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Jack Smethurst with fellow Love Thy Neighbour cast members Nina Baden-Semper, Rudolph Walker and Kate WilliamsWalker, whose character was the victim
of most of the taunts. He argued that it
was one of the first programmes to give
black actors equal status to white actors
in money and billing. The show was
also popular on African television net-
works and a stage production toured
the West Indies. The black comedian
Gina Yashere told a Radio 4 docu-
mentary on Love Thy Neighbour in
2016: “My mum used to watch it and
laugh at it, which is weird. You know
what, it’s being in England in the
Seventies and just seeing black people
on TV. We’re not naked running through
the jungle being beaten up by Tarzan.”
Smethurst, who in real life doted on
his mixed-race grandchildren, said of
Booth: “I saw him as a loudmouthedbuffoon and the only stipulation I made
was that he had to be a loser. I think we
broke down a few barriers rather than
built any. The only complaints I get are
from white people.”
John Smethurst was born one of five
children in the slums of Collyhurst,
Manchester, in 1932 to Bill, a factory
worker, and Kitty, who worked in a de-
partment store. He attended St Patrick’s
School in Collyhurst but was evacuated
to Blackpool after the family home was
destroyed in the Blitz. He later attended
St Clare’s School in Blackley.
The child’s acting ambitions stemmed
from watching James Cagney films and
his uncle John, who would quote
Shakespeare. “He left me wondering
what he was talking about.” Jack leftschool at 14 and eventually became an
apprentice cutter at Kindler’s raincoat
factory, where his father also worked.
He stayed for four years, with crushing
boredom forestalled only by theatre
trips. At 18 he escaped from the factory
to do National Service in the RAF,
stationed in Cosford, Shropshire. He
remained for a third year as a regular,
taking advantage of being able to stay at
RAF digs in London and buy
discounted theatre tickets.
On leaving the RAF he successfully
auditioned for the London Academy of
Music and Dramatic Art, benefiting
from a surge in demand for regional
accents. The local education authority
refused to help to pay his fees, but
changed its mind after he gave thepanel an impromptu burst of Henry V.
The night before he was due to leave
Manchester he suffered nerves and
decided not to go. His sister Patricia
changed his mind by telling him how
proud his parents were that he had got in.
Smethurst went on to act in rep and
joined the English Stage Company at
the Royal Court Theatre, appearing in
Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, alongside
Dudley Moore, in 1959. In early film
roles he was a young army recruit in
Carry On Sergeant (1958) and Conroy in
A Kind Of Loving (1962).
He worked in television, playing “a
lot of little hardmen from the north” in
shows such as No Hiding Place and Z
Cars. However, over the next decade he
was often out of work.
Smethurst found himself typecast
after Love Thy Neighbour. “I couldn’t
get arrested,” he told the Daily Express
in 2017. He worked in a flower shop, but
was eventually saved by a three-year
stint as a dustman in Coronation Street.
There were several Shakespearean
roles, including Shylock in The Merchant
of Venice and Petruchio in The Taming
of the Shrew with Toyah Willcox. He
also became a pantomime stalwart and
with his own theatre company put on
summer shows at Butlin’s.
Television did not entirely forget
him. There were cameos in Last of the
Summer Wine, Heartbeat and Victoria
Wood’s Dinnerladies and a recurring
role in Casualty, playing a man with
Alzheimer’s disease.
Smethurst is survived by his wife, Julie
(née Nicholls), a Rada-trained actress
whom he met in a touring theatre pro-
duction and married in 1957. He is also
survived by their daughters Perdita, a
special needs teacher, Merry, a nurse,
Jane, an arts fundraiser, and by their son,
Adam, an actor and film-maker.
He never did enjoy another big TV
success after Love Thy Neighbour, but
he was not complaining. “It’s been a
chequered career, but I tell you what, it
beats that bloody raincoat factory.”Jack Smethurst, actor, was born on
April 9, 1932. He died on
February 16, 2022, aged 89His mother washed laundry for the
dozen brothels that had become Search-
light’s main industry. Their shack had no
indoor lavatory, hot water or telephone.
To attend high school he hitchhiked
40 miles to Henderson, staying with
relatives during the week and working
part-time in a petrol station or with his
father in the mines.
At school he met two people who
would change his life. One was Mike
O’Callaghan, a teacher who turned him
into a decent middleweight boxer and
later became his political mentor. The
other was Landra Gould, a fellow
student with whom he eloped to Utah
at the age of 19 because her JewishJack Smethurst’s racist catchphrases as
Eddie Booth made Love Thy Neighbour
arguably the most contentious sitcom of
the Seventies. Yet the Mancunian, who
was Britain’s second most famous bigot
after Alf Garnett, usually ended each
episode outsmarted by his taller, more
handsome and better educated black
neighbour played by Rudolph Walker.
Smethurst plays a working-class
factory worker and union rep who is
horrified when a couple of West Indian
descent move in next door. Bill
Reynolds (Walker) works in the same
factory and they continue their
arguments at the pub. The socialist
Booth’s animus is increased by the fact
that Reynolds votes Conservative.
In 54 episodes broadcast from 1972 to
1976 and written by Vince Powell and
Harry Driver, Booth addresses his
neighbour as “chocolate drop”, and
worse. Walker does not take the racial
insults lying down, calling Smethurst
“white honky”, “white trash” and
“snowflake”. During this crossfire, their
wives (Nina Baden-Semper and Kate
Williams) bond. The men eventually
become friends as well, though neither
of them would ever admit it.
Interpreted as ITV’s answer to the
BBC’s Till Death Us Do Part, Love Thy
Neighbour was a more direct satire on a
Britain still struggling to come to terms
with postwar immigration. Smethurst’s
tragi-comic round face convincingly
portrayed the beleaguered working
man, hammered by the taxman, blighted
by power cuts and perplexed by the
shifting cultural landscape. “It gets on
my wick,” he laments in one episode. “I
work next to him, live next to him and
now I’ve got to drink next to him. Talk
about me and my shadow.”
The show was criticised for encour-
aging playground taunts against black
children, but one of its strongest
defenders was the Trinidadian-born
His black co-star
Rudolph Walker
defended the show
Jack Smethurst
Actor who as the bigot Eddie Booth traded racial insults with his black neighbour in the controversial sitcom Love Thy Neighbour
STUDIO CANAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKHarry Reid
Pugnacious US senator and consummate Washington power broker whose horse trading helped to push through Obamacare
As majority leader of the US Senate for
seven years, Harry Reid was one of the
first leading Democrats to spot the
potential of his young colleague,
Barack Obama, and to urge him to run
for president in 2008.
Later, with Obama in the Oval
Office, the pugnacious Nevadan used
his mastery of political horse trading
and the Senate’s arcane rules to secure
the most consequential legislation of
Obama’s presidency, including the
watershed “Obamacare” bill.
Shortly before Reid died, Obama
wrote to him: “I wouldn’t have been
president had it not been for your
encouragement and support, and I
wouldn’t have got most of what
I got done without your skill and
determination.” That was not a bad
epitaph for a man who was raised in a
tiny shack built from railway sleepers in
Nevada’s hot, dusty Mojave desert, paid
his way through law school by working
as a policeman on Capitol Hill, and
survived death threats from crooked
Las Vegas casino owners.
Harry Mason Reid was born in the
tiny former goldmining settlement of
Searchlight, 60 miles south of Las Vegas,
in 1939. He was one of four sons of a fre-
quently unemployed miner who drank
heavily and suffered from depression.
parents disapproved of him. The couple
converted to Mormonism (Reid never
smoked or drank) and had five children,
two of whom followed him into politics.
After graduating from Utah State
University, Reid took a law degree in
Washington DC, moonlighting as an
officer for the US Capitol Police to
support his growing family.
He then returned to Henderson,
where he worked as a lawyer until
winning election to the Nevada state
assembly in 1968. Two years after that
O’Callaghan stood for governor, with
Reid as his running-mate, and won. All
seemed right with Reid’s world when he
watched Muhammad Ali beat Jerry
Quarry in Las Vegas, and met his idol
before the fight. Afterwards he received
a call from his mother who said: “Your
pop shot himself.”
In 1974 Reid ran for the US Senate
against Paul Laxalt, a former Republican
governor, believing he could not lose
after President Nixon’s resignation. He
did lose. He then ran for mayor of Las
Vegas and lost that race too, leaving
him a “35-year-old has-been”.
O’Callaghan rescued Reid by making
him head of the Nevada Gaming
Commission. He spent the next four
years battling mafia control of casinos,
blacklisting two mobsters: Tony“The Ant” Spilotro and Frank “Lefty”
Rosenthal. Offered a $120,000 bribe by
another casino operator, Reid trapped
him in an FBI sting. He received nu-
merous death threats, and his wife once
found a bomb beneath the family car.
By 1982 Nevada’s population had
grown sufficiently to qualify for a
second seat in the US House of Repre-
sentatives. Reid ran, and won, and four
years later stood for the Senate after
Laxalt retired. He won that race too,
and began rising through the ranks. By
2007 he was Senate majority leader,
with a portrait of Mark Twain hanging
prominently in his office.
Reid was not charismatic, a
compelling public speaker or a great
communicator. Yet he was a wily
tactician and consummate power broker.
His soft voice concealed a pugnacious
temperament, a fierce determination
and, on occasion, an ugly partisanship.
He was a pragmatist who initially
opposed abortion and gun controls, but
adopted a more progressive stance as
the growing Hispanic population shifted
Nevada’s politics leftwards.
As early as 2006 Reid encouraged
Obama, then a first-term senator, to
run for president at a time when most of
his party were backing another Demo-
cratic senator, Hillary Clinton. And itwas during Obama’s subsequent presi-
dency that he really came into his own.
He shepherded Obama’s Affordable
Care Act, the greatest expansion of
healthcare provision since the 1960s,
through the Senate despite unanimous
Republican opposition. He secured an
$800 billion economic stimulus package
after the financial crash, and over-
hauled Wall Street banking regulations.
He also invoked the “nuclear option”
of lowering the threshold for Senate ap-
proval of most presidential judicial nom-
inations from 60 votes to a simple major-
ity. The move backfired in 2017 when the
new Republican majority extended that
provision to Supreme Court nominees,
leaving the Democrats unable to block
three hardline conservatives nominated
by President Trump: Neil Gorsuch, Brett
Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Reid had retired the previous year
after 34 years in Congress. “I didn’t make
it because of my good looks,” he said. “I
didn’t make it because I’m a genius. I
made it because I worked hard.”Harry Reid, US senator, was born on
December 2, 1939. He died of pancreatic
cancer on December 28, 2021, aged 82Reid at the Capitol building in 2012Email: [email protected]