Johnny Speight - Life and Career

Life and Career

John Speight was born at 57 Chester Rd Canning Town, West Ham, Essex (now Greater London), and began contributing scripts to comedy shows in 1955, starting with Great Scott - It's Maynard!. He later contributed to Sykes And A... (1960-65), which starred Eric Sykes, Hattie Jacques and Richard Wattis. Speight was one of many writing talents on that series which also included the star Sykes, John Antrobus and Spike Milligan.

He created the iconic working class tramp figure played by Arthur Haynes in the latter's long-running and top-rating ATV comedy series. Haynes died in 1966.

In 1965, Speight wrote a BBC TV pilot which became the 1966 series Till Death Us Do Part featuring Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett, a reactionary Conservative-voting working class man with a chip on his shoulder and an angry word on everything. Garnett became one of the most memorable characters in British TV history, despite being such an appalling figure. The series also starred Dandy Nichols, as his long-suffering wife Elsie. The 1971 US sitcom All in the Family was based on this series.

It was during the production of Till Death Us Do Part that a BBC bureaucrat, according to legend, attempted to talk Speight into ameliorating his script by bargaining the number of occurrences of "damn", "bloody" and other words held to be offensive. The incident became the basis for a satirical sketch performed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, with Cook as the bureaucrat and Moore as a scriptwriter named "Johnny".

Speight's later series Curry and Chips (1969), was a more controversial sitcom from LWT for the ITV channel, soon cancelled on the instructions of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Despite the apparent anti-political correctness, Speight's intention—like in Till Death Us Do Part—was to highlight discrimination, not promote it.

It was a cast of stereotypes, featuring a blacked-up Spike Milligan as Kevin O'Grady (who was supposed to be half Irish, half Pakistani), Eric Sykes as a liberal, Kenny Lynch as a black man who was prejudiced against Asians, and Norman Rossington and Geoffrey Hughes as racist Liverpudlians.

Speight's next comedy was For Richer...For Poorer (1975), a one-off pilot which featured Harry H Corbett as a left-wing answer to Alf Garnett.

After a brief return of Till Death Us Do Part on ITV in 1981 as Till Death..., Alf Garnett returned with a vengeance on the BBC's In Sickness and in Health which ran from 1985 to 1992.

In 1998, Speight died of pancreatic cancer, aged 78, and LWT put forward a series of specials featuring Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett, giving his thoughts on a variety of subjects. The programmes were originally shelved by ITV controller, David Liddiment.