#Incoming call from ned meme tv
Despite a strong start on Club X, where his “Buygones” led to a bestselling book, he never really managed to break through to a wider television audience, although shows such as Inside Victor Lewis-Smith, Ads Infinitum, and TV Offal were never less than original and wickedly funny. Charlie Brooker has a character in one of his shows describe Lewis-Smith as being ‘like a rich man’s you’Īdored by audiences, even if they sometimes could not believe what they had just heard, Victor’s Loose Ends contributions led to a short but hugely influential stint at Radio 1, the album Tested on Humans for Irritancy, and longstanding columns for publications as diverse as the Evening Standard, Esquire and Private Eye. With a combination of sonic trickery, caustic wit, disdain for celebrity culture and above all mastery of pointed crank phone calls – all of it presented in a distinctive comic universe occupying a weird postwar world of pop-culture references – he somehow managed to stand out as the loose cannon even on a show that already featured Stephen Fry. His sharp wit did not go unnoticed for long and he was invited to join the regular contributors to Ned Sherrin’s new Radio 4 show Loose Ends. Bored and frustrated by the formulaic nature of the shows he worked on, his maverick streak soon began to show, most notoriously when he booked thickly accented actor Arthur Mullard as a holiday stand-in for regular presenter Libby Purves on the magazine show Midweek. Victor began his career as a pop DJ at BBC Radio York, before moving to Radio 4 as a producer. Surprisingly, the host did not see fit to launch legal action on this occasion. Late one night on Radio 1, he even alluded to certain rumours about Jimmy Savile directly in a phone call to the Jim’ll Fix It production office. Never far from controversy, he found himself in hot water over everything from a tasteless gag about a terrorist attack which allegedly saw him suspended from local radio to constant tabloid uproar over his contributions to Channel 4 arts show Club X. With his regular co-writer Paul Sparks he was one of the few practitioners of what could genuinely be labelled “dangerous” comedy, and more than happy to make the joke and deal with the consequences later. In Victor’s comic world nobody was safe – including him and often, it felt, even the audience. The urban myth stuck, however, and this unexpected turn of events inadvertently underlined every point Victor tried to make with his comedy. This resulted in a legal rebuke from Captain Pugwash’s creator John Ryan. The details are characteristically vague, but for whatever reason, Victor repeated the obscene, fictitious names in one of his newspaper columns – part of his ongoing fascination with the odd, the arcane and the now completely unacceptable in bygone popular culture. If you’ve ever wondered why so many people are so insistent that the BBC children’s show Captain Pugwash featured characters with rude names – it didn’t – then look no further than Victor Lewis-Smith.
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