Len Heath
Telegraph journalist and entrepreneur who wrote scripts for Peter Sellers and invented Captain Birds Eye
LEN HEATH, who has died aged 90, was a Daily Telegraph journalist, screenwriter, adman, marketing guru and entrepreneur; whether it was writing scripts for Peter Sellers comedies such as Two Way Stretch, or inventing the character of Captain Birds Eye, he loved words and deployed them with infectious wit.
He once joked that his motto was “spend your way out of poverty”, but he was adventurous rather than reckless. When Flying Enterprise, a 6,700-ton freighter, began listing in heavy seas 300 miles off the southwest coast of Ireland in January 1952, Heath was determined to reach her before the rest of the world’s media.
He chartered a trawler from a Falmouth pub, but the skipper was celebrating a birthday and his fellow revellers asked to come along for the ride. Heath agreed and they duly reached the stricken freighter before anyone else. He filed his global scoop from the yawing trawler, dictating his copy on the vessel’s primitive radio while the skipper held a sick bucket for him. It was his first front page story for the Telegraph.
As one employer observed: “Mr Heath is a very good person to have in a tight spot, into which he would almost certainly have got you in the first place.”
The son of a milkman for Express Dairies, Leonard Edwin William Heath was born at Paddington, London, on March 19 1927, opposite a pub called the Skiddaw, from which the local police used to take fighting drunks away on a Saturday night strapped to wheelbarrows. Educated at Christ’s Hospital on an LCC scholarship, he left aged 17 in 1944 and secured a job as a tea boy for the Telegraph’s lobby correspondents in Westminster, where his duties included fire watching.
He was called up in 1945 and served as a sub-lieutenant on the mine sweeper Florizel, off the north coast of Scotland and Greenland. In 1949 he returned to the Telegraph, where he met Ann, a secretary in the newsroom, who went on to become his wife.
Heath found he could turn his hand to most forms of newspaper writing and stood in, at various times, for the naval, shipping and motoring correspondents. (His exclusive story on the Flying Enterprise was the first time a general reporter had been given a byline.)
In 1955 he was persuaded by an actor friend, John “Plum” Warren, to work for the advertising agency Lintas in preparation for the imminent launch of commercial television. Despite knowing nothing about advertising, Heath wrote a script for Surf washing powder that became the third advert ever to be broadcast on British television.
Weekends were spent at the kitchen table, penning film scripts with Plum. Heath was credited as a co-writer on seven British comedies of which three – Up the Creek (1958), Two Way Stretch
(1960) and The Wrong Arm of the Law
(1963) – starred Peter Sellers. In his day job, Heath became marketing director of Birds Eye. As well as inventing Captain Birds Eye, he wrote the slogan “Sweet as the moment when the pod went pop” for Birds Eye frozen peas.
He went on to join a groundbreaking new advertising agency called KMP (renamed KMPH after he joined). He and his colleague Brian Palmer both claimed responsibility for the line “You can take a white horse anywhere”, used to advertise White Horse whisky, one of their most radical campaigns. It was also with Palmer that Heath developed a lifelong passion for sailing, culminating in an Atlantic crossing in 1990.
In 1969, KMPH renamed itself Kimpher, after floating on the London stock market, and by 1974 it was the fifth largest agency group in Britain. Heath stood down as a partner in 1975 and his next projects included setting up Writers in Business, an agency that wrote copy for companies, and the Consumer Connection, a market research firm.
But it was Imagination, a communications and design agency, that was to become Heath’s defining legacy. Co-founded in 1978 with Gary Withers, during the 1980s Imagination challenged the cult of the 30-second commercial with a light and sound show extravaganzas for clients such as Ford Motors, BT, BA and Cadbury. In the 1990s, Imagination presented the Dinosaurs exhibition at the Natural History Museum (1992) and was responsible for the Talk and Journey zones in the Millennium Dome (1999). Today, it is a global company with offices around the world.
In 2000 Heath retired to his home in the Surrey Hills, where he read, corresponded prolifically and enjoyed the Telegraph cryptic crossword.
He is survived by his wife and their three children.
Len Heath, born March 19 1927, died July 28 2017