative and much-copied moneymaking idea that became known as "Vertuosity" selling successful British sitcoms such as Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part to US television networks to develop their own vernacular versions (Sanford and Son on NBC and All in the Family on CBS). It made Vertue rich but the spiralling success of Associated London Films also resulted in the end of her marriage.

Having also parted company with Stigwood, she set up a small independent production company at Shepperton Studios in the mid-1980s. Hartswood Films was not a success. At her lowest ebb in 1989, Vertue, now in her late sixties, read an unknown comic novel called Men Behaving Badly by Simon Nye, a translator for Credit Suisse. After chuckling through the misadventures of two politically incorrect flat-mates, Vertue realised that it would make a great sitcom. She sold it to ITV, but the show was dropped after one series in 1992. Undeterred, Vertue sold it to the BBC, where it ran for five series and became the highest-rated sitcom of the Nineties, riding on the zeitgeist of the "laddish humour" then in vogue. It also appealed to women because of the underlying vulnerability of the men played by Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes, and female viewers' empathy for the long-suffering girlfriends played by Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash.

Vertue enjoyed further success with Sherlock, an idiosyncratic take on the Arthur Conan Doyle adventures that made a star of Benedict Cumberbatch.

Having started her career making tea for Milligan, Vertue told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs in 2013 that naivety had been her secret "It's important not to know too many rules. If you don't know there's a rule [against something] you just do it."

Beryl Frances Johnson was born in Croydon in 1931 to Elsie (née Francis), and Frank Johnson, an engineer who worked in a munitions factory during the Second World War and later ran a garage where Beryl had her first job, manning the pumps.

She attended Mitcham County Grammar School with no great distinction and left at 15 to take a typing course. She then spent six years in a shipping office before she was diagnosed with TB and sent to a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight. Not long after her recovery the Hancock's Half Hour writing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, whom she had known at school, tried to recruit her as a secretary for ALS.

Dreading the one-hour trolley bus journey to their dingy office above a fruit and veg shop in Shepherd's Bush, Vertue refused. Simpson persisted and she was duly interviewed by Milligan, who was more interested in her tea-making ability than her typing or shorthand speeds. She was offered the job but asked for what she thought was the prohibitive sum of ten pounds a week. "To my horror they accepted."

In addition to her secretarial duties, which included typing Milligan's scripts for The Goon Show and dealing with the Goons' huge fan mail, she fielded calls from Milligan in the middle of the night asking her to type up his latest comic brainwave. When Simpson and Galton asked her to call the BBC about their contracts, she succeeded in doubling their income for Hancock's Half Hour.

She went on to negotiate contracts for all the writers on ALS's roster, including an insurance salesman called Johnny Speight for whom she sold Till Death Us Do Part and a furniture salesman called Terry Nation who created the Daleks for Doctor Who. Showing an early aptitude for "exterminating" complacent male BBC bureaucrats, Vertue shrewdly altered Nation's contract to include merchandising rights, a first in British television. The popularity of Dalek-related toys, comics and games made Nation rich.

She struck her first international deal by acting out Hancock's Half Hour scripts at a meeting with a German television producer. She was deeply fond of Hancock, but never close. "I don't think you ever got to know him very well," she said. In 1961, at the height of his success that she had done much to create, Hancock dispensed with Galton and Simpson and told Vertue he no longer wanted her services either.

She turned her attention to the flagging career of Frankie Howerd, who was considering giving up showbusiness and running a pub. Vertue was determined to dissuade him and suggested he try cabaret. She got him a booking at the Blue Angel, a London nightclub. Howerd was reluctant but gave in. "She was a dreadful bully. Thank goodness", he recalled.

Her ALS offshoot Associated London Films got off to a quick start in 1966 when she persuaded Joe Levine in Hollywood to take up a Galton and Simpson script, The Spy With the Cold Nose (1966), and got herself credited as associate producer. She went on to produce The Plank (1967), a silent comedy with Sykes and Tommy Cooper. That year Stigwood, an entrepreneur wanting to diversify from pop music into theatre, television and films, made an offer for ALS. Sykes and Milligan left but Vertue joined Stigwood and served as deputy chairman.

Vertue also pioneered cinema adapt tations of popular sitcoms, includin4 - Till Death Us Do Part (1969), Up Pompeii (1971) and two Steptoe spin-offs, which all did well at the box office.

She and Stigwood made big money. She commuted to America on Concorde and had her own chauffeur-driven, powder-blue Rolls-Royce, though her embarrassed children begged her not to take them to school in it.

She scored a coup by hiring Jack Lemmon to star in a 1975 American TV adaptation of John Osborne's The Entertainer, and earned notoriety by persuading US television networks to sanction the first use of the word "bas tard" on terrestrial TV there.

American producers were so disarmed by her straightforward approach and mild manners that they were unprepared for her ruthless negotiating. She told one that a script she was trying to sell "didn't work in the middle but we'll fix it". He was stunned by her honesty.

Vertue had married her childhood sweetheart, Clem Vertue, who ran a travel agency. Keen gardeners, they lived quietly near Reigate, Surrey. Ver-tue would do all the housework at weekends. Eventually her jet-set working life put a strain on their marriage. They remained friends but their dip..., vorce in 1984 destroyed her confidencC and, in her own words, she "spent five years not succeeding".

Men Behaving Badly proved to be her redemption; forging a well-trodden path, she sold the format to a US network. Hartswood was responsible for other successful sitcoms, including Steven Moffat's Coupling.

Her last big venture, Sherlock, was a family affair. Her daughter Sue produced the series while Vertue was the executive producer. The co-creator of Sherlock was her son-in-law Moffat, Sue's husband.

Her other daughter Debbie was also an executive at Hartswood. Both daughters will carry on Hartswood Films. Vertue said that she turned down many lucrative offers for the company.

"I was coming out of a desert of nothingness at that point and here we are with Sherlock 25 years later. It's a cracking small independent company and I'm proud of that," she said.

Reflecting on her decades as one of the toughest dealmakers in the business, Vertue described herself as "the world's worst feminist" — "I was just never aware of sexism in the office," she said. "I was having too much fun."

Beryl Vertue, CBE, television and film producer, was born on April 8,1931. She died on February 12, 2022, aged 90

Caption: Vertue with the comedy writers Eric Sykes, Ray Galton, Spike Milligan and Alan Simpson. Below: at the TV Baftas in 2015

Beryl Vertue

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