Sydney Lotterby
Bafta-winning comedy veteran behind Porridge and Yes Minister
SYDNEY LOTTERBY, who has died aged 93, was not a household name, yet he was responsible, as producer and director, for many of the greatest hits of the “golden age” of British comedy.
One of the most respected practitioners of his craft, Lotterby was there at the birth of Porridge and Going Straight, Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, Alan
Bennett’s sketch show On The Margin, The Liver Birds, Ever Decreasing Circles and Open All Hours. He directed
four series of Last of the Summer Wine and the final
series of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. He also took over on Butterflies.
He won four Baftas for comedy – twice for Porridge, once for Going Straight and once for Yes Minister – and was nominated for 11 more, yet apart from credits the only time his name was spoken on television was in 1967 when Marty Feldman and John Cleese wrote a sketch entitled “The Four Sydney Lotterbies” for At Last the 1948 Show.
“Marty Feldman rang me and said, ‘I want to use your name’,” Lotterby recalled. “I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘It’s such an unusual name.’ These two guys started chatting. One said, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘My name’s Sydney Lotterby.’ ‘Funny, so’s mine.’ And eventually there were about 10 people with the name Sydney Lotterby, and they were all married to the same woman.”
Sydney Warren Lotterby was born on September 1 1926 and joined the BBC as a cameraman, then technical manager.
In 1958 he was asked to act as a minder for the producer Jack Good on the live pop music show Six-five Special. “In those days you weren’t allowed to get a camera in shot,” he recalled. “In all his enthusiasm Jack Good couldn’t stop. They wanted someone to sit in the gallery and keep an eye on him. Thank goodness the day I joined he left the BBC and after three months they said: ‘OK, you can have the job’.”
Lotterby’s first directing credit was in 1960 for two episodes of Charlie Drake. He made his producing debut in 1962 with Twist!, followed by Sykes And A … (1963-65), starring Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques.
Lotterby was modest about his role as midwife to so many hit sitcoms, once observing: “If you’ve got good actors and a good script, all you do is sit back and get on with it.” His role as director, he claimed, merely involved “making sure that the jokes get across”.
But he put his stamp on British comedy all the same, eschewing slapstick, overacting and the oldfashioned set-up and punchline routine, while never being attracted to the unstructured format of “alternative comedy” or the stripped-down production values of shows like The Royle Family.
Lotterby was the first to admit that not all his projects came off. There was a “not very good” sitcom called Gnomes of Dulwich, with Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd as garden gnomes. Bloomin’ Marvellous “didn’t take off ”, and he felt that Carla Lane’s Liver Birds had not stood the test of time: “These days it’s natural that if people are together they go to bed. We weren’t allowed to do that.”
But as Geoffrey Palmer (Lionel in As Time Goes By) observed, Lotterby was “immensely painstaking” and created “the most lovely working atmosphere”. The only actor to remain unimpressed was Richard Briers who, after the first two series of Ever Decreasing Circles (1984), insisted a new director be appointed. “I was told I wasn’t giving enough direction to the principal actor,” Lotterby said. “It hurt at the time but there we are.”
Lotterby was appointed OBE in 1994 and in 2007 was the recipient of Bafta’s special award.
Sydney Lotterby, born September 1 1926, died July 28 2020