Gordon Crier
Gordon Crier (1912 – 16 September 1984) was a Scottish radio and television producer and writer.
His early successes included Band Waggon, the first comedy show designed for radio, broadcast by the BBC from 1938 to 1940, co-produced by Crier and Harry S. Pepper.[1][2] After the first three shows had flopped, the scriptwriter was dismissed and a team of Crier, Vernon Harris, Arthur Askey, and Richard Murdoch was brought in. They made Band Waggon the most popular radio show of the 1930s.[3]
In 1950 Crier was a founding member of the Lord's Taverners, with John Snagge, Roy Plomley, Brian Johnston, and others, a group of actors and BBC men who enjoyed watching cricket from the Tavern pub at Lord's Cricket Ground.[4]
In January 1952, Crier was arrested in Germany by the Russians, while organizing a tour by Gracie Fields, but was soon released.[5]
By 1953, Crier was working for an advertising agency, but he remained a friend of Ronnie Waldman and continued to feed ideas for programmes to the BBC.[6]
Selected credits
- Variety (television series, 1937) - producer
- Band Waggon (radio series, 1938-1940) - co-producer and writer
- Band Waggon (film, 1940) - writer
- What Would You Do, Chums? (radio series, 1939) - writer
- The Wind in the Willows (radio adaptation, 1941)[7]
- Peter Pan (radio adaptation, 1941)[7]
- Telecrime (TV series, 1946) (producer - 6 episodes)
- Farewell to the Pegasus (TV movie, 1947) producer
- Cinderella (TV movie, 1950) - scriptwriter
Notes
- ↑ Peter Hay , Canned Laughter: The Best Stories from Radio and Television (1992), p. 42
- ↑ Bandwaggon at britishcomedy.org.uk, accessed 30 July 2016
- ↑ Gordon Bathgate, Voices from the Ether: the history of radio, p. 58
- ↑ Charlotte Breese, Hutch (A. & C. Black, 2012), p. 152
- ↑ Gordon Crier returns to London after arrest by Russians dated 24 January 1952 at itnsource.com, accessed 30 July 2016: "Producer Gordon Crier returns to London and speaks of his arrest by the Russians, and his wife welcomes him home"
- ↑ Louis Barfe, Turned Out Nice Again: the Story of British Light Entertainment (Atlantic Books, 2013), [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XHbFLkrXezMC&pg=PT61#v=onepage&q&f=false p. 61
- 1 2 Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children's Fiction in the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 666