the times | Wednesday February 16 2022 49
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Dapper winemaker
with estates in Bordeaux
Anthony Barton
Page 50Vertue with the comedy writers Eric Sykes, Ray Galton, Spike Milligan and Alan Simpson. Below: at the TV Baftas in 2015Vertue realised that it would make a
great sitcom. She sold it to ITV, but the
show was dropped after one series in- Undeterred, Vertue sold it to the
BBC, where it ran for five series and be-
came the highest-rated sitcom of the
Nineties, riding on the zeitgeist of the
“laddish humour” then in vogue. It also
appealed to women because of the
underlying vulnerability of the men
played by Neil Morrissey and Martin
Clunes, and female viewers’ empathy
for the long-suffering girlfriends played
by Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash.
Vertue enjoyed further success with
Sherlock, an idiosyncratic take on the
Arthur Conan Doyle adventures that
made a star of Benedict Cumberbatch.
Having started her career making tea
for Milligan, Vertue told Kirsty Young
on Desert Island Discs in 2013 that
naivety had been her secret. “It’s impor-
tant not to know too many rules. If you
don’t know there’s a rule [against some-
thing] you just do it.”
Beryl Frances Johnson was born in
Croydon in 1931 to Elsie (née Francis),
and Frank Johnson, an engineer who
worked in a munitions factory during
the Second World War and later ran a
garage where Beryl had her first job,
manning the pumps.
She attended Mitcham County
Grammar School with no great distinc-
tion and left at 15 to take a typing
course. She then spent six years in a
shipping office before she was diag-
nosed with TB and sent to a sanatorium
on the Isle of Wight. Not long after her
recovery the Hancock’s Half Hour writ-
ing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simp-
son, whom she had known at school,
tried to recruit her as a secretary for
ALS.
Dreading the one-hour trolley bus
journey to their dingy office above a
fruit and veg shop in Shepherd’s Bush,
Vertue refused. Simpson persisted and
she was duly interviewed by Milligan,
who was more interested in her tea-
making ability than her typing or short-
hand speeds. She was offered the job
but asked for what she thought was the
prohibitive sum of ten pounds a week.
“To my horror they accepted.”
In addition to her secretarial duties,
which included typing Milligan’s scripts
for The Goon Show and dealing with the
Goons’ huge fan mail, she fielded calls
from Milligan in the middle of the night
asking her to type up his latest comic
brainwave. When Simpson and Galton
asked her to call the BBC about their
contracts, she succeeded in doubling
their income for Hancock’s Half Hour.
She went on to negotiate contracts
for all the writers on ALS’s roster, in-
cluding an insurance salesman called
Johnny Speight for whom she sold Till
Death Us Do Part and a furniture sales-
man called Terry Nation who created
the Daleks for Doctor Who. Showing an
early aptitude for “exterminating”
complacent male BBC bureaucrats,
Vertue shrewdly altered Nation’s con-
tract to include merchandising rights, aCowed by the prospect of persuading
Ike Turner to agree to his wife Tina
appearing in the 1975 film Tommy, the
impresario Robert Stigwood sent Beryl
Vertue instead.
Short, unassuming and rather
“mumsie” looking, Vertue did not come
across as the most powerful woman in
British showbusiness, which she was in
the 1970s, but even the abusive, para-
noid, cocaine-addicted Ike Turner
learnt not to underestimate her.
“I was driven to a hut outside LA by a
girl whom I later discovered was Ike’s
girlfriend. She had a gun in her hand-
bag,” recalled the British comedy script
agent turned film producer. “When we
arrived, Tina Turner appeared and
dragged me to the ground — because
there were surveillance cameras every-
where — and begged me not to make
him cross.
“His office was like a bordello, ma-
roon everywhere, and there he was, in a
white suit, looking immaculate. He got
out a cigarette and she [Tina] shot from
one side of the room to the other to light
it for him. I decided to be very British; I
was wearing white gloves that day, and
I told him not to worry, that we were
going to take such good care of Tina.
Well, he didn’t quite know how to react.”
The woman who had regularly
calmed Spike Milligan during manic
episodes, mollified Tony Hancock in
foul, drunken moods, and persuaded
the head of the mafia-linked Teamsters
union in Boston to let her make a film in
the US city, got the deal done. Tina
Turner went on to give a pulsating per-
formance in Ken Russell’s Tommy as the
Acid Queen. “I never asked his permis-
sion [to hire her] but thanked him when
he hadn’t quite given it,” she said.
She had started in the mid-1950s as a
secretary for Associated London
Scripts (ALS), a writers’ co-operative
founded by Eric Sykes and Milligan.
Entirely by default she evolved into a
highly effective agent for them and
many other British comedy writers and
actors in their fast-growing “fun fact-
ory”. After moving into films in 1966,
she formed a partnership with Stig-
wood and invented a lucrative and
much-copied moneymaking idea that
became known as “Vertuosity” — sell-
ing successful British sitcoms such as
Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do
Part to US television networks to devel-
op their own vernacular versions (San-
ford and Son on NBC and All in the
Family on CBS). It made Vertue rich but
the spiralling success of Associated
London Films also resulted in the end
of her marriage.
Having also parted company with
Stigwood, she set up a small independ-
ent production company at Shepperton
Studios in the mid-1980s. Hartswood
Films was not a success. At her lowest
ebb in 1989, Vertue, now in her late six-
ties, read an unknown comic novel
called Men Behaving Badly by Simon
Nye, a translator for Credit Suisse. After
chuckling through the misadventures
of two politically incorrect flat-mates,
Her children begged her
not to take them to
school in her Rolls-Royce
Obituaries
Beryl Vertue
Grand dame of British showbusiness who was an agent for comedy greats and late in life produced Men Behaving Badly and Sherlock
POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGESfirst in British television. The populari-
ty of Dalek-related toys, comics and
games made Nation rich.
She struck her first international deal
by acting out Hancock’s Half Hour
scripts at a meeting with a German tele-
vision producer. She was deeply fond of
Hancock, but never close. “I don’t think
you ever got to know him very well,” she
said. In 1961, at the height of his
success that she had done much to
create, Hancock dispensed with
Galton and Simpson and told
Vertue he no longer wanted her
services either.
She turned her attention to the
flagging career of Frankie Howerd,
who was considering giving up
showbusiness and running a
pub. Vertue was determined to
dissuade him and suggested he
try cabaret. She got him a book-
ing at the Blue Angel, a
London nightclub. Howerd
was reluctant but gave in.
“She was a dreadful bully.
Thank goodness”, he recalled.
Her ALS offshoot Asso-
ciated London Films got off to
a quick start in 1966 when she
persuaded Joe Levine in Hol-
lywood to take up a Galton
and Simpson script, The Spy
With the Cold Nose (1966), and
got herself credited as associate
producer. She went on to pro-
duce The Plank (1967), a silent
comedy with Sykes and TommyCooper. That year Stigwood, an entre-
preneur wanting to diversify from pop
music into theatre, television and films,
made an offer for ALS. Sykes and Milli-
gan left but Vertue joined Stigwood and
served as deputy chairman.
Vertue also pioneered cinema adap-
tations of popular sitcoms, including
Till Death Us Do Part (1969), Up Pompeii
(1971) and two Steptoe spin-offs, which
all did well at the box office.
She and Stigwood made big money.
She commuted to America on Con-
corde and had her own chauffeur-driv-
en, powder-blue Rolls-Royce, though
her embarrassed children begged her
not to take them to school in it.
She scored a coup by hiring Jack
Lemmon to star in a 1975 American TV
adaptation of John Osborne’s The En-
tertainer, and earned notoriety by per-
suading US television networks to
sanction the first use of the word “bas-
tard” on terrestrial TV there.
American producers were so dis-
armed by her straightforward approach
and mild manners that they were unpre-
pared for her ruthless negotiating. She
told one that a script she was trying to
sell “didn’t work in the middle but we’ll
fix it”. He was stunned by her honesty.
Vertue had married her childhood
sweetheart, Clem Vertue, who ran a
travel agency. Keen gardeners, they
lived quietly near Reigate, Surrey. Ver-
tue would do all the housework at
weekends. Eventually her jet-set work-
ing life put a strain on their marriage.
They remained friends but their di-
vorce in 1984 destroyed her confidence
and, in her own words, she “spent five
years not succeeding”.
Men Behaving Badly proved to be her
redemption; forging a well-trodden
path, she sold the format to a US net-
work. Hartswood was responsible for
other successful sitcoms, including
Steven Moffat’s Coupling.
Her last big venture, Sherlock, was a
family affair. Her daughter Sue pro-
duced the series while Vertue was the
executive producer. The co-creator of
Sherlock was her son-in-law Moffat,
Sue’s husband.
Her other daughter Debbie was also
an executive at Hartswood. Both
daughters will carry on Hartswood
Films. Vertue said that she
turned down many lucrative
offers for the company.
“I was coming out of a desert
of nothingness at that point and
here we are with Sherlock 25
years later. It’s a cracking
small independent com-
pany and I’m proud of
that,” she said.
Reflecting on her
decades as one of the
toughest dealmakers in
the business, Vertue de-
scribed herself as “the
world’s worst feminist”
— “I was just never
aware of sexism in the
office,” she said. “I was
having too much fun.”Beryl Vertue, CBE,
television and film
producer, was born
on April 8, 1931. She
died on February 12,
2022, aged 90 2