Victor Lewis-Smith

Victor Lewis-Smith is a British radio, television and film producer, restaurant critic, travel writer, and TV critic.

Early Life and career

Lewis-Smith was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire on 28 November 1960 and started at the BBC in 1980.

Radio and recordings

Lewis-Smith noted in the Daily Mirror that he worked for the BBC at the age of 17, continuing after graduation from the University of York as a network producer on BBC Radio 4 talk shows Rollercoaster, Start The Week and Midweek, during which he booked Arthur Mullard as a stand-in presenter for Libby Purves (interviewing Prof. A. J. Ayer). That controversial programme was featured on the BBC Radio 4 iPM programme on 3rd September 2011.

From 1983-5 he presented the Sunday morning programme Snooze Button for BBC Radio York, featuring humorous but erudite conversations with local personalities (including John Scott Whiteley who later featured in his 21st-Century Bach series), music towards the more intelligent end of the pop spectrum, and some of his own interpretations including the now famous "York Minster Rap". This took the backing track of "Street Dance" by Break Machine and overlaid a rap in which he claimed through his sexual prowess to have caused the York Minster fire of 1984. For local radio, Snooze Button was, as he described it, "dangerous radio" and a precursor to, or rehearsal for, his later work.

In 1986 he became a freelance writer, a regular on BBC Radio 4's Colour Supplement and a strand producer and contributor on Loose Ends. During this time, he won nine awards at the 1988 Independent Radio Advertising Awards (including the Gold) for his Midland Bank student campaign.

In 1989 he also made his first programme for BBC Radio 1 (producer: John Walters) under the name "Steve Nage", parodying the Simon Bates mid-Atlantic, nasal style of Radio 1 disc jockey [1]. This style of parody was subsequently used by Chris Morris in the early 90s with his character "Wayne Kerr" and, later, by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse with their "Smashy and Nicey" characters.

Radiohaha, the online encyclopaedia of contemporary British radio comedy, describes Lewis-Smith and Chris Morris as tending "to occupy similar ground". Of Chris Morris' creation, Wayne Kerr, Lewis-Smith said in his Time Out column: "Imitation is the sincerest form of being a thieving bastard". In the same column he said that Morris (when working at BBC Radio Bristol) had sent a Lewis-Smith-style tape to Loose Ends in 1988, asking if he could be on the programme and that he had even written to Time Out editor John Morrish, asking to take over Lewis-Smith's column when the latter was on holiday. Both Lewis-Smith and Morris produced most of their radio work during the 1980s and early 1990s, before pursuing successful (and quite different) careers in television.

Lewis-Smith's company (Associated-Rediffusion) made two series of the comedy show Victor Lewis-Smith for BBC Radio 1, for which he won a Best Comedy Radio Programme award in the 1990 British Comedy Awards.

In 1991, he released a CD and cassette entitled Tested on Humans for Irritancy, which was drawn from his broadcasts on Loose Ends and Radio 1. A second cassette Nuisance Calls (re-released on iTunes in August 2006) was marketed by Associated-Rediffusion. Some of these calls later appeared in TV Offal.

Lewis-Smith contributed an introduction to the composition "Towers of Dub" by The Orb. It was released on 1992's U.F.Orb. This introduction was in fact a sample taken from an episode of Lewis-Smith's first Radio 1 series. Another sample taken from this series ("not ripped to the tits on drink or drugs") turned up on the track "Plateau" from The Orb Live 93 album.

Pranks and hoax phone calls

The Times Higher Education Supplement (4 July 2003) claimed that "Lewis-Smith, while still a student, climbed scaffolding on the front of York Minster and called the faithful to prayer muezzin-style".

Lewis-Smith's prank phone calls include:

• Calling the office of That's Life!, and speaking to Adrian Mills, pretending to be a bass trombone player in a wheelchair, who then collapses while trying to play the "Sailor's Hornpipe" at extreme speed down the phone. (Lewis-Smith appears to have a particular loathing for Esther Rantzen.)
• Telephoning the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and asking them why there was only one such organisation.
• Phoning Harrods department store and asking if he had got through to the H.A. Rods shop, before enquiring about returning an allegedly faulty vacuum cleaner which he claimed (in a halting voice) to have bought "to suck dust off sausages".
• Phoning BBC Television centre reception and asking the receptionist to announce over the hotel's loudspeaker system to ask "General Pinochet" if he could hold fire until reasonable discussions with NATO, which she unsuspectingly did.
• Ringing the White House, and using the synthesized speech system of a computer to impersonate Stephen Hawking and demanding to speak to the President. Having been put through to the Oval Office, 'Hawking' then introduces 'his friend' Victor Lewis-Smith's impression of a "baby turning into a pig".
• Phoning This Morning live and pretending to have an injured back, then saying he phoned because "Richard and Judy are the biggest pain in the arse so they should know what to do". He was quickly cut off, and although Richard Madeley exclaimed that they did not care, there was a brief pause afterwards during which Judy Finnegan looked clearly upset.
• Phoning BBC Radio and applying to be a continuity announcer, while pretending to have Tourette's syndrome and reminding them of their equal opportunities policy.
• Phoning ITN claiming to work for British Telecom and having knowledge of the whereabouts of Salman Rushdie. After a failed attempt to extract payment for the information he claims that Salman Rushdie is 'in Communicado', a small island in the Aegean.
• Phoning London Weekend Television posing as Marcus Garvey and arranging to meet Haile Selassie in "Babylon an' ting." This particular call was sampled by The Orb for use in their song "Towers of Dub" which appears on U.F.Orb among other albums.
• Phoning Michael Winner telling him that he could not direct traffic on Orkney Island.

When re-released, a compilation of these calls peaked at No.1 on the iTunes comedy chart on 27 July 2006. At the time of their first broadcast, they attracted controversy: in The Sunday Times (15 April 1990) Paul Donovan argued that Lewis-Smith's hoaxes are "repugnant". Donovan claims first that Lewis-Smith's company broke a "written undertaking that permission to broadcast would be obtained from all the people who had received the hoax calls" and that subsequently the BBC made illegal broadcasts in breach of their producers' guidelines ("Lewis-Smith was unavailable for comment"). Donovan then says that the material "invites us to snigger at what men and women, particularly those not blessed with Lewis-Smith's education, say when caught unawares". The compilation has continued to be offered for sale. The Guardian's Lucy Mangan described some of the recordings as being "touched with genius". Writing about Lewis-Smith's hoax phone calls in The Times Higher Education, Sally Feldman observed that "He chooses his victims carefully, pricking the pompous and the powerful in the very best traditions of satire. His favourite target is the media, his pranks intended to expose their smugness, their laziness and their gullibility." .

Television

Lewis-Smith has made a number of programmes for British light entertainment television:

• In 1989, he wrote and presented eighteen episodes of Buy-gones for Club X on Channel 4, and contributed scripts for Central's Spitting Image
• Up Your Arts (compiled from his contributions to Channel 4 show Club X)
• Inside Victor Lewis-Smith (1993) (in which he is a virtually unseen character). This BBC2 series purported to be based within the Frank Bough Memorial Zip Injury Wing of St. Reith's, a BBC hospital for its fallen stars. The series takes place inside the head of a man completely saturated with television, and suffering from a hyperactive spleen.
• TV Offal on Channel 4 (pilot 1997; series 1998)
• TV Offal Prime Cuts on Channel 4; 1999
• Ads Infinitum for BBC2 (pilot 1996; two series, 1998 and 2000)
• Z For Fake for BBC2 in 2001 (8 programmes)

He also made contributions to other shows, such as BBC2's TV Hell theme night, and Private Eye's flop - Great Bore of the Year Awards.

Lewis-Smith is Chairman of a TV and radio production company called "Associated-Rediffusion" (the name being taken from the original Associated-Rediffusion - the first commercial TV station in Britain) and is executive producer of an ongoing collection of documentaries. Several have been one-off programmes, including the BAFTA-winning, Dudley Moore - After the Laughter, for BBC1's Omnibus, which was the cause of a dispute as to whether Moore was dying or not (The Strange Saga of Dudley and the BBC). Also Scandal in the Bins, about Benjamin Pell, a man who steals the garbage of public figures in order to find incriminating documents.

Other documentaries include The Man Who Ate His Archbishop's Liver? (Channel 4) about Idi Amin; Alchemists of Sound, about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; a biography of clarinettist Artie Shaw (nominated for a Grierson award); one on singer/songwriter Jake Thackray; a BBC Four programme about British experimental music of the 1960s and 70s called Here's A Piano I Prepared Earlier (also nominated for a Grierson); and documentaries about British views on eschatology, the Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel, the musical partnership of Dame Cleo Laine & Sir John Dankworth, and the harmonica.

Lewis-Smith is currently writer and Executive Producer for Keith Allen's documentaries for Channel 4, which have so far included Little Lady Fauntleroy (2004) about Lauren Harries and her family; You're Fayed, about businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed; Michael Carroll - King of Chavs about the British lottery winner known to the press as the "Lotto Lout" (a third Grierson nomination); Tourette de France following a group of young Tourette's Syndrome victims on their trip to Paris; and Keith Allen Will Burn In Hell, focussing on Allen's accompanying Westboro Baptist Church on their mission. These documentaries have attracted comments covering a spectrum of opinions from The Guardian, "It makes me want to declare Allen my new God" to The Scotsman calling these films (22 June 2007) "an intermittent series of purposefully scrappy and deconstructive documentaries from Allen and director Victor Lewis-Smith, each hamstrung by the fact that the unctuous Allen isn't particularly amusing or likeable". The most recent of these documentaries is Keith Meets Nick, featuring Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, broadcast by Channel 4 on 5 March 2012.

Lewis-Smith was executive producer of a long-running series of short TV programmes called 21st Century Bach - The Complete Organ Works. These featured Johann Sebastian Bach's organ works, filmed in performance by John Scott Whiteley on, mainly, authentic instruments of the time. The televised recitals included both conventional coverage of the instruments, performer and buildings, and also shots of the organ mechanism at work (including filming within the wind-chests using an endoscope), cameras suspended from helium-filled balloons which ranged freely across the enormous Baroque instruments, and close-ups of the player's face. The series started on BBC2 in June 2003. Reviewer Graeme Kay, commenting upon the programmes in "Choir and Organ" magazine in August 2006, praised the series, saying "the imaginative range of content in these well-crafted miniature programmes ... will withstand repeated viewing. I would certainly hope to see the series completed."[2]

In June 2007 Lewis-Smith's company made a programme for BSkyB called How TV Changed Football Forever which included interviews with Greg Dyke, Piers Morgan, Kelvin Mackenzie and Rupert Murdoch: (Guardian Unlimited, 22 June 2007).

Since 2010, Lewis-Smith has been the Executive Producer of In Confidence, an ongoing series of one-to-one interviews, featuring leading figures from the arts. Presented by Laurie Taylor, this production for Sky Arts has been widely praised by television reviewers, with the Daily Telegraph noting that “In an age of soapy soundbites, Sky Art’s hour-long interview strand is a serious attempt to delve deeper into its subjects.” Guests have included Peter Maxwell Davies, Lily Allen, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Richard Dawkins, Cleo Laine, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, Kathy Burke, Stephen Fry, Andre Previn, Jackie Mason, and Danny Baker. Two series (totalling twenty-two editions) were broadcast during 2010 and 2011. The third series (ten editions) began airing on Sky Arts in March 2012. A fourth series began production in early 2012 and (according to Sky Arts TV) a fifth has already been commissioned.

Writing

Lewis-Smith started his writing career in the late 1980s, with weekly columns in Time Out magazine where he took over from Julie Burchill, the short-lived Sunday Correspondent, and The Mail on Sunday (where he often substituted for Burchill) as well as Esquire magazine. He has also written for The Independent, and was Restaurant Critic for Harpers & Queen magazine from 1995 to 1998. He was also Restaurant Critic for The Guardian between 2004 and 2005.

In 1992 he began a long association with the Evening Standard, contributing daily television reviews along with other writers, as well as occasional restaurant reviews and travel articles. He frequently used his TV reviews, which he contributed most weeks over a 15-year period, to criticise the British Royal Family, the importance of social class in the United Kingdom (particularly in the context of what he regards as a cynical, exploitative attitude to viewers by television executives), the Iraq War and other foreign policies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, British cuisine, and organic farming. He supports Britain's involvement in Europe (often condemning his own country as "America Junior") and is a critic of what he terms "Little Englanders". His critical targets also include celebrity chefs, Jeremy Clarkson, Vanessa Feltz and, especially, Esther Rantzen. He was a vociferous critic of Director-General Greg Dyke and BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey, who he blamed for lowering the standards of the BBC. He also appears to have a particular loathing of "Mockneys" such as Nigel Kennedy, Ben Elton and Jo Brand. His other pet hates include Endemol, Peter Bazalgette and Big Brother, and the general direction of Channel 4 since the 1990s.

It was announced in June 2007 that Lewis-Smith would be retiring from his daily television column. In The Observer's Media Diary on June 17, 2007, a London Evening Standard spokeswoman was quoted as saying: "Victor is a wonderful writer, and he will continue to feature in the Standard". This came shortly after Lewis-Smith had used his columns to declare traditional television dead, and "narrowcasting" via such methods as YouTube as the future.

Since 1993, he has edited the "Funny Old World" column of bizarre news stories in Private Eye, and he wrote a weekly page for the Daily Mirror for some years until 2003. From autumn 2004 to April 2005 he was the resident restaurant critic of The Guardian's Saturday magazine supplement. His columns included reviews of a Little Chef restaurant, an East End Pie and Mash Shop and (in his final column) a Bridlington Fish & Chip Shop.

His books include Buy-Gones and Inside the Magic Rectangle, a collection of his early Evening Standard TV reviews.

Collaborators

Much of Lewis-Smith's work after 1987 can be co-credited to Paul Sparks, who is given a co-writing credit on Inside the Magic Rectangle and the BBC Radio 1 series as well as a co-producing credit on much of the TV work. The Independent newspaper (19 December 2000) commented Dr Sparks and Lewis-Smith evidently think alike. They even write alike and quoted two pieces of identical writing, one by Lewis-Smith and one by Sparks.

Keyboardist Dave Stewart provided a (straight) musical number for the second Radio 1 series, and later provided music for Lewis-Smith's TV projects. The originally cited producer for his programmes, one Anton Piller, is a joke, the name belonging to a real but unconnected person who gave his name to a particularly Draconian kind of court order. Another of his cover names is Harold Coltart, which he used in 1989 when he appeared on a Call the Controller phone-in on BBC Radio 4 condemning the station's controversial soap opera Citizens, fooling everyone in the studio. Another (former) television collaborator is producer/director Ned Parker.

Legal

In 2005, Lewis-Smith took legal action against The Independent newspaper after it queried the impartiality of his television reviewing. On 31 Oct 2005, the newspaper published the following retraction: In an analysis of television critics it was suggested that some of Victor Lewis-Smith's reviews may be motivated by settling old scores with commissioning editors who have rejected his ideas. We accept that Mr Lewis-Smith's television criticism is not motivated by such a consideration and we apologise unreservedly to him. The same newspaper on 11 Aug 2005 claimed to quote a former colleague, whose name was never given, as saying "It's strange how someone who dishes it out every day can be so queeny when they're on the receiving end".

On 5 July 1999 The Independent had printed an apology in which the newspaper "accepts that there was no scuffle ... and that Victor Lewis-Smith did not scream for security guards before legging it". However the same newspaper had previously run a story, which it did not retract, saying of his membership of the Groucho Club "Victor Lewis-Smith sits in a corner and gets into fights" - 28 Nov 1995.

In June 2006, Gordon Ramsay, his production company, and his producer accepted an out-of-court settlement of £75,000 from Associated Newspapers, after an article in London's Evening Standard written by Lewis-Smith alleged that Ramsay had faked television scenes and installed an incompetent chef. Ramsay said at the time, "We have never done anything in a cynical, fake way." However, a year later, Channel 4 admitted that a scene in another of Ramsay's programmes had been faked, and apologised to viewers.

On 28 July 2006, hypnotist Paul McKenna successfully sued the Daily Mirror for libel over articles written by Lewis-Smith from 1997 alleging that Mr McKenna was in the possession of a false PhD, having obtained the qualification from a non-accredited institution in the United States, whose principal had since been imprisoned for making misleading claims about the status of degrees he handed out to candidates.

When Lewis-Smith returned to writing in his Evening Standard column on 29 August 2006, he referred to himself as Dr Lewis-Smith, saying that he had received a PhD in the same manner as McKenna (by paying a non-accredited institution) and suing anybody who suggests his PhD is "bogus".

In November 2008, Victor Lewis-Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Westminster.