TV and music star tarnished his fame with a liking for questionable company

Kenny Lynch, who has died aged 81, was one of the first black entertainers to achieve stardom in Britain in the early 1960s, when he toured with the Beatles and had a Top 10 hit with Up On The Roof, a 1962 cover of a Drifters song.

But his cheeky image as a comedian took a knock in 1971 when he was named by the

News of the World in its revelations of the socalled BBC payola scandal, in which singer Janie Jones was said to have offered prostitutes to BBC staff in return for their plugging certain records.

Unusually versatile, Lynch could range from stand-up comedy to crooning the great American songbook in his

Sinatra tribute act. He was also a talented songwriter, and with the

American Mort Shuman penned the Small Faces’ breakthrough hit, Sha-la-la-la-lee , in 1966. The band hated it, but it brought them enormous success, charting at No 3.

In between his chart successes, Lynch offered an insight into the emerging pop scene in a lecture he gave to students at the Chelsea College of Science and Technology, explaining some of the pitfalls of showbiz life. He liked to boast that, in 1963, he was the first artist to cover a Beatles song, Misery, a number on the group’s first album which he had heard them compose on a tour bus when they were still comparatively unknown.

John Lennon and Paul Mccartney had originally offered the song to Helen Shapiro, the star of the tour – Lynch had second billing, ahead of the Beatles – but she said it was too dreary. In the event, Lynch’s version of Misery flopped. For Lennon, Lynch’s soulful treatment was ruined by the contribution of guitarist Bert Weedon, a musician Lennon detested. ‘‘I would have played if you’d asked me,’’ Lennon said.

Lynch could be imprudent in his choice of company. His reputation narrowly survived the payola scandal, in which he was numbered among those attending ‘‘parties’’ at Jones’ house in Kensington, although Jones herself insisted that he never participated in any of the orgies that ensued.

Nevertheless, two years later, Lynch’s name was mentioned in the course of a highprofile court case by one of Jones’ call-girls, who said in evidence that she had heard talk of getting Lynch’s ‘‘heavies’’ to go after the girls if they went to the police.

At the subsequent Old Bailey trial, another prostitute testified that Lynch and one of Jones’ clients had taken it in turns to have sex with her while she was dressed in a child’s playsuit and holding a teddy bear. It was said that the client watched through a two-way mirror while Lynch posed as the girl’s stepfather.

Lynch kept raffish company all his life. With the Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, the one-time gangland enforcer Freddie

Foreman, and other superannuated gangsters and their henchmen, he attended the funeral in 2007 of Joey Pyle, a former professional boxer with links to both the Kray and Richardson gangs.

Yet a year earlier Lynch had serenaded the Queen and Prince Philip at a surprise 80th birthday party for the sovereign at a restaurant in Mayfair. He crooned several wartime numbers, prompting an appreciative thumbs-up from the prince.

One of 13 children of a Caribbean seaman and an English mother from Canning Town, Kenneth Lynch was born in Stepney, east London. He left school at 15 and, after taking various jobs, did national service and was the regimental featherweight boxing champion.

In parallel with his singing career, Lynch appeared regularly in television dramas, starting in 1964 when he played Lucky, a West

Indian singer-guitarist, in Kingsley Amis’ A Question About Hell. He starred as a Cockney workman in Johnny Speight’s comedy series Curry and Chips and, in 1972, with the actor Harry Fowler, hosted the children’s show Get This!, which combined comedy with bite-sized facts and information. In 2012 he played the racist Kenny, a black man who disliked Indians in Citizen Khan, billed as BBC Television’s first South Asian comedy.

In 1996, Lynch and his golfing friends

Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck, billing themselves as the Three Fivers, recorded a version of Winter Wonderland in what they called a ‘‘cheeky tribute’’ to the opera singers Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, known collectively as the Three Tenors. The operatic trio took legal steps to stop the variety veterans from ‘‘abusing and vulgarising’’ their reputations.

He was appointed an OBE in 1970, and remained a lively raconteur, television personality and occasional actor. He is survived by two daughters. – Telegraph Group