Beryl Vertue dies aged 90
- Top British comedy producer and agent Beryl Vertue has died aged 90
- She represented comedians such as Spike Milligan, and produced TV hits including Men Behaving Badly
- Her daughters say: "She meant so much to so many"
Beryl Vertue, one of British comedy's most influential and pioneering producers and agents, has died at the age of 90.
Born in London on 8th April 1931, Vertue began her career in showbusiness typing up notes for sitcom writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, but soon progressed to becoming an agent, representing the likes of Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes early in her career.
She would go on to become a film and TV producer, acting as an executive producer on movies such as Up Pompeii and Steptoe & Son.
Setting up independent production company Hartswood Films, she then produced TV sitcoms including Men Behaving Badly, Is It Legal? and Coupling. Hartswood also created TV hit Sherlock. She was still working in her 80s when she executive produced ITV comedy drama Edge Of Heaven in 2014.
Her daughters, Sue and Debbie, said today: "It's with the heaviest of hearts that we have to share the sad news that mum passed away peacefully last night. It wasn't Covid, it was just her nearly 91-year-old body saying enough is enough.
"We were there so the passing was as good as one could hope for. Nothing wrong with her brain - even earlier this week she was grilling us both about work. It's really impossible to believe that she has gone though, because I know we're not alone in thinking that somehow she'd go on forever. She meant so much to so many.
"She wasn't just our mum, she was our best friend, our mentor, our adviser, our role model, our holiday companion, our giggle-maker and our boss! She adored her family and was so proud of us all. She also adored her career and spending time with everybody.
"She loved a glass of wine at lunchtime, she loved asking the common-sense question, she was often the last person at a party, she didn't suffer fools, she was fair, she was kind, she was fun, she was stubborn, in fact she was the total package and we will miss her beyond words.
"She was more than a mother to us - she was also a friend. To many in the industry she was more than a friend - she was often a mother."
Vertue once recalled how she ended up being an agent "sort of by accident":
One day, Alan Simpson said that his and Ray's contract was coming to an end, and he asked me if I could deal with the next one for them and sort the money out. 'Oh,' I said, 'I don't know anything about that sort of thing - I wouldn't know what to do or what to say!' But he told me the kind of things that they wanted for their next contract, and I went ahead and got hold of this lady at the Copyright Department of the BBC, and said 'It's very difficult, you know, there are two of them, you see, and, oh, they're such good writers...' and so on and so on, and I ended up getting five guineas more for them than they'd had before. So, naturally, I was very pleased about that - it felt like a great little triumph. And then I started doing all of those sorts of things - not just for Alan and Ray but for the others, too - until, one day, someone said to me, 'How long have you been an agent?'
Well, I know it probably sounds extraordinary now, but I hadn't realised that that was what I was! I'd just thought that I was a secretary who did a lot! So I became an agent very much by default, but turned out - I might say with some immodesty - to be a very good one. So it's funny how you can do well at something that had never even occurred to you.
Vertue is celebrated not only for her long career, but also highly influential, revolutionary moves within the industry. Notably, she almost single-handedly invented merchandising of British television programmes, after representing Doctor Who writer and Daleks creator Terry Nation and investigating how memorabilia was being leveraged in the US, especially by toy-makers. Long before the invention of VHS or DVD, she oversaw the launch of products ranging from LPs to board games and puppets to jigsaws.
She also clarified the nature of programme ownership and pioneered the marketing of format rights.
Speaking to historian Graham McCann, she once explained: "When we used to do the contracts, they always had this clause about selling the programmes overseas - so the copyrights all moved. And in the very early days I thought, 'Well, they'll never sell those programmes overseas; they won't understand them'. So I just started crossing the clauses out. But it turned out that, because of me going 'scribble, scribble, scribble' over those clauses, the writers and us kept the format."
This lead directly to the invention of international sales, selling the rights to formats to overseas broadcasters to remake in their own language: "Germany was the first place where we were successful. They had much more money than we were used to getting at home, and so they paid the writers very well for these scripts. It was quite hard selling them comedy, because they couldn't always understand why it was funny, so I used to act it out and try to make them see."
Vertue was awarded an OBE in 2000 and a CBE in 2016 for her work in the TV industry. In 2004, she was given a BAFTA award for outstanding creative contribution to television and in March 2012 she was honoured with a lifetime achievement title by the Royal Television Society.
Last year, British Comedy Guide published an article titled Beryl Vertue: The woman who changed her world. In it, comedy biographer Graham McCann highlighted the career of "the extraordinary career of the most important, innovative, influential and inspirational woman in the history of British broadcasting".
Read our Comedy Chronicles article about Beryl Vertue's career