ComedyCollective
Writers Project
"The Bad Erotic Fiction Award, for bad writing about sex, went to AA Gill. He told the organisers what they could do with it - but not very well." 28 November 1999
Independent, The (London), Feb 11, 2000 by John Random AS A comic writer, Ivan Shakespeare would have been the first to see the irony of the manner of his death - felled by a heart attack in the act of keeping fit. (He was jogging at the time.) A commissioned writer on Radio 2's The News Huddlines and Week Ending and The Beaton Generation on Radio 4, he most recently worked on Bremner, Bird and Fortune for Channel 4, in which his talent for sharp, political satire found a perfect home. Born and brought up in West Bromwich, he escaped at the relatively late age of 23 to read Sociology at Lancaster University. After various jobs he moved to London to pursue a career as an accountant, working for - among others - the Bank of Bermuda, where he met his partner, Elspeth McLean. In 1989 he won a competition in Time Out and took the decision to strike out as a full-time writer. It was especially brave of Shakespeare, since he was the least pushy person imaginable and always feared that his talents would be outshone. He was wrong, of course, and soon established himself in the corridors of BBC Radio Comedy, as well as becoming a stalwart of the live topical satire show Newsrevue at the Canal Cafe in Little Venice in north London. In both places, he brought his own distinctive touch to the difficult business of satirising a Tory government that was increasingly beyond parody. Ivan Shakespeare was an immensely erudite and cultured man, the north London home he shared with Elspeth McLean crammed with a collection of more than 400 music tapes - chiefly classical - and a shelf-buckling 4,000 books. It was to the Bloomsbury Group that he turned for his sitcom A Square of One's Own, which first went out on Radio 4 in May 1996 and was repeated a year later. At the time of his death, he was busier than ever with screenplays, a radio play and a TV sitcom all in various stages of development, and on a personal note seemed happier and more settled than he had ever been. Sometimes exasperated, but never self-pitying, Shakespeare was easy-going and generous in his praise of other writers. Nor was he above being the butt of jokes himself, as when he agreed to appear on television as a David Mellor lookalike (complete with Chelsea strip). He once turned up to a wedding in a second-hand suit that he'd snapped up for a song. "Yes, it's bespoke," said Ivan to another guest, "Unfortunately, it's bespoke for someone else." Ivan Shakespeare, writer: born West Bromwich, Staffordshire 19 July 1952; died London 3 February 2000.
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