Steven Moffat pays tribute to TV legend Beryl Vertue
Moffat honours his "friend, holiday companion, drinking buddy and mother-in-law" who died on 12th February 2022.
Beryl Vertue 1931–2022
"Did you ever encounter sexism?" I asked the woman who was to become my mother-in-law. This was a very long time ago and I was an earnest young man. "No," said Beryl Vertue. "Would you like a cup of tea?"
Context: I’d just started going out with Sue, Beryl’s daughter. I was a TV scriptwriter with a slightly messy career, suddenly involved with two industry greats and trying not to feel too outclassed (26 years later, still no luck). Sue’s CV was already terrifying but Beryl’s kind of blew my mind. The Goons, Spike Milligan, Galton & Simpson, Tommy, Robert Stigwood, Till Death Us Do Part, Daleks, Men Behaving Badly... Where did you even start with a career like that?
There isn’t the space here to talk about all she did. If you’re interested, and you should be, there’s a wonderful article on comedy.co.uk called Beryl Vertue: the Woman Who Changed Her World by Graham McCann. Read it and feel your eyebrows climbing out of the top of your head.
A couple of highlights so you get the picture. You know when they remake shows in other countries? Like The Office or any shows like that? That was Beryl’s idea. No one had thought of that until, one day, sitting in her office, it occurred to her that a show like Till Death Us Do Part was too distinctively British to work anywhere else – but the scripts and the characters and the ideas could work everywhere. And so Till Death Us Do Part became the American megahit All in the Family and Steptoe and Son became Sanford and Son and Upstairs Downstairs became Beacon Hill… and the business of television changed for ever. All because of a thought Beryl had one day in her office.
On another day, in her role as a writer’s agent, she read some scripts by her client Terry Nation for some new, kiddie, sci-fi show being made by the BBC (I think it was called Doctor Who) and she noticed some characters in it that she thought might become rather popular. She quickly adjusted Terry Nation’s contract so he retained the rights to those characters, and the BBC readily agreed. Of course they did. I mean, who’d ever even heard of the Daleks? And so Terry Nation became a rich man and the BBC learnt a lesson in commercial exploitation that led to BBC Enterprises, and then BBC Worldwide and now BBC Studios.
There’s so much more I could tell you – too much, it sometimes seems, to have fitted into her 90 years – but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about my friend, my holiday companion, my drinking buddy and my mother-in-law. The woman I am going to miss so much.
If you’d met her, you’d have liked her because absolutely everybody did. You’d have thought she was funny, and kind, and terribly polite, and uncommonly interested in everything you had to say. Aside from the easy confidence and the shiny jacket, you’d probably have described her as perfectly ordinary in the best sort of way. And you’d have been right on all those points; she was funny, kind and very sort of normal. And when she breezed into all those meetings with the great and the good – and the terrible and the terrifying – and got them to agree to things they barely understood at the time, it was only because she had one fairly useful advantage: she was the smartest human being in every room she ever walked into.
That was Beryl. You might think she was humble; actually, she just wasn’t arrogant. You might mistake her for unassuming; in fact, she just failed to be insecure. You might dismiss her as naive; and then realise you’d just signed away the Daleks.
For all her terrifying laser focus, she could switch it all off in a moment. The second she was off duty she was as giddy and silly as anyone could be. Her daughters called her the Giggler-in-Chief and she earned that title every day. I remember once on holiday, in some beach bar somewhere, she declared her drink to be far too strong, and added some orange juice.
"It’s still the same amount alcoholic," protested David, her other son-in-law. "You just put more orange juice in."
"I nearly understand," replied Beryl, polishing off the drink and ordering another one.
Despite facing down some truly unpleasant and powerful people without a blink or a flicker in her smile, she rather hated confrontation. If you happened to make a remark she disliked or found distasteful (like a marginally critical comment about the royal family), she just drifted off into an impenetrable vagueness, smiled distractedly, and made you a cup of tea.
And so it was when I asked her about the sexism she must have encountered over the years: she just dismissed the idea, and drifted quickly away from the unpleasant subject and towards the kettle. Ah, but I was young and pompous and not to be thwarted. "No, there’s a lot of sexism in this industry," I mansplained to one of the industry’s most experienced women. "You must have encountered it."
"Oh, I suppose there was a silly man now and then," she conceded.
"And how did you deal with them?" I asked. At last I was going to find out about Beryl’s struggle with the patriarchy.
"Oh, I don’t know," she replied, handing me a cup of tea. "I expect I probably fired them."
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