Harry William Thompson (6 February 1960 – 7 November 2005) was an English radio and television producer, comedy writer, novelist and biographer. Thompson was widely regarded as one of the most successful television producers and comedy writers of his generation.
Born in London, Thompson was educated at Highgate Grammar School for Boys and Brasenose College, Oxford University before joining the BBC as a trainee in 1981. He soon focused his attention on comedy, working as a researcher for Not the Nine O'Clock News and BBC Radio's The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Rising to the level of producer, he produced the BBC radio shows The News Quiz and Lenin of the Rovers. Hat Trick Productions subsequently employed Thompson to produce a television adaptation of The News Quiz, entitled Have I Got News For You; a critical and commercial success, he would produce the show for five years before moving onto other projects.
A biographer and novelist, Thompson authored five books; biographies of Hergé and his Adventures of Tintin series, Peter Cook and Richard Ingrams, as well as a novel, This Thing of Darkness, and the semi-autobiographical Penguins Stopped Play.
Famous quotes containing the words harry and/or thompson:
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“She went her unremembering way,
She went and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.”
—Francis Thompson (1859–1907)