Ned Sherrin

Edward George Sherrin was born on 18 February 1931 at Gawlers Farm in Low Ham, Somerset, the second son of smallholding farmer Thomas Adam Sherrin and Dorothy Finch. He attended Sexey's School in Bruton, Somerset, and completed his national service in the Royal Signals, receiving a commission as an officer in 1950. Sherrin went on to read law at Exeter College, Oxford, and was subsequently called to the bar by Gray's Inn, qualifying as a barrister. His interests shifted toward the performing arts during his time at Oxford, and in 1956 he entered British television shortly after the launch of independent television, producing programs for ATV in Birmingham.

In 1957 Sherrin joined the BBC as a temporary production assistant and moved into a producer role in Television Talks by 1963. His most consequential early work came in 1962, when he was responsible for the first satirical television series That Was the Week That Was, starring David Frost and Millicent Martin. Two successor programs followed: Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, which ran from 1964 to 1965, and BBC-3, which ran from 1965 to 1966. His other film and television work included Up Pompeii!, Up the Front, The Cobblers of Umbridge, World in Ferment, and The Virgin Soldiers. In 1978 he hosted We Interrupt This Week, a news events quiz produced by WNET/Channel 13 in New York featuring teams of journalists and columnists. In 1990 he appeared as a contestant on Cluedo, competing against Thelma Barlow. He also played the role of Addison in the 1992 film Orlando.

Beginning in 1986, Sherrin presented the BBC Radio 4 light entertainment program Loose Ends on Saturday mornings, and he hosted the music quiz Counterpoint on the same network from 1986 through 2006. He additionally toured the United Kingdom with a one-man show, An Evening of Theatrical Anecdotes.

In the West End, Sherrin produced and directed numerous theatre productions, among them Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell and the musical revue Side by Side by Sondheim. In 1984 he received an Olivier Award for directing and conceiving The Ratepayers' Iolanthe, an adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Iolanthe written by Sherrin and Alistair Beaton. Side by Side by Sondheim also brought Sherrin to Broadway in 1977, where his appearance in the revue earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.

Sherrin authored two volumes of autobiography, several books of quotations and anecdotes, fiction, and a number of works in collaboration with Caryl Brahms. His publications included A Small Thing – Like an Earthquake, Cutting Edge, Song by Song co-written with Brahms, The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, and Ned Sherrin: the autobiography, published in 2005. He was openly gay and served as a patron of the London Gay Symphony Orchestra and of the Stephen Sondheim Society of Singapore until 1995. In the 1997 New Year Honours he was awarded a CBE. Sherrin was diagnosed with unilateral vocal cord paralysis in January 2007, a diagnosis later revised to throat cancer. He died on 1 October 2007 at the age of 76.