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Victor Lewis-Smith is a British film, television and radio producer, a television and restaurant critic, a satirist and newspaper columnist. He is executive producer of the ITV1 Annual National Food & Drink Awards.[1] He is an alumnus of the University of York.[2] He has been a contributor to Private Eye fortnightly magazine since June 1993.

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Associated Rediffusion Productions Limited

Lewis-Smith owns a film, television and radio production company called Associated Rediffusion Productions Limited, having acquired the rights in 1990, to the name and logo of the original company, Associated-Rediffusion.[3]

As Executive Producer

On 1 January 2021, the Sky Documentaries Channel aired "Steve McQueen: The Lost Movie", presented by David Letterman.[4]

On 9 February 2020, ITV aired "The ITV Food & Drink Awards" presented by Stephen Fry.[5]

Lewis-Smith's documentary, The Undiscovered Peter Cook, was the first in a series transmitted on BBC Four in November 2016.[6] In December 2018, Lewis-Smith made three more documentaries in the style of The Undiscovered Peter Cook for Sky Arts, this time concerning Peter Sellers, Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock.[7] Lewis-Smith was executive producer of a series of controversial documentaries presented by Keith Allen for Channel 4. This included biographies of Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party, Lottery winner Michael Carroll, the TV Cook Keith Floyd (who died 2 hours before the programme was transmitted), and the "child prodigy" Lauren Harries.[8]

Lewis-Smith is executive producer of a series of more than 60 TV programmes called 21st Century Bach - The Complete Organ Works. The series started on BBC Two in June 2003, and has since aired on Sky Arts.

From 2010, Lewis-Smith was the Executive Producer of In Confidence, a series of one-to-one interviews, featuring leading figures from the arts. Presented by Laurie Taylor, this production for Sky Arts was well received in a television review by the Daily Telegraph, with the Telegraph noting that "In an age of soapy soundbites, Sky Arts hour-long interview strand is a serious attempt to delve deeper into its subjects."[9] Guests included Peter Maxwell Davies, Lily Allen, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Richard Dawkins, Cleo Laine, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, Kathy Burke, Stephen Fry, Andre Previn, Jackie Mason, and Danny Baker. 72 programmes over four series were transmitted.^{[citation needed]}

Television

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Lewis-Smith has appeared in a number of his productions for British television:

• In 1989, he wrote and presented eighteen episodes of Buy-gones for Club X on Channel 4, and contributed sketch scripts for Central's Spitting Image
• Up Your Arts (compiled from his contributions to Channel 4 show Club X; 1992)[10]
• Inside Victor Lewis-Smith (1993) (in which he is a virtually unseen character). This BBC2 series purported to be based within the Frank Bough Memorial Zip Injury Wing of St. Reith's, a BBC hospital for its fallen stars. The series takes place inside the head of a man completely saturated with television, and suffering from a hyperactive spleen.
• TV Offal on Channel 4 (pilot 1997; series 1998)
• TV Offal Prime Cuts on Channel 4; 1999
• Ads Infinitum for BBC Two (pilot 1996; two series, 1998 and 2000)
• Z For Fake for BBC Two in 2001 (8 programmes)
• The Barftas for Channel 4 in 2002 [10]
• The Vicious Circle for Channel 5 (UK) in 2002
• Here's a Piano I Prepared Earlier for BBC Four (2005, narrator and producer)
• Jake on the Box for BBC Four (2006, narrator and producer)

Radio and recordings

On 30 May 1988, his first programme for BBC Radio 1, with producer John Walters, under the pseudonym Steve Nage was broadcast, parodying the Simon Bates-style mid-Atlantic delivery of Radio 1 disc jockeys of the time.^{[citation needed]}

Lewis-Smith's company Associated-Rediffusion made two series of the comedy show Victor Lewis-Smith for BBC Radio 1, for which he won a Best Comedy Radio Programme award in the 1990 British Comedy Awards. These programmes are noted for his prank calls which influenced Kayvan Novak and Sacha Baron Cohen.[11]

Lewis-Smith's prank calls attracted some controversy at the time of their first broadcast: in The Sunday Times on 15 April 1990, Paul Donovan opined that Lewis-Smith's hoaxes were "repugnant". However, The Guardian's Lucy Mangan described some of the recordings as being "touched with genius".[12] Writing about Lewis-Smith's hoax phone calls in The Times Higher Education, Sally Feldman observed that "He chooses his victims carefully, pricking the pompous and the powerful in the very best traditions of satire. His favourite target is the media, his pranks intended to expose their smugness, their laziness and their gullibility."[13] An audio sample of a call to London Weekend Television appears at the start of Towers of Dub by the Orb.

Writing

In the 1980s Lewis-Smith took over from Julie Burchill in writing weekly columns for Time Out magazine. He also wrote weekly columns during the same period for the short-lived Sunday Correspondent and The Mail on Sunday (where he often substituted for Burchill), as well as Esquire magazine. He has also written as food critic for The Independent, and was restaurant critic for Harpers & Queen magazine from 1995 to 1998 as well as The Guardian, where he combined comedy writing and food criticism to help create the now commonplace modern genre of amusing food writing.

In 1992, Lewis-Smith began a long association with the London Evening Standard, contributing daily television reviews along with other writers, as well as occasional restaurant reviews and travel articles. It was announced in June 2007 that he would be retiring from his daily television column.[14]

Since 1993, he has been compiler of the "Funny Old World" column of bizarre news items in Private Eye, where he replaced Christopher Logue. In 2011, he was living in Cumbria and never visited the magazine's London office.[15] He wrote a weekly page for the Daily Mirror for some years until 2003. From autumn 2004 to April 2005 he was the resident restaurant critic of The Guardian's Saturday magazine supplement.[16][17]

His books include Buy-Gones and Inside the Magic Rectangle, a collection of his early Evening Standard TV reviews and TV Reviews, a collection of his Evening Standard TV reviews since 2000 (published in 2011).

Honorary doctorate

He received an honorary doctorate (D.Litt.) from the University of Westminster in November 2008.[13]

Legal

In June 2006, the television chef Gordon Ramsay, his production company and his producer accepted an out-of-court settlement of £75,000 from Associated Newspapers, after an article in London's Evening Standard written by Lewis-Smith alleged that Ramsay had faked television scenes and installed an incompetent chef. Ramsay said at the time, "We have never done anything in a cynical, fake way." However, a year later, Channel 4 admitted that a scene in another of Ramsay's programmes had been faked, and apologised to viewers.[18]

On 28 July 2006, hypnotist Paul McKenna successfully sued the Daily Mirror for libel over articles written by Lewis-Smith from 1997 alleging that McKenna had deliberately misled the public with a fake PhD, having obtained the qualification from the non-accredited, LaSalle University, in the United States whose principal had since been imprisoned for making misleading claims about the status of degrees he handed out to candidates.[19] He later accepted damages of £25,000.[20]

References

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