Dear Bill…

On a day when the news got a whole lot worse I was already reeling from hearing about the death of Bill Dare. I was about to write “radio producer” because that’s the way most people knew him – and indeed, a huge amount of my time spent with him was in the world of audio.

Bill was brilliant in so many areas of comedy – as a radio writer, novelist, composer and TV producer.

I first met Bill 47 years ago. Before alternative comedy, before Spitting Image, before Dead Ringers – and our lives and paths have crossed regularly since. Literally, since we have been close neighbours in north London for 30 years.

Bill was best known as a radio producer – and there were plenty of words written and spoken about Dead Ringers, rightly so, the much loved topical impersonations show.

Another of Bill’s genius skills was as a creator of formats – often simple but incredibly effective. What was Dead Ringers if not Spitting Image on the radio?

Bill also created The Mary Whitehouse Experience for radio and TV – another simple idea that married what was still known as alternative comedy and the Oxbridge revue format.

He already had form in that field. In 1985 I compered a Radio 4 series for him called something like “Hey Radio” which brought together the top stand-ups and University sketch troupes in a live show format.

I wrote for many of Bill’s shows over the decades and I’ll admit he was not the easiest producer to please. There was a simple reason for this – Bill was a great comedy writer, and he could always write the sketch or song better than we could.

I don’t mean he was necessarily the best writer, but he could always hear the whole show in his head and there weren’t enough hours in the day for him to produce, cast, rehearse and edit a topical radio show and have to write the whole damn thing as well.

When I did get sketches on his shows they had usually been heavily rewritten with Bill’s imprint – and would invariably be better for it.

Broadly speaking there are two types of comedy producer – innovators and administrators. Bill was an extremely rare example of both. A comedy producer’s job involves persuading one side – the establishment BBC – to take risks while working with the other side – the creators – to stay just enough on the right side of the road to get the show made.

Spitting Image was always going to challenge that and would probably never have got past the pilot stage if it had been a BBC show.  In the late 1980s Pete Sinclair and I wrote around 20 songs when Bill was the producer – and to answer your next question, no we didn’t write The Chicken Song – and Bill was always happy to push the boundaries as long as he felt we were morally justified.

By complete coincidence only this weekend I was showing my son some of the songs we wrote and had forgotten quite how cruel we were. As my son correctly pointed out “it was a different era, you were expected to say those things then.”

As recently as 2022 he was creating a great new radio sketch show Please Use Other Door. At a time when we were all being told that the BBC wasn’t making sketch shows any more, and doors were being slammed shut for new writers, Bill came up with another simple idea – “Overheard conversations take place over the course of the day” – wrote most of the sketches but tried to bring in as many new writers as possible.

I owe Bill a huge debt, in 1997 when Radio 4’s News Quiz was looking for new writers for the chairman’s script he recommended me for the role and that job led to many more across TV and radio for the next 10 years.

Bill has always not just championed new writers, he’s done as much as possible to bring them on. In 2013 Bill and I were the last two candidates for the job of running the new National Film and TV School comedy writing and producing course. His producing record meant in the end there was no contest, but he still came to me and together we adapted and worked on the curriculum once it came into contact with actual students.

I first met Bill when he was still at school in Bristol, and I was taking the student revue company to the 1978 Edinburgh Fringe. This was an early lesson in how to bankrupt a student union by convincing your university that your band of enthusiastic amateurs could compete with the pros at the biggest arts festival in the world.

Bill was the saxophonist in our student revue band – yes, our bloated company included five people whose sole job was to play music in one of the shows.

He was still Bill Jones at this point, and I was unaware of the connection to comedy royalty. His dad Peter was one of the most extraordinary and innovative comic performers of his generation.

Peter was best known at the time as the star of Just A Minute and as the radio voice of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. His friendly delivery and weary cynicism were the perfect match for what has become the most famous radio show in the universe.

Without dwelling too much on his dad there were two aspects of Peter that I came to recognise over the years in his son. The first was that Peter had a comic mind that went to places no one else could manage.

In All Directions was by all accounts the most extraordinary and innovative radio show ever made. Produced in the early 1950s, it involved the great writers Denis Norden and Frank Muir sitting in a room with the two Peters – Jones and Ustinov – switching on a tape recorder and asking them innocent questions then leaving them to improvise the answers.

Norden and Muir went off to write up the tapes and turn them into half hour episodes, which the two Peters then performed as scripted comedy. When I found out about this show around ten years ago, and was told no copies still existed, I asked Bill if he might be able to dig some out and he promised one day he would. Sadly that never happened.

Second is – versatility. Peter was best known as a radio star, especially in the early days of TV but he was equally at home in TV audience sitcoms and those great British post war comic films. He was also a fine writer, creating his own radio series about a pompous actor, something Bill also achieved with his brilliant “I An Actor” series starring Nigel Planer.

I say versatility, in Bill it often came across as a continuing frustrating struggle to create new comedy. Most radio producers will look at his CV and see a huge output, including many big popular award winning shows and marvel at his productivity levels.

That was never enough for Bill. He was always trying new ideas, pushing his own boundaries even as he stayed on just the right side of the BBC’s radio rules to create a stream of hit shows.

His Radio show Life, Death and Sex with Mike and Sue was the first time I discovered that boy, Bill could write. Again the simple format, a TV lifestyle show like the hugely popular Good Morning With Richard and Judy, only in this case Bill brought more darkness to the relationship between the hosts, while navigating the regular slots and forced jollity of the rest of the format.

Bill’s ability to write great characters was also evident in his first novel, Natural Selection. I read it when it came out and the subsequent Brian Gulliver’s Travels and The Billion Dollar Lie.

After the first one I remember him saying to me “don’t ever write novels. I’m never doing it again.” And of course he did. Bill loved writing, more than anything. For the last ten years he and Pete were writing continuously, developing many sitcoms and screenplays, often trapped in development hell but some of which were coming close to fruition.

Since I started writing novels four years ago we talked about the form and what he could do to market them. How in this new universe of self-publishing you have to do all that work yourself. I tried to persuade him to bring some of his enormous producer talent to the world of publishing but his attitude was that producing was the day job, and he’d rather be writing.

Or at least, creating. In more recent years he went back to his first love of music and started writing his own songs.

The last time we met was at Christmas, the convening of the annual Crouch End Radio comedy/novelist/songwriter Club (Membership: 2) and he’d brought along his iPad to the pub to show me his latest project – cartoons.

He’d sent several of these to the New Yorker, and he wanted to know what I thought of them and why they might have missed the cut. I told him to imagine Bill Dare producer as the New Yorker cartoon editor, and Bill the cartoonist as the hundreds of writers who had had work rejected by him over the previous four decades. Rejection is never personal, but it always feels that way. In the end, I said to him, you used the writers who never took no as your final answer.

I also gave him the contact details for another Crouch Ender, the hugely talented animator Zoom Rockman who has been cartooning since he was eight and has already achieved success in that field. This was only a few weeks ago and I suspect they never connected.

I’m still in a state of shock but that felt like a fitting final meeting. He didn’t even mention that he’d just produced a lovely new radio comedy series with Stephen Mangan called The Island, in which the real life actor finds himself stranded on the Desert Island Discs island with all the other celebrities.

Bill didn’t write that show but it has all the hallmarks of a typical Bill radio idea. Like Brian Gulliver’s travels, the man is lost, shipwrecked, forced to navigate a baffling world and is completely out of his depth. Just when he thinks he’s found the answer, some new terrible thing happens.

Unusually for Bill, he sent out a mass email telling everyone about it before it came out and asking for our opinions. I listened and sent a quick note saying I’d enjoyed it and thought Stephen Mangan was brilliant.

“Cheers Dave.” The last email I received from Bill. 10 Feb.

I was looking forward to having a more in-depth discussion about it when he got back and playing the part of Bill the boss to his Dave the creator, hemming and hawing over the work before going into detail.

That’s not going to happen now, but if it had I wouldn’t have had the insight that has come now that he’s no longer with us.

To the outside world, Bill was a great success, a brilliantly talented radio producer who stood shoulder high among a cohort that includes the great Phil Clarke (Peep Show, I Will Destroy You) Harry Thompson (Have I Got News For You) and Armando Iannucci (Thick of It).

To those of us who knew him, Bill was the character played by Stephen Mangan. He’d made it, the pinnacle of success, to be asked to appear on Desert Island Discs. But he wanted more. Now what?

Two days on I’m still struggling to come to terms with the final answer.