William G Stewart
Gifted television producer and presenter best known as the sober quizmaster on Fifteen to One
WILLIAM G STEWART, who has died aged 84, brought the manic game show The Price Is Right to British television screens and later hosted one of television’s toughest quizzes, Fifteen to One.
A one-time BBC trainee, he made his name as the extrovert producer of situation comedies on ITV such as Bless This House (1971-76) and Love Thy Neighbour (1972-76). He followed his first game show success, Family Fortunes (1980-85), with The Price Is Right (1984-88), a format imported from America. It was hosted by the comedian Leslie Crowther, and British viewers had not seen anything like it.
The show was loud and brash, and one of its most striking features was the studio audience, largely consisting of coach parties, that Stewart would whip into a frenzy by rushing around in a shiny satin bomber jacket while Land of Hope and Glory blared from the studio speakers. By the time Crowther himself came on to pick contestants from the throng with the catchphrase “Come on down!”, the audience was at fever pitch.
Once in Crowther’s embrace, contestants had to estimate the cost of an assortment of items and in the final round they could pick from a range of big-ticket prizes by accurately estimating their total value. Stewart was unperturbed when the very first contestant, Mary Brown (chosen because her name rhymed with “Come on down!”), was paralysed with fear and remained rooted to her seat.
Within weeks of launching, The Price Is Right had trumped even Coronation Street to top the ratings with 16 million viewers, even though the Daily Mail had attacked its “unspeakable vulgarity, ghastly materialism and unedifying greed”. Launched at the end of a lengthy recession, the programme caught the acquisitive tenor of the times, but was axed in 1988, the year in which Stewart himself stepped in front of the cameras for the first time.
As producer of Fifteen to One for Channel 4, Stewart decided to host the quiz in person when he was unable find an alternative who would know enough about the background to the questions. These were mostly written by Stewart and could be extremely testing, as the contestants were whittled down from 15 to one eventual winner.
The format had been suggested to Stewart by a British Telecom salesman. In the gladiatorial first round, contestants were ranged in a half-circle behind what looked like small illuminated pulpits; they could pass the questioning to whichever of their rivals they nominated, hoping they might be vulnerable. With his refrain “Question or nominate?”, the bespectacled Stewart proved to be quite unlike any other quizmaster, conducting proceedings at a brisk trot, with a manner that was firm but fair. While throwing in the occasional quip, he would not tolerate any nonsense and always made sure the quiz was the star. He even sued a contestant who returned some years after his first appearance, ear-ringed, T-shirted and under an assumed name, in contravention of the rules. He retired in 2003 when the quiz was finally cancelled.
William Gladstone Stewart was born on July 15 1933 at Habrough near Grimsby, but was orphaned as a young boy and brought up in a children’s home at Sidcup. After National Service with the Royal Army Educational Corps attached to the King’s African Rifles, and a brief spell as a Butlin’s Redcoat, in 1958 he joined the BBC as a television call-boy in light entertainment, later working as a scene shifter.
After the 1959 general election, as Stewart would relate in a 2009 BBC4 documentary, he worked for several years as private secretary to the louche Labour MP Tom Driberg, who became a “mentor and something of a father figure”, though early on in the friendship Driberg attempted to seduce Stewart in a taxi and was rebuffed. “He taught me about art, literature and classical music,” Stewart remembered, “and he introduced me to the most amazing collection of his friends.”
In 1965, encouraged by Eric Sykes, he took a television directors’ course and went on to work on several ITV comedy series with Sykes as well as Al Read, Max Bygraves, Bruce Forsyth, Reg Varney, Frankie Howerd, Warren Mitchell, Bob Monkhouse and Tommy Cooper.
As producer and director of Bless
This House, starring the Carry On star Sid James, Stewart was unsure if the comedian was up to the role after rehearsals for the first show fell flat. But James himself explained that it was the final recording, not the rehearsals, that would bring out the best in him. In the event, the first episode of Bless This House was a great success, and Stewart made a point of never watching a full rehearsal again.
Among the other sitcoms he produced or directed were Father, Dear Father, Love Thy Neighbour (one of the first to tackle race relations, albeit in an unsophisticated way), My Good Woman, Spooner’s Patch and The Rag Trade. By the early 1970s he was producing and directing David Frost in The Frost Programme and The Frost Report, in which Stewart once had to descend, mortified, from the production gallery to the studio floor to tell Shirley Bassey she would have to come back the following night because Frost wanted to let an interview overrun after the commercial break.
In 1980 Stewart changed direction and had a hit with Family Fortunes, his first game show and another American format, which had impressed him on a visit to Los Angeles. He signed Bob Monkhouse as the host, and Stewart’s agent, Billy Marsh, negotiated a contract that paid him, as director and producer, £1,250 per programme – a stupendous deal considering that Stewart was churning out 12 programmes a week.
The idea was that two families would compete to guess the most likely responses to various questions, as canvassed in a survey of 100 people. Stewart had banned Monkhouse from making any off-colour jokes, but when one contestant, asked to name a film starring Humphrey Bogart, ventured the answer The African Queen, Monkhouse glanced at the scoreboard and asked: “Can we see Johnny Mathis up there?” Stewart cut it out of the final edit.
In 1982 he founded his own production company, Regent Productions, which made Fifteen To One, selling it in 1999 to Pearson Television. It later became part of Talkback Thames, the British arm of Fremantlemedia. In the mid-1990s he was called in as a consultant on a new game show with Chris Evans, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, and his advice was credited with transforming the programme’s prospects.
Stewart was a long-standing supporter of the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, and lobbied the European Parliament and Unesco on the subject.
In 2010, when he was 77, he was shortlisted to appear on Strictly Come Dancing. But he told the Telegraph that his agent was advised “that the BBC would not insure me – I was too old”.
Stewart was a Fellow of the Royal Television Society, being elected to its Hall of Fame in 2000, and president of the Media Society from 2003 to 2005.
William G Stewart was thrice married, firstly, in 1960, to Audrey Harrison, with whom he had a son and two daughters. After their divorce in 1976, he married the actress Sally Geeson, who starred in Bless This House, and with whom he had another son and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1986, and with his third wife, Laura Calland, the voice-over artist on Fifteen to One, he had two further daughters.
William G Stewart, born July 15 1933, died September 21 2017