Dick Vosburgh

Richard Kennedy Vosburgh, writer and lyricist: born Elizabeth, New Jersey 27 August 1929; married 1953 Beryl Roque (one son, five daughters); died London 18 April 2007.

Dick Vosburgh was an immensely talented writer, broadcaster and lyricist who provided material for virtually every leading comic performer in the UK, plus such American superstars as Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Carol Channing and Peggy Lee. He also wrote sketches for revues, and book and lyrics for musical comedies, notably A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine - which won the Evening Standard and Plays and Players awards in 1979, and the following year won two Tony Awards for its Broadway production, which ran for nearly two years.

Vosburgh's quick wit and invention put him much in demand as a gag writer, and stars for whom he provided sitcoms and sketches included Stanley Baxter, Frankie Howerd, Bob Monkhouse, John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett, Lenny Henry and Roy Hudd. He contributed to film scripts for Frankie Howerd (Up Pompeii and Up the Chastity Belt) and Bob Hope (Call Me Bwana), as well as Carry On Nurse.

A keen admirer of good comedy writing, he brought attention to many writers whose names would otherwise remain little known to the general public. Readers of The Independent will be familiar with his finely detailed obituaries of show-business personalities, of which some 200 have been published since the first, of Sid Colin, in 1989. A panellist for eight years on Radio 4's film quiz Screenplay, he wrote expertly on stars remembered fondly by "B" movie fans, such as Joyce Compton, Lyle Talbot, Fritz Feld and Sheldon Leonard, and performed the same service for some of Tin Pan Alley's unsung composers and lyricists.

He gave due praise to Edward Eliscu, lyricist of More Than You Know and The Carioca, for his strong stance against the House Un-American Activities Committee - when asked by his agent to name names, Eliscu reported, "I said I'd walk on two feet, not on four, and gave up that agent."

His tribute to Mitchell Parrish, writer of the words for "Star Dust", made the perceptive observation that the composer Hoagy Carmichael called his 1965 autobiography Sometimes I Wonder, used lines from the song as chapter titles and never mentioned Parrish once.

Sometimes Vosburgh's writing evoked his own droll delivery - "I clearly remember the day I met Bernard Bresslaw," he wrote. "So, I'll bet, can anyone who met him."

His facts were meticulously researched. Just as he had little patience for badly rhymed lyrics, he loathed sloppily conceived biographies, and enjoyed debating the merits of such works. His prolific work for radio included biographies of James Stewart and Bing Crosby, an enthralling account of the life of the British composer Eric Maschwitz entitled Nightingales and Things and a wonderfully wicked and witty collection entitled Don't Trust Your Song to a Singer - one of the first things I did when I met him was thank him for introducing me to Sarah Vaughan's hard-to-believe version of the Gershwins' "Aren't You Kind of Glad We Did?", on which instead of the correct line, "with never a sign of any chaperone", she sings, "with never a sign of any Chapter One".

Vosburgh was fanatical about adhering to the lyricist's intentions, and woe betide the cabaret performer who sang "S'wonderful, S'marvellous" as "It's wonderful, It's marvellous" in his presence. His love of good music and literate lyrics made him the ideal writer for a series such as Gary Wilmot's Showstoppers, and his spoken introductions to the concert performances of "Lost Musicals" presented yearly by Ian Marshall Fisher were alone worth the price of admission, brilliantly mixing fact, anecdote and humour.

Born Richard Kennedy Vosburgh in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1929, he moved to Washington when his father, Frederick, a reporter for Reuters news agency, was offered a job with the National Geographic Magazine. He later recalled that his mother, an avid moviegoer who loved musicals and the melodramas of Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, took him to the cinema frequently and made him a lifelong film enthusiast.

Sent to a boarding school in Miami, where the air was considered more suitable for his asthma, he kept an exercise book full of self-penned film synopses plus pictures of the stars. On his return to Washington, he wrote plays for local radio stations, and, at the age of 15, he was writing a regular series, Youth Drama Workshop, always ensuring that there was a good part for himself.

In 1948 his parents split up, and he persuaded his father, who eventually became Editor of the National Geographic, to send him to London to study at Rada, where he won the Comedy Acting Prize. While still at the college, he began contributing lyrics and sketches for such West End revues as Intimacy at 8:30, For Adults Only and The Lord Chamberlain Regrets.

His reputation spread and in 1953 he wrote his first radio show, Breakfast with Braden, starring the Canadian humorist Bernard Braden. In January 1953 he married Beryl Roque, who had been a fellow student at Rada, and by the end of the year he had appeared on the London stage as an American prisoner of war in the play Stalag 17 and acquired a regular job with the weekly fan magazine Picturegoer.

From writing for radio programmes, including over 50 editions of The Show Band Show, he segued into television, and his credits over the following decades would fill several pages. They included Alfred Marks Time (1956), Bresslaw and Friends (1961), The Stanley Baxter Show (1963) and Frost Over Europe (1967), starring David Frost, which won the Golden Rose at Montreux.

On another Frost show, Frost on Sunday (1968), he was taken with the work of a new writer, Garry Chambers, whom he then promoted. "He was such a generous man," says Chambers, "who gave my career a real boost. He asked me to work with him on Who Do You Do?, and shows for Tommy Cooper and Freddie Starr, and in 1979 we wrote a special titled Bob Hope at the London Palladium. Hope liked writers who worked in pairs rather than singly. I remember that it was the time of the great garbage strike in London, and Dick gave Hope a line about the smell in Leicester Square, "which stinks from here to High Holborn". Hope, not knowing the correct pronunciation, said "High Holl-born", which got an even bigger laugh. We had a great line-up on that show - the guests included Richard Burton, Susan George and Raquel Welch.

He adds, Dick was the warmest and most generous of men, but occasionally there would be someone who was difficult to work with - Arthur Askey for instance. If you told Dick later that you were going to be working with such a person again, he would say, "Be sure to give them my loathe."

Other shows on which Vosburgh worked were The Max Bygraves Hour (1970), The Russ Abbott Show (1986) and An Audience with Ronnie Corbett (1997). Corbett's association with Vosburgh started over 40 years ago. "He was a dear, dear, man," Corbett recalls, "and on one of my early specials he conceived the idea of a musical version of Romeo and Juliet set to Sousa marches. That spawned the mini-musicals that were to become such a vital part of The Two Ronnies. Like all Dick's friends, I delighted in his encyclopaedic knowledge of songs, shows and movies. When I heard Bobby Short singing an obscure Cole Porter number, "Black and White Baby", I decided to put it into my act, but discovered that Porter had only written one verse. Dick wrote a second one for me, but the quality of the writing is such that nobody realises that it is not by Porter himself. Dick would also come up with wonderful song parodies and witty material for performing at functions.

Only occasionally did Vosburgh perform himself. "I was cast in a TV series," he said in a 1960s interview, "as an obnoxious comedian, very vulgar and unfunny. That was OK until I saw the cast list. It said "Dick Vosburgh as himself".

How to Irritate People (1968), with John Cleese, was one of the shows in which he appeared, and he was in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969). For the cult puppet series Space Patrol he provided the voice of Captain Larry Dart.

Vosburgh made no secret of the fact that having a show on Broadway was one of the greatest thrills of his life. A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine started life at the New End Theatre in Hampstead before transferring to the Mayfair Theatre. Devised and written with the actor and composer Frank Lazarus, it was a two-part musical that combined a revue, centred on the fads and foibles of Hollywood, with a pastiche Marx Brothers movie entitled A Night in the Ukraine.

The first section included an inspired number devised by Vosburgh and Lazarus, in which the cast of eight, while tap dancing, recited the risible Production Code devised by censors in 1930s Hollywood. The brilliant pastiche of a Marx Brothers movie, which comprised the show's second half, resulted in a lawsuit from the heirs of two of the brothers, who claimed plagiarism and were shocked to discover that everything in the script was pure Vosburgh. (Though the case dragged on for months, Vosburgh and Lazarus ultimately won.)

The team first met when Lazarus was starring in a play on the London fringe, The Erik Satie Story, and was told Vosburgh was looking for an actor who could play the piano. "During our first phone conversation," said Lazarus, "I asked him what the role was. Dick told me that since all the Marx Brothers were dead he thought it was tragic that the world would never see another Marx Brothers film, so he had the idea of doing a new Marx Brothers show based on Chekhov's The Bear. When he described how the parts would be adapted to fit Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Margaret Dumont, I was laughing hysterically. I was delighted at the prospect of playing Chico, and when he told me that for the moment he lacked a composer I mentioned that I also wrote tunes . . ."

Other Vosburgh-Lazarus collaborations included the musical The Snark and How to Hunt It, and new material for the radio series Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, based on Marx Brothers shows. They starred in a two-man revue, The World is My Ulcer, at the King's Head, Islington, and with Jessica Martin they performed a musical tribute to Moss Hart, entitled Prince of Broadway, at the much-lamented London Theatre Museum. Recently the BBC commissioned Vosburgh to adapt A Night in the Ukraine for Radio 4 to be broadcast next Christmas, with a new song by Vosburgh and Lazarus.

Vosburgh had another stage musical hit when Windy City (with music by Tony Macauley) opened at the Victoria Palace in 1982. Starring Anton Rogers and Dennis Waterman, and based on the classic play The Front Page, it won the Ivor Novello and Evening Standard awards as Best Musical.

Another of Vosburgh's collaborators was the composer and singer-pianist Denis King, who first joined forces with him when Ned Sherrin asked them to write special material for Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, the television series that succeeded That Was the Week That Was. The pair worked together frequently over the years, and had a hit with the musical A Saint She Ain't, which opened at the King's Head in 1999. A satire on Hollywood and its movies, the show included a typical piece of brilliant Vosburgh writing, a sketch in the manner of the comedy team Abbott and Costello that was even funnier than the original one it emulated.

Vosburgh and King also appeared in a revue, Two Beards and a Blonde, co-starring Tamsin Outhwaite, and later in a similar show with Sarah Redmond, Beauty and the Beards (Vosburgh, like King, sported an awesome beard). King said, "Dick was a joyous collaborator and a great friend. I loved the guy. His sense of humour and his enthusiasm for performers, for comedy writers and for movies was boundless. I think he was one of the most under-rated of lyricists, with remarkable flair and a fastidious approach to rhyme-schemes."

A few months ago Vosburgh and King gave one of the last concerts to be performed at the Theatre Museum, a musical revue, The Un-American Song Book.

Vosburgh was an expert on the shameful period in American history when the House Un-American Activities Committee ruined the lives and careers of anyone who had flirted with left-wing causes or organisations that had any links with Communism. It was a subject that had particular attraction to a man who was so honest, so open and so truly liberal.

Tom Vallance

"And greetings to you, Robert" were the words that began any phone conversation with Dick Vosburgh, delivered in the darkest of dark brown American voices, writes Bob Sinfield. Dick had been in the UK since the early 1950s but always sounded like he'd just stepped off the boat.

We met in 1985 when he came to see a play of mine at his local, the King's Head in Islington. Though he enjoyed it, I was told I needed to learn the difference between "imply" and "infer". Dick was the only pedant I've ever known who wasn't a bore.

On the contrary, he would never phrase an opinion in pedestrian speech if a more colourful wording were available. When I mentioned a particularly irksome director to him, Dick's response was that the amount of respect he had for the man could be inserted into the navel of a gnat. At that moment, I realised I was looking at Dorothy Parker with a beard.

Sometimes, his laser-beam wit went unappreciated. When asked to devise a name for a Roy Hudd television series, Dick suggested RH Positive. This was brusquely dismissed in favour of the terminally cumbersome Illustrated Weekly Hudd, clearly the product of a lesser brain. My favourite Vosburgh show title was that of his Radio 2 project featuring hit songs from flop musicals, Tunes the Backers Whistled While Jumping Off the Roof. Miraculously, the Radio Times printed it in full for all six weeks of the programme's life.

Dick's legendary comedy-writing prowess had given him an elder statesman status by the time I recruited him for Rory Bremner's début series on BBC2 - but, as a humble script editor, I was overruled when I wanted the director to film Dick's mini-masterpiece, An Audience is Born (like A Star is Born but with the punters in the spotlight). One scene - involving the entire audience at a bus stop - was deemed prohibitively expensive. Dick was far too gentlemanly to come back with the line "Do they want it funny or do they want it cheap?" but by then I knew him well enough to guess that's what he was thinking.

When he handled audiences himself, the man's modesty would often emerge in unexpected ways. On a show we both appeared in, recorded at the Radio Theatre, Dick bridged a technical hiatus by informing the crowd, "Last time I warmed up an audience, two people died of hypothermia."

Not only, writes Mark Brisenden, did Dick Vosburgh contribute material to the BBC radio series Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, but I regard him as the catalyst of the whole thing. It was his glowing review in Punch magazine heralding the publication of the original Flywheel scripts that alerted me to the book's existence.

Dick also appeared in two episodes of the third series alongside another comedy great, Spike Milligan. Dick's performances were beautiful and helped give me a glimpse of what it must have been like to have worked in the true golden age of American radio comedy, the history of which he was so steeped in.

He would have been tickled pink to have his obit appear alongside that of Kitty Carlisle Hart, the romantic lead of A Night at the Opera - the movie that many feel to have been the Marx Brothers' finest. Now that is timing.