I was assistant district administrator at St Thomas' hospital in London in the mid 1980s, when Michael Winner approached us for permission to use the old Lambeth hospital site as a location for Death Wish 3. The hospital had closed, though the nurses home was still in use, and we were planning a community care centre for part of the site, so its future was in limbo.

I approached an old friend, Roger Stalley, a fellow of Trinity College Dublin, to find out how much Trinity had been paid for allowing filming of Educating Rita. I asked Winner for half that amount, to reflect the different circumstances. He was outraged and told me later that he phoned Lewis Gilbert, producer and director of Educating Rita, to berate him for overpaying. Nevertheless, Winner eventually agreed to the fee, due to the excellent negotiating skills of Helen Peston, the hospital's head of communications, and indeed added an extra £2,000 to upgrade the dining room in the nurses home, to include the Winner wine bar.

Mary Applebey, who has died aged 96, was appointed in 1951 the general secretary of the National Association of Mental Health, the forerunner organisation to Mind. Mary had experienced the reality of mental health issues within her immediate family and her crusade over the next 25 years was to find new ways of transforming the lives of those suffering with mental illness.

From relatively insignificant beginnings Mary developed NAMH to become hugely influential, employing 200 people and regularly consulted by government, the judiciary, the NHS and social work organisations. In the early 70s she had a fierce battle with the Church of Scientology, which is opposed to psychiatric treatment and sought to destroy NAMH by flooding it with new members. However, Mary finally won in the High Court in a case that proved seminal for the law relating to charities. Her immense contribution to the development of public awareness of the problems of people with mental illness was recognised when she was made a CBE in 1975, by which time the organisation had become Mind. She was a vice-president of Mind until she died.

Mary was born on Bastille Day, an appropriate date for someone who was feisty, energetic and sceptical of the established order of things throughout her life. From an academic family, in 1985 she effortlessly gained a place at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she read modern languages – and met her lifelong companion Ad Leathart. There, too, she met my mother, Joy, becoming a great friend to my family and later an unofficial aunt to me and my siblings. After time in the War and Foreign Offices, including a stint in postwar Berlin, for which she was made an OBE, Mary was appointed general secretary of NAMH.

Mary was a busy public servant. A magistrate with the Inner London juvenile court, she chaired the bench for many years. She contributed to government inquiries on mental health and on social services. She was on the appeals panel for both the BBC and ITV, a member of the immigration appeal tribunals and a board member of Christian Aid. But she probably took most delight in chairing the selection committees for the civil service. Latterly, Mary became increasingly involved in the activities of Christ Church, Chelsea, including their work for the homeless – for whom, at the age of 94, she was still involved in making sandwiches in the night shelter.

Mary was respected and loved for her quiet wisdom and sound judgement, her broad sympathies and her positive outlook. Her delight in contact with people of all generations made her an uplifting presence in their lives. Ad predeceased her. She is survived by two nieces and a nephew.

BBC producer and director with a key role in the success of Morecambe and Wise

John Ammonds, who has died aged 88, was one of British television's finest producer/directors specialising in the field of light entertainment. He shaped countless peak-time shows during the so-called "golden age" of TV; and helped Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise and many other major stars reach the summit of their small-screen careers, setting a standard of quality in terms both of content and form that continues to command respect.

Among his distinctive contributions to the success of the Morecambe and Wise show was the droll little dance with which Eric and Ernie ended each performance (Ammonds got the idea from seeing Groucho Marx do something similar in the 1932 film comedy Horse Feathers), the deployment of star guests as unlikely comic stooges, and Eric's use of the close-up to make conspiratorial remarks to the viewers (a conceit that has inspired many imitations). He also ensured, as the writer Eddie Braben's amiably relentless taskmaster ("If you sent him a Christmas card, you'd expect him to send it back for a rewrite"), that the standard of the scripts remained remarkably high.

Ammonds was a calmly efficient organiser and encourager of diverse talents, temperaments and techniques; he could be creative and flexible as well as disciplined and managerial; he possessed an exceptionally sharp eye and ear for detail; and he always acted as though he was the servant of the public rather than of his profession. The most polished of populists, he epitomised the BBC's traditional dictum about "giving viewers what they want – but better than they expected it".

He was born in Kennington, London, to working-class parents. His mother, Jessie, one of 16 children, had married his father, John, a watchmaker, in what John junior described as a "shotgun wedding" and he would say later that he remembered only the arguments between this "quite unsuited" couple during his formative years.

It was his father who introduced him to the world of entertainment. As a frustrated actor with a passion for the work of Charles Dickens, Ammonds senior sometimes co-opted his son into the amateur dramatic troupe he had formed, the Dickensian Tabard Players, to tour the workhouses and prisons in and around Southwark. One of the most vivid memories John would retain of these juvenile performances was of the occasion when, aged about 13, he appeared as Oliver Twist in a production staged inside Holloway prison before an audience of "extremely interested" women prisoners: "They were good and started shouting and screaming only after Bill Sikes had killed Nancy."

Although John won a scholarship to a grammar school at Sutton in Surrey, he found much of his education uninspiring, preferring to amuse himself at home by constructing a variety of crystal and cat's whisker radio sets in his father's garden shed. Rather than stay on to complete his Higher School Certificate, he left at the age of 15 and instead sat the entrance examination to become a civil servant at the London county council (mainly because it seemed to promise a job for life and a pension at the end of it). After sampling the job on a part-time basis, however, he decided to try something else.

His career in broadcasting began in 1941, after he sent a speculative letter to the BBC asking if there were any openings for a junior engineer and was invited to apply to become a sound effects operator in the corporation's engineering division. He spent the next 13 years in the BBC's variety department at London, Bristol and Bangor, before moving to Manchester to be a producer. By the mid-1950s, he was responsible for several popular radio shows, working with such popular northern performers as Jimmy Clitheroe, Dave Morris and, in their debut series, Morecambe and Wise.

Moving into television at the end of the decade, John soon won a reputation not only for the competence of his productions but also for his knack of embellishing the image of his stars. It was his idea, for example, to begin Harry Worth's shows with a much-mimicked optical illusion, involving his "levitated" reflection in a shop window, and his idea again to get Val Doonican to croon one song each week sitting in the rocking chair that ended up being his trademark.

It was after he was reunited with Morecambe and Wise in 1968, however, that John achieved his greatest success, proving himself, not only as producer/director but also as an all-purpose creative sounding board, as invaluable to the pair as George Martin had been to the Beatles. He taught them how best to use their talents for television, turning their show into the most admired entertainment of the time.

He left the show in 1974, after eight series, in order to devote more time to his wife, Wyn, whom he had married in 1952 and had then recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. However, he continued to oversee numerous other productions for both the BBC and ITV, including shows featuring Mike Yarwood, Dick Emery and Les Dawson. He was also reunited once again with Morecambe and Wise when they asked him to supervise their final few shows for Thames.

Ammonds – who was appointed MBE in 1975 for his services to entertainment – retired from broadcasting in 1988. Living in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, he continued to help care for his wife until her death in 2009, and acted as a wise and generous adviser to many writers and documentary makers keen to chronicle the era of television he had graced.

He is survived by a daughter, Jane.

• John Ammonds, radio and television producer and director, born 21 May 1924; died 13 February 2013

Our mother, Alison Kelly, who has died of metastatic breast cancer aged 65, was a determined advocate for equality of opportunity and a tireless adventurer. As a sociologist working at the University of Manchester from 1976 to 1988, she co-directed the action research project Girls Into Science and Technology (Gist), focusing on the science education of girls.

Born in Earl's Court, London, she went to school in Birmingham. Her experience as the only girl in her A-level physics class, followed by a degree in physics, an MSc in astrophysics and a PhD in educational statistics, convinced her that more girls would study "hard" sciences if the cultural and policy conditions were right. The Gist project was the most wide-ranging of its kind, and demonstrated that changing textbooks, raising teacher awareness, improving careers advice and providing positive female role models could have a dramatic impact on girls' attitude to science and their career ambitions.

This rational exploration of the causes of inequality also drove her work from 1988 to 1996 at Stockport education authority, where she focused on the use of free school meals as an indicator of social deprivation in relation to school performance. This measure is now used nationwide to contextualise exam results and identify truly underperforming schools.

An activist by nature, Alison threw herself into causes ranging from the renovation of the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester to the languishing local Liberal Democrats. Outspoken and direct, she was always full of energy and committed. She was also a great adventurer. As a 15-year-old schoolgirl, she secretly hitchhiked to Rome with a friend to see the pope. Two formative years were spent teaching science in a girls' convent school in Swaziland, followed by spells living in Sweden, the US and latterly Luxembourg, where she played a key role in the British Ladies Club of Luxembourg and in The Network, a business women's networking and mentoring organisation.

She was determined that cancer and chemotherapy would not stop her trekking in the Himalayas or strolling round Tiananmen Square. Even when she stayed in one place, she brought the world to her: with her husband, Dan, whom she married in 1969, she brought us up in an international household in Manchester. We shared our home and lives with families from all over the world, including Turkey, Ireland, China, Ethiopia and (the then) Yugoslavia, many of whom remain good friends.

She is survived by Dan, us; her parents, Ronald and Jo; her brother, Chris, and sister, Viki; and two granddaughters, Georgina and Athena.

Record producer and songwriter behind the Shangri-Las' 1960s girl-group hit Leader of the Pack

"Is she really going out with him?" is the spoken introduction to Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las, one of the most evocative examples of the "girl group" genre of 1960s pop music. The producer and co-writer of that record and other Shangri-Las hits was George "Shadow" Morton, who has died aged 72 of cancer. Morton's other productions included Janis Ian's controversial hit Society's Child, as well as recordings by heavy rock bands Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly, and punk pioneers the New York Dolls.

Leader of the Pack, released in the US in 1964, was the most remarkable of the Shangri-Las' hits; a story of a middle-class girl's love for a motorcycle gang leader that ends in a fatal accident. Morton added the sound of a motorbike to the record and lead singer Mary Weiss's keening vocals made it a No 1 hit in the US. The success of a parody, Leader of the Laundromat by the Detergents, in 1965 set the seal on the song's classic status.

In Britain, recent disturbances involving mods and rockers caused timid broadcasters to ban the track. Despite – or because of – this, Leader of the Pack was a hit in the UK in 1965, and again in 1972 and 1976. Leader of the Pack has also been used in a number of films, including Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, for which Morton unsuccessfully sued for payment.

Morton was born in Richmond, Virginia, but grew up in Brooklyn. When he was a young teenager his parents decided to move to the more salubrious suburb of Hicksville, Long Island. His first love was jazz (a phrase from a Modern Jazz Quartet tune was echoed in his first Shangri-Las hit) but at high school, he joined a doo-wop vocal group. After dropping out of education he found himself on the fringes of the music business, recording a couple of obscure singles with the Markys.

In 1964, he discovered that an acquaintance from Long Island, Ellie Greenwich, had become a successful songwriter. Visiting Greenwich at her office in the Brill Building on Broadway, Morton was asked what he did by her husband and writing partner, Jeff Barry. With bravado he replied untruthfully that he wrote songs. Barry, who was to give him his nickname of "Shadow" because of his habit of silently disappearing from social settings, challenged him to come back with some examples and Morton hurriedly put together a recording session with the Shangri-Las. The result was a seven-minute track called Remember (Walking in the Sand), with sound effects of seagull cries and lengthy recitative passages. After Barry and Greenwich had helped Morton to edit and re-record the song, it was issued on the Red Bird label and became a top 20 hit.

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As well as Leader of the Pack, Morton and the Shangri-Las had several other hit singles in the US over the next two years, including I Can Never Go Home Anymore, Give Him a Great Big Kiss, and Past, Present and Future.

From the beginning, Morton acquired, and cultivated, a reputation for eccentricity and unpredictability. As a teenager, the pianist and singer Billy Joel played on the first demo recording of Remember (Walking in the Sand) and recalled that Morton "had a very theatrical way of producing; he used to wear a cape in the studio and was very intimidating to a young kid like me". Weiss described him as "colourful, unique and extremely talented, but very difficult to get into a room at a scheduled time".

When the Red Bird company folded in 1966 Morton took the Shangri-Las to the Mercury label, where they had less success. By this time, Morton had become the producer of the 15-year-old Janis Ian. He chose Society's Child, a tale of a doomed interracial romance, as her first single. However, as Ian recounted in her autobiography, Morton tried to persuade her to censor the lyric, saying: "I can guarantee you a No 1 record if you'll change just one word. Just change 'black' to anything else." Ian refused, and the record was a hit, but not a chart topper. Morton went on to produce Ian's first two albums.

He next produced the first album of the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, who played rock music on classical instruments and featured future film-music composer Michael Kamen. Morton went on to work with a New York rock group called the Pigeons who specialised in lengthy, ponderous versions of recent hits. After their name was changed to Vanilla Fudge, Shadow Morton produced the hit You Keep Me Hanging On, a barely recognisable variation on a Supremes' recording, which was a US top 10 hit in 1968.

Although he was to produce three albums by Vanilla Fudge, Morton's alcohol consumption had affected his standing on the New York scene. In the late 60s, he found less work, with his only subsequent success being the 17-minute piece In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (a garbled version of the phrase "in the garden of Eden") by the heavy rock band Iron Butterfly, which he was asked to supervise by Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records. In one of several rambling interviews he gave late in life, Morton claimed that he contributed very little to the session because of his inebriation.

In the early 70s, he made a single with British group Mott the Hoople and produced Too Much Too Soon by the New York Dolls. This failed to enhance the group's reputation, which was soon to be revived by the British impresario Malcolm McLaren. He also worked with the all-female rock band Isis and made records with the singer-songwriter Tom Pacheco.

By the end of the 70s, Morton had left the music business. He was successfully treated for alcoholism in the 80s, and switched careers to design golf clubs.

Morton's marriage to Lois Berman ended in divorce, and he is survived by three daughters, three grandchildren and a sister.

• George Francis (Shadow) Morton, songwriter and record producer, born 3 September 1940; died 14 February 2013

Genial star of the sitcom The Good Life who impressed in a range of roles on stage

When he played Hamlet as a young man, Richard Briers, who has died aged 79 after suffering from a lung condition, said he was the first Prince of Denmark to give the audience half an hour in the pub afterwards. He was nothing if not quick. In fact, wrote the veteran critic WA Darlington, he played Hamlet "like a demented typewriter". Briers, always the most modest and self-deprecating of actors, and the sweetest of men, relished the review, happy to claim a place in the light comedians' gallery of his knighted idols Charles Hawtrey, Gerald du Maurier and Noël Coward.

"People don't realise how good an actor Dickie Briers really is," said John Gielgud. This was probably because of his sunny, cheerful disposition and the rat-a-tat articulacy of his delivery. "You're a great farceur," said Coward, delivering another testimony, "because you never, ever, hang about."

Although he excelled in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn, and became a national figure in his television sitcoms of the 1970s and 80s, notably The Good Life, he could mine hidden depths on stage, giving notable performances in Ibsen, Chekhov and, for Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance company, Shakespeare.

The Good Life defined his career, though he spent a lot of time getting away from his television persona as the self-sufficient, Surbiton smallholding dweller Tom Good in the brilliant series – 30 episodes between 1975 and 1978 – written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, and produced by John Howard Davies.

Paired with Felicity Kendal as his wife, Barbara, and pitted against their formidable, snobbish neighbour Margo Leadbetter (Penelope Keith) and her docile husband, Jerry (Paul Eddington), he gave one of the classic good-natured comedy sitcom performances of our time. Briers was already an established West End star when he started in The Good Life. In the same year as the first series, he up-ended expectation as Colin in Absent Friends, Ayckbourn's bitter comedy about death, and the death of love, at the Garrick theatre. Like the playwright, he proved once and for all that he "did" bleak, too.

Briers was born in Raynes Park, south-west London, and educated at schools in Wimbledon. He described his bookmaker father, Joseph, as a feckless drifter. His mother, Morna Richardson, was a pianist. Richard's cousin was the gap-toothed film star Terry-Thomas. While doing his national service with the RAF, Briers attended evening classes in drama. He then worked as an office clerk before taking a place at Rada, where he won the silver medal. He won a scholarship to the Liverpool Rep for the season of 1956-57 and was never out of work thereafter. At Liverpool he met Ann Davies, whom he married in 1957; they spent most of their married life in Chiswick, west London, in a house they bought around 10 years later.

Seasons in Leatherhead and Coventry were followed by a London debut in 1959 at the Duke of York's as Joseph Field in Lionel Hale's Gilt and Gingerbread. He played in Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache at the Arts theatre and went on tour as Gerald Popkiss in Ben Travers's Rookery Nook, before giving an irresistible Roland Maule, the importunate playwright from Uckfield, in Coward's Present Laughter, at the Vaudeville in 1965.

He was back at the Duke of York's in Ayckbourn's first London hit, Relatively Speaking, in 1967, forming a wonderful quartet with Celia Johnson, Jennifer Hilary and Michael Hordern, who inadvertently trod on a garden rake that sprang up to hit him on the nose ("What hoe?!"). He was Moon, the stand-in critic, in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound at the Criterion in 1968 ("a performance of sharp hopelessness and vindictiveness," said Helen Dawson), and played several roles in Michael Frayn's The Two of Us, with Lynn Redgrave, at the Garrick in 1970. He took over from Alan Bates in Simon Gray's Butley in 1972 and proceeded, he said genially, to empty theatres all over Britain in the leading role of Richard III on tour.

He regained his equilibrium, and his comedy momentum, as Sidney Hopcroft in Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular (set on three separate Christmas Eves) at the Criterion in 1973. So he was well-established by the watershed year of 1975 and The Good Life. His first leading television role had been in 1962 as a young barrister in Brothers in Law, scripted by Frank Muir and Denis Norden. He followed that with five series of Marriage Lines (1963-66) by Richard Waring, in which he was a lowly clerk, George Starling, married to Prunella Scales as Kate. The Good Life launched him on a much more varied theatre diet, including Ibsen's The Wild Duck at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1980; George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man (his was a richly nuanced, physical performance as the battle-weary Bluntschli) in 1981; Ray Cooney's Run for Your Wife (as a bigamous taxi driver, with Bernard Cribbins as his "cover" and apologist) in 1983; and Sir John Vanbrugh's The Relapse at Chichester in 1986, as the hilarious chatterbox Lord Foppington.

John Sessions was also in The Relapse, and his friend Branagh came to see it. This led directly to Briers working with Branagh on many subsequent projects: as a perhaps too likeable Malvolio ("My best part, and I know it," he said) in an otherwise wintry Twelfth Night at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, in 1987, and on a world tour with the Renaissance company as a ropey King Lear (the set really was a mass of ropes, the production dubbed "String Lear") and a sagacious, though not riotously funny, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

He was much more successful as Uncle Vanya, directed by Branagh in 1991, in which his body, said one critic, seemed to be in a state of permanent civil war between his adoration of Yelena and a simmering outrage about his treatment at the professor's hands.

Briers's television work in the mid-to-late 1980s was concentrated on two hit series: Ever Decreasing Circles, again written by Esmonde and Larbey for the BBC, in which he played Martin Bryce, a well-organised fusspot obsessed with law and order; and All in Good Faith, written by John Kane for Thames TV, and produced by Davies, in which he excelled as the Rev Philip Lambe, a caring vicar in a wealthy rural parish, pining for the inner-city hubbub. Reunited with Eddington, who was by then very ill with skin cancer, he played Jack in David Storey's Home in 1994 at Wyndham's, a moving display of forced grins and competitive come-backs. Collaborating with a new generation of theatre-makers, he was a crabbed and susceptible Scrooge in a chorus of black-garbed, quick-changing carollers in Neil Bartlett's version of A Christmas Carol at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1996.

Even more significantly, he and Geraldine McEwan played the nonagenarian couple in Eugène Ionesco's The Chairs, directed by Simon McBurney at the Royal Court (relocated at the Duke of York's during refurbishment). He was magnificent as the mouldy old white-haired janitor, master of the mop and bucket, supervising an invisible gathering to hear the very last message for humanity.

He owed his late-flourishing film career to Branagh, appearing in a string of his movies: as Bardolph in Henry V (1989), Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing (1993), the old blind man in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), a cantankerous old thespian in A Midwinter's Tale (1995), Polonius in Hamlet (1996) and Sir Nathaniel in the musical Love's Labour's Lost (2000).

His bond with the British public was renewed in the highly successful upmarket BBC soap Monarch of the Glen (2000-05): he was Hector MacDonald, best chum of Julian Fellowes as Lord Kilwillie, but was blown up trying to train his dog; he returned in a later series as a ghost.

The Ayckbourn connection was cemented in 2002 in a fine revival of Bedroom Farce at the Aldwych, with June Whitfield as his stage wife. In classic Briers fashion, he entered beaming with a cup of cocoa at entirely the wrong moment. He seemed to bid farewell to the stage as a touring Prospero in The Tempest in 2003, but returned unexpectedly in 2010 as the military relic Adolphus Spanker in Nicholas Hytner's mellow National Theatre revival of Dion Boucicault's London Assurance, alongside Fiona Shaw and Simon Russell Beale. It was sheer delight to be reminded of his natural comic vitality as he rambled on and on, the sound of gunshot still ringing in his ears from the sack of Copenhagen in 1807.

Briers became quietly disillusioned with contemporary television comedy and the cult of celebrity and reality shows, noting that people used to be magical because they were on television and that, now, "nobody's magical because everyone's on television".

He wrote several pleasant, light-hearted volumes, including Coward and Company (1987), A Little Light Weeding (1993) and, with his wife, A Taste of the Good Life (1995). He was made OBE in 1989 – "And I suppose you're getting this for making people laugh?" said the Queen, a great fan of The Good Life – and CBE in 2003.

He is survived by Ann and their daughters, Lucy and Kate.

• Richard David Briers, actor, born 14 January 1934; died 17 February 2013

The actor Richard Briers, best known for starring in the popular BBC comedy The Good Life, has died at the age of 79

Singer and guitarist who acted as a role model to the Beatles

It is generally recognised that the Beatles developed their frenetic stage act during lengthy engagements in the clubs of Hamburg's Reeperbahn district. Less well-known is the fact that a Hamburg-based English musician, Tony Sheridan, was something of a role model in this process, with Paul McCartney referring to him as "The Teacher". While in Germany, the Beatles made their first recording, as a backing group for Sheridan, who has died aged 72 after undergoing heart surgery.

He was born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity in Norwich, into a middle-class Irish family. At school he had a conventional classical music education, learning the violin, singing in the choir and performing in Gilbert and Sullivan. Everything changed in 1956 when, like many British youths, he heard Lonnie Donegan's skiffle record Rock Island Line. Sheridan took up the guitar and formed a skiffle group, the Saints, with school friends. After winning a local talent contest, they decided to try their luck at the famous Soho coffee bar the 2i's.

Most of the group soon returned home, but Sheridan decided to stay in London and look for work. He played regularly at the 2i's, acquired an electric guitar and in 1958 became a regular performer on the television show Oh Boy! Sheridan provided guitar accompaniment to Marty Wilde and other fledgling British rock'n'roll stars.

Eventually, he was booked on to package tours of the UK headed by American singers, culminating in his appearance down the bill on Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent's tour in 1960. After a show in Bristol, Sheridan asked the stars for a lift to London but he was turned down and thus avoided the road accident in which Cochran died and Vincent was seriously injured.

Soon afterwards, Sheridan moved to Hamburg. Some accounts state that he was getting away from an unhappy marriage, or from overdue hire purchase payments on his Martin guitar, or that his departure was due to a growing notoriety for truculence and unreliability. However, it was also the case that the owner of the Kaiserkeller club wanted an English group to purvey authentic rock'n'roll to his customers.

The first shows of Sheridan and the Jets – comprising other British players – drew admiring crowds. As more and more British performers were drawn to Hamburg, Sheridan revelled in his status as the king of the scene, behaving towards other musicians, according to one of them, "like a sergeant major".

In the summer of 1960 the Beatles arrived and soon fell under Sheridan's spell, emulating his increasingly anarchic stage antics and admiring his rabble-rousing skills as a rock'n'roller. One apocryphal anecdote had Sheridan and the Beatles playing Ray Charles's What'd I Say nonstop for 90 minutes. Other Liverpool groups who were booked into Hamburg clubs also acknowledged Sheridan's importance. Gerry Marsden said: "He was a genius, a great guitar player. I used to watch Tony every night and he influenced me a great deal."

When the Beatles returned to Hamburg in 1961, Sheridan had been offered a recording contract by Bert Kaempfert, a well-known bandleader. Kaempfert was not sympathetic to raw rock music and Sheridan compromised by agreeing to record two English-language songs known to German schoolchildren, When the Saints Go Marching In and My Bonnie. In need of accompanists, Sheridan brought the Beatles to the recording studio. It was a request for the resulting single release (a hit in Germany) in his Liverpool music store that first drew Brian Epstein's attention to the Beatles. Epstein soon became their manager.

After the Beatles left Hamburg, Sheridan continued to work and play hard with other visiting British bands until, in 1967, he took a band to perform for American troops in Vietnam. During this time, the band came under fire and one member was killed. It was erroneously reported that Sheridan himself had died, but he returned to Germany, where for much of the 1970s he worked for a radio station. In 1978, Hamburg's famous Star-Club reopened with Sheridan playing alongside the TCB Band, a group of musicians who had formerly backed Elvis Presley.

Over the years, Sheridan's association with the Beatles brought a stream of requests for interviews and appearances. He corresponded with the Japanese musicologist Toru Mitsui, who wrote a scholarly paper on the Kaempfert sessions and brought Sheridan to speak to an international gathering of popular music experts in Kanazawa in 1997.

His records with the Beatles have been frequently reissued, and Sheridan made several further albums in Germany and the US. In later years he appeared occasionally on stage, including at a Beatles convention in California last year.

Sheridan was married three times. His third wife, Anna Sievers, died in 2011. He is survived by two daughters and three sons.

• Tony Sheridan (Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity), guitarist and singer, born 21 May 1940; died 16 February 2013

iOur friend and former colleague, Karl Blau, who has died aged 84, was a talented and internationally respected biochemist. In 1966, Karl was invited to take charge of a laboratory at the North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, where he published important early studies on the metabolites produced by children with inherited metabolic diseases, particularly phenylketonuria.

In 1972, he established one of the UK's first prenatal diagnostic laboratories for inherited diseases, at Queen Charlotte's maternity hospital in London. Karl developed a particular interest in the prenatal diagnosis of cystic fibrosis; in the event, DNA screening subsequently eclipsed his work. He published many original papers and co-authored, with Graham King, the influential Handbook of Derivatives for Chromatography (1977).

Karl was a delightful and supportive colleague. He combined liberal and tolerant views with a compendious knowledge and a sense of humour that was never malevolent. He retired in 1992 and pursued one of his ongoing interests: writing science-fiction novels. In earlier years he had enjoyed sailing and skiing.

He was born in Vienna, where his father was a senior civil servant in the Austrian transport ministry. Karl's father was Catholic, from a Jewish background, his mother Protestant. At the time of the Anschluss, his parents (who survived the war) sent Karl to Britain under the auspices of "the Church of England Committee for Non-Aryan Christians". Karl lodged with two female teachers in Epsom, Surrey, and went to a prep school in Leatherhead. His academic career flourished and he went by scholarship to Kelly college, in Tavistock, Devon. From there he won an open exhibition to Queens' College, Cambridge. This proved a major financial strain for his benefactors and so he set to work as a laboratory technician at Courtaulds. While there, he obtained a degree in chemistry at Birkbeck College, followed by a PhD in biochemistry at King's College London, where he became warden of the halls of residence.

He is survived by his wife, Susan, whom he married in 1964; their two sons, Charles and Simon; and two grandsons, Blake and Leo.

Our colleague Richard Groves, who has died of cancer aged 65, made an enormous contribution to housing and environmental health for more than 40 years. At the University of Birmingham's Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Rick developed and led teaching on housing for environmental health officers. He was director of the centre from 2005 to 2008.

Rick was born in Clacton, Essex, and studied town planning at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) and social administration at Brunel University, Middlesex. He worked for the West Midlands voluntary organisation Community Planning Associates from 1972 to 1976, in the early years of Birmingham's ground-breaking urban renewal programme.

He was also instrumental in establishing Community Forum, a powerful voice for local people affected by the shift in policy from slum clearance to the improvement of older housing. Rick was greatly respected by the many groups he worked with both directly and through Community Forum. He spearheaded an approach to housing renewal that was far ahead of its time, in which local communities played a central role in determining what should happen to the places where they lived.

Moving to Birmingham University in 1976, Rick maintained his interests in housing and urban renewal through research and teaching. With colleagues in the university and the city, he developed a series of innovative courses. An annual 15-week programme for the government of India ran for 15 years and another for the Hong Kong Housing Authority lasted 17 years, while other programmes were provided for China and Korea. Rick also worked in Malaysia, South America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, mainly on housing and urban development. He played a leading role in work on housing in developing countries, through the European Network for Housing Research.

Rick had a long involvement with voluntary organisations. He was chair of Shape Housing Association and the Birmingham Standing Conference for the Single Homeless, and a board member of Art Homes and the West Midlands Kick Start Partnership, both of which provided affordable finance to low income home owners for the repair and maintenance of their homes.

Rick was a talented cricketer, a member of Worcestershire County Cricket Club and a well-informed follower of England's cricketing fortunes. He valued and enjoyed his family connections and friendships in the Isle of Gigha, in the Hebrides, and in Norway, both of which he visited regularly. He had a voracious appetite for literature and for 16th- and 17th-century British history, and an endless capacity to encourage and support family, friends, colleagues and students of all ages and nationalities.

He is survived by his wife, Kate, whom he married in 1973, sons, Tom, Josh, Jake and Sam, and three grandchildren.

Jeremy Ramsden, who has died of a stroke aged 59, was one of the finest photographic printers of his generation. Jeremy could take a frame of anyone's film and turn it into a work of art on paper. His attention to detail was apparent in the way he would produce a variety of prints from the same frame, each having its own distinct mood and character. When you got your negatives back, you would see his meticulous notes written on little strips of masking tape affixed to the protective sheets. When you consider the names on his client list – which included Tim Walker, Elaine Constantine, Harry Borden and Brian Griffin– the breadth of his achievement becomes clear.

Jeremy was born in Sydney, Australia. He joined the merchant navy after leaving college, arriving in London in time to celebrate his 21st birthday. A keen photographer since childhood, he became involved in the London photo scene in a variety of capacities, including studio assistant to Brian Duffy, freelancing as a photojournalist (he was a fine photographer in his own right) and mastering the arcane art of colour printmaking.

His experiences of the glory days of Soho in the advertising boom of the 1970s and 80s would have made a very interesting book. Jeremy had a stereotypical Aussie gusto for travel, people and a good story but, above all, he liked sharing his enthusiasm for the world and how we see it. He was generous with his time and a champion of photographers. Having Jeremy in your corner was like having a secret weapon; an unsolicited compliment from him was worth far more than one from almost any picture editor.

A couple of years ago, Jeremy co-founded Labyrinth, a darkroom in the East End of London which has become a mecca for new and established photographers. Jeremy was full of excitement for the young talents coming to him, the brave ones who had chosen film over digital. He gave a great deal and asked for very little in return. The industry will feel a lot colder without him.

He is survived by his children, Alexis and Liam, from his marriage to Kim, from whom he was divorced; his sister, Kate; and his brother, Michael.

A dignified comic actor in farce and on TV, and a dedicated disability campaigner alongside her husband, Brian Rix

The acting career of Elspet Gray, who has died aged 83, was obscured but not extinguished by being so closely bound up with her marriage to the farceur Brian Rix. In 1951, Gray gave birth to a daughter, Shelley, who had Down's syndrome. In later life she was active alongside her actor-manager husband after he left the stage in 1977 to work for people with learning disabilities – initially through presenting a BBC television series, and then as secretary general of Mencap. However, she made periodic returns to the stage and maintained a screen presence: in 1979, for instance, she was a paediatrician guest in Fawlty Towers, and in 1994 the first bride's mother in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

As well as bringing up her subsequent three children, she visited Shelley every week in the residential home that she went to after the family had done their best to "muddle through" for five years. Both Gray and Rix had feelings of guilt about sending their child away, though they reckoned that she would get better attention in the residential home, and that it would be unkind to expose her to the attention she would have received had she been with her famous parents.

Rix, the leading exponent of farce in British theatre, television and cinema of the period, became an energetic campaigner and fundraiser, and Gray a powerful advocate for their cause. The current chief executive of Mencap, Mark Goldring, said that the eventual Lord and Lady Rix "made a formidable team in their determination to change the lives of people with learning disabilities".

The couple returned to the stage in a revival of the popular farce Dry Rot in 1988, and five years later in a presentation called Tour de Farce, describing the trials and tribulations of travelling players at various stages of history. Some of the material in Tour de Farce might have been regarded as on the bawdy side for the dignified and beautiful Gray, including the anecdote about a notice in one theatre warning the chorus girls that squatting on the wash basins to relieve themselves might cause a nasty accident: "Ladies have been badly lacerated."

But Gray and her husband had always been an unconventional couple. Rix, who came from a wealthy family, was running his own theatre company when, aged 25, he auditioned her. He recalled later that it had been a miserably cold and damp day and that he had a hangover, but he had been besotted immediately as she walked in and illuminated the scene. Years later he still remembered exactly what she had been wearing – a green, tweedish costume enhancing her red hair. He gave her a job in the Bridlington repertory company where he himself was working, and asked her to marry him. As she was only 19, she declined.

She did, however, live with him – a fairly bold course even for thespians at that time. It was while they were together in the bath that he proposed for the umpteenth time, and on that occasion she accepted. Rix toured his production of John Chapman's Reluctant Heroes and took it to the Whitehall theatre – it was the first of the many farces there, which made his reputation, and ran from 1950 to 1954. Gray was in the same production, and a film version followed. They settled in the capital and started their family.

Gray was born in Inverness, Scotland, and went to school at St Margaret's, Hastings, and the Presentation Convent, Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley, before doing her theatrical training at Rada. Her first professional appearance came in 1947, in the play Edward, My Son, at the Grand theatre, Leeds, which transferred to His Majesty's theatre in the West End the following month, so providing her London debut.

Her next stage role after Reluctant Heroes came in another farce, Wolf's Clothing (1959), at Wyndham's, and at the Garrick in 1967 she took part in her husband's farce season, appearing in Uproar in the House and Let Sleeping Wives Lie.

Four years later she was in a tour of four plays by the farceur Vernon Sylvaine, and in 1973 went to the O'Keefe theatre in Toronto, in a production of Move Over Mrs Markham. In 1980 she appeared at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal Stratford East in the melodrama The Streets of London, and in 1983 was in Charley's Aunt with Griff Rhys Jones at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

Gray made her first film in 1949, and later featured in Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969). Her many television roles included Lady Collingwood in Catweazle (1971), Chancellor Thalia in the Doctor Who story The Arc of Infinity (1973), and Phyllis Bristow in eight episodes of the second world war drama Tenko (1984).

In The Black Adder (1982), the first series in which Rowan Atkinson set about subverting British history, he played the mythical Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh, and Gray his mother, Queen Gertrude of Flanders, the consort of Brian Blessed as Richard IV. Her final TV appearance came in an episode of Victoria Wood's sitcom Dinnerladies (1998).

Shelley died in 2005. Gray is survived by her husband, two sons and a daughter.

• Elspet Gray (Elspeth Jean MacGregor-Gray), actor, born 12 April 1929; died 18 February 2013

My father, Philip Adey, who has died aged 73, was a chemistry teacher turned educationist and author. He devoted the majority of his working life to researching and promoting the teaching of thinking skills in school. His work on science teaching methods produced significant gains at GCSE, not only in science but also in maths and English. The method was further developed for primary education.

Philip was born in Sevenoaks, Kent. After attending Bryanston school, Dorset, he gained a BSc in chemistry and a PGCE and Academic Diploma in Education from the London Institute of Education. Appointed head of chemistry at the Lodge school in Barbados in 1963, he left in 1970 to become a consultant on the Caribbean Integrated Science Project based at the University of the West Indies.

Returning to the UK in 1974 to complete his PhD at Chelsea College of Science and Technology, he then worked for the British Council in London and Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1979 to 1984. He went on to be a researcher, lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor at King's College London. After retiring in 2004, he continued working in Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Hungary and Poland. He was recently the education commissioner for Westminster city council.

Throughout his period at Chelsea and King's, Philip pursued a research and development programme related to the assessment and enhancement of school students' intellectual ability. This led to a series of publications on cognitive acceleration and professional development programmes for teachers. His work with Michael Shayer and Carolyn Yates was highly influential. With Shayer, he wrote two bestselling books, Towards a Science of Science Teaching (1981) and Really Raising Standards: Cognitive Intervention and Educational Achievement (1994).

Thinking Science, the curriculum materials of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (Case) project, written with Shayer and Yates, can still be found in schools throughout the UK and beyond. His later work on Case in primary schools involved a number of colleagues in the UK, the US and Australia.

Philip was tireless and intellectually rigorous, and engaged all on equal terms. His warmth and wit could light up a room. He was an excellent speaker and thousands of teachers have been inspired during his professional development sessions. His commitment to high-quality science education for all was evident throughout his career. He delighted in challenging many of the orthodoxies held dear by politicians and policymakers, and debunking myths in education. His last book, Bad Education, was published last November.

Philip is survived by his second wife, Jadwiga, whom he married in 2006; by his sons, Lewis and myself, from his first marriage, to Jennifer, who died in 2003; by Jadwiga's daughters, Lucy and Sophie; and by his grandchildren, Ayesha, Kamilah, Saffron and Leo.

Geoffrey Coates, the distinguished organometallic chemist, has died aged 95. In his academic research, Geoffrey worked with hazardous air- and moisture-sensitive compounds containing metal-carbon or metal-hydrogen bonds. Their study helped our understanding of chemical bonding (and of safety issues), and led to new catalysts, semiconducting materials and reagents for use in the chemical, oil, plastics and pharmaceutical industries.

His authoritative book on organometallic compounds, which grew from a slim monograph to a comprehensive, two-volume third edition in a decade, greatly helped generations of students and researchers.

Born in London, he was the elder son of two chemists, Joseph (onetime professor of chemistry at the University College of Swansea) and Ada. Educated at Clifton college, Bristol, Geoffrey studied chemistry at the Queen's College, Oxford, then worked on high-energy substances (flares, explosives, bomb disposal) during the second world war, before taking a lectureship at Bristol University in 1945.

In 1953 he moved to Durham University as head of the chemistry department, and during the next 15 years transformed a small, fragmented unit in assorted buildings into a well-balanced department housed in a modern building he designed, staffed and equipped. It is now one of the UK's leading chemistry departments.

A stickler for accuracy, Geoffrey could appear brusque, but was in fact utterly unselfish, kind and considerate, concerned that people should be treated fairly. Though reserved, he was a brilliant lecturer whose spectacular demonstrations, humour and inspired body language entertained and informed.

Having delivered what Durham needed, Geoffrey moved to the University of Wyoming in 1968 to play a similar role there. His wife, Jean, whom he married in 1951, made her own career in medicine there. Retiring in 1979, Geoffrey remained very active, roaming the wild countryside, acquiring new skills, exploring the world on freighters and working for global causes promoting fairness and equality.

He launched our own careers, and greatly enriched our lives; we and many others are proud to be members of his large scientific family. He is survived by Jean, by his daughter, Helen, and son, Peter, and by his grandchildren, great-grandchildren and nephews. Geoffrey's younger brother, John, the distinguished naval architect, died in 2010.

Screenwriter for Don Siegel and writer/producer of classic TV series, he named many of his colleagues as communists

In 1951, when the screenwriter Richard Collins, who has died aged 98, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac), he named more than 20 colleagues and friends in the film industry as belonging to or sympathising with the Communist party. Although by so doing he saved his Hollywood career, it was an action that cast a shadow over the rest of his life, regardless of his success in film and television as a writer and producer.

According to many, it was a cowardly act, which Collins later tried to justify, as did directors Elia Kazan and Edward Dmytryk, by saying that it was his patriotic duty, and that Huac knew the names anyway. However, in an interview in Victor Navasky's book Naming Names (1980), Collins called himself "a son of a bitch, a miserable little bastard. It was unfortunate but true. I was a good boy, doing what you're supposed to do."

Collins, who had admitted having been a member of the Communist party, but had stopped paying his dues in 1939, was first subpoenaed as one of 19 unfriendly witnesses in 1947, which led to him being blacklisted. Four years later, with no screenwriting work coming his way, Collins decided to recant, while others went to prison for pleading the fifth amendment. He then immediately continued in films where he had left off.

Unlike many members of the Communist party who were working class and/or of immigrant stock, Collins was born to well-off parents in New York City. His father was the fashion designer Harry Collins, who dressed the Vanderbilts and the Astors. Young Collins attended various schools in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, before briefly studying at Stanford University.

In 1936, back in New York, he satisfied his interest in writing as a member of the New Theatre League, a leftwing institution linked to the Young Communist League. In 1935, Collins returned to Los Angeles where he took a job at a department store, before becoming a script reader and junior writer at various Hollywood studios.

Collins got his first screenwriting credit on Rulers of the Sea (1939), a well-crafted adventure about the building and maiden voyage of the first steamship. There followed a few screenplays for different studios, including two movies for MGM: the revue-style all-star, morale-boosting Thousands Cheer (1943) and Song of Russia (1944). The latter, starring Robert Taylor as an American conductor falling for a Soviet classical pianist (Susan Peters), was a glowing tribute to the US's wartime ally. MGM later regretted producing it when kowtowing to Senator McCarthy, while the rightwing Taylor, called as a friendly witness, explained that the film was made under pressure from President Roosevelt to gain sympathy for the Soviets in their war against Germany. The film was so corny in its utopian depiction of the Soviet Union that it was impossible, even for a committed Stalinist, to take seriously. Nevertheless, it was hauled out in 1947 as an example of the communist influence over the film industry.

The two MGM films were co-written with Paul Jarrico, as was the story of Little Giant (1946), one of the better Abbott and Costello farces. Despite their close working relationship, Collins gave Jarrico's name to Huac. Jarrico never spoke to Collins again. Another tragic victim of the anti-communist scare was Collins's first wife, Dorothy Comingore, best known for portraying Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane (1941). Unlike her former husband – they were divorced in 1945 after six years of marriage – she refused to answer questions on her alleged communist connections before Huac in 1952. As a result, her career was ended.

After clearing his name, Collins began to be offered work again, mainly with five movies directed by Don Siegel, among them Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), which was entirely conceived and written by Collins, and stands as one of his best scripts. The realistic prison picture is a powerful indictment of the dehumanising effects of the US penal system. Despite not receiving a credit for the screenplay of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Collins made an important contribution to the classic sci-fi drama, which can be seen to reflect the hysteria of the McCarthy era.

Collins's last feature film script was Pay or Die (1960), a gripping low-budget mafia movie starring Ernest Borgnine as a good cop. Then Collins went almost exclusively into television, both as a writer and producer. He wrote episodes for Route 66, The Untouchables, Bonanza – of which he produced 127 episodes from 1968 to 1973 – and Matlock, which he produced from 1987 to 1992.

Collins, whose second wife died in 1991, is survived by his son and a daughter.

• Richard Collins, screenwriter and producer; born 20 July 1914; died 14 February 2013

Founder member of Soft Machine and a key figure in British psychedelic rock

Kevin Ayers's debut solo album, Joy of a Toy, released in 1969, concluded with a song called All This Crazy Gift of Time. "All my blond and twilight dreams," sang Ayers in his signature, slightly wayward baritone, "all those strangled future schemes, all those glasses drained of wine ..."

In retrospect, it sounds like a statement of intent, though intent is perhaps too strong a word to apply to Ayers, whose singular songwriting talent was matched by a sometimes startling lack of ambition. "I lost it years ago; a long, long time ago," he told one interviewer in 2007, referring to his lack of ego and self-belief. "But, in a way, I don't think I've ever had it."

Ayers, who has been found dead at the age of 68 at his home in the medieval village of Montolieu in south-west France, was one of the great almost-stars of British rock. A founding member of Soft Machine, he was a key figure in the birth of British pastoral psychedelia, and then went on to enjoy cult status as a singer-songwriter in the late 1960s and early 70s. Among his champions were the late John Peel and the influential British rock journalist Nick Kent, who later wrote: "Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett were the two most important people in British pop music. Everything that came after came from them."

Ayers was born in Herne Bay, Kent, the son of the journalist, poet and BBC producer Rowan Ayers, who later originated the BBC2 rock music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test. After his parents divorced and his mother married a civil servant, Ayers spent most of his childhood in Malaysia, where, he would later admit, he discovered a fondness for the slow and easy life.

At 12, he returned to Britain and settled in Canterbury. There, he became a fledgling musician and founder of the "Canterbury sound", an often whimsical English take on American psychedelia that merged jazz, folk, pop and nascent progressive rock.

Ayers's first band was the Wilde Flowers, whose line-up included various future members of Caravan as well as Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, with whom he would go on to form Soft Machine in 1966. Alongside Pink Floyd, Soft Machine played regularly at the UFO club in London, becoming one of the key underground groups of the time.

In 1968, the group toured the US in support of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a brush with rock stardom and relentless gigging that left the laid-back Ayers weary and disillusioned. He sold his Fender bass guitar to Hendrix's sideman Noel Redding, and fled to Ibiza with fellow Soft Machine maverick Daevid Allen. There he wrote the songs that would make up Joy of a Toy. It set the tone for much of what was to follow: Ayers's sonorous voice enunciating songs that ran the gamut from wilfully weird to oddly catchy, the whole not quite transcending the sum of the many varied and musically adventurous parts.

Ayers recorded four critically well-received albums for the British progressive rock label Harvest, the third of which, Whatevershebringswesing (1972), featured musical contributions from Robert Wyatt and Mike Oldfield and the orchestral arrangements of David Bedford. It included the dramatically melancholy Song from the Bottom of a Well and the catchy, more-roll-than-rock swagger of Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes, which became, if not quite a hit, a signature song of sorts in his subsequent live shows.

In his 2008 memoir, Changeling, Oldfield recalled the anarchic atmosphere of the recording sessions at Abbey Road studio, where, on a day that no other musician bothered to turn up, he more or less cut the backing track for Champagne Cowboy Blues single-handedly. "Eventually, Kevin rolled in. I said, 'I've done it, I've done a track!' He was a bit put out, I think, that I had taken over his studio time ... He did keep it as a backing track: he put some different words to it and it was put on the album."

Ayers signed to Chris Blackwell's Island label. The resulting album, The Confessions of Dr Dream and Other Stories (1974), was more focused by his standards, and marked the beginning of a creative partnership with guitarist Ollie Halsall. The following year, Ayers's appearance at the Rainbow Theatre in London alongside John Cale, Brian Eno and Nico was recorded for a subsequent live album entitled June 1, 1974.

In the late 1970s, as punk took hold in Britain, Ayers seemed to disappear from view, dogged by addiction and what often seemed like a general lack of interest in his own career. He made the lacklustre Diamond Jack and the Queen of Pain (1983) with a group of musicians he befriended in Spain, and the well-received Falling Up (1988) in Madrid.

For a while, he lived a reclusive life in the south of France, before being tempted back to the studio for an album, The Unfairground (2007), featuring contributions from a new generation of musician-fans that included members of Teenage Fanclub, Neutral Milk Hotel and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

"I think you have to have a bit missing upstairs," he once said, "or just be hungry for fame and money, to play the industry game. I'm not very good at it." That, of course, was part of his charm. He was a true bohemian and a fitfully brilliant musical drifter. After his death, a piece of paper was found by his bedside. On it was written a note, or perhaps an idea for a song: "You can't shine if you don't burn." He did both in his inimitable – and never less than charming – way.

He is survived by three daughters, Rachel, Galen and Annaliese, and his sister, Kate.

• Kevin Ayers, singer-songwriter and guitarist, born 16 August 1944; found dead 20 February 2013

Television presenter synonymous with the hit show Mr and Mrs

Derek Batey, who has died aged 84, once asked a contestant on Mr and Mrs to name his wife's favourite flower. "Oh Derek, that's easy," came the reply from the husband as he smiled at his wife. "It's Homepride."

But the ITV show with which the Cumbrian presenter became synonymous, and which was watched by 11 million ITV viewers on Saturday nights by the late 1970s, was not premised on spreading marital misinformation to a nation of couch potatoes. Rather, its aim was to encourage conjugal felicity: the show's theme song went "Mr and Mrs, be nice to each other / Mr and Mrs, we've got to love one another". Coterminous with an era in which divorce rates soared and casual sex became socially unexceptionable, Mr and Mrs proselytised for the straight and narrow virtue of heterosexual commitment.

The show's format was simple: one partner sat in a soundproofed booth while Batey asked the spouse three questions. For example: What is your partner's favourite way to eat an egg? What part of your partner's body is she or he most embarrassed about? What animal is your partner most scared of? The pair then swapped places. Couples who got one question correct won £10 and those who got all six right won a jackpot of £2,000. Losers received a carriage clock and Batey's condolences.

For viewers, one of Mr and Mrs' pleasures was the insight into the otherwise inscrutable privacy of the British marriage. Batey once asked: "When you're having a meal at home and there's no one else around, just you and your wife, do you always have serviettes, sometimes have serviettes, or never have serviettes?" "He looked at me for about three minutes," recalled Batey, "and then said slowly, 'Do you mean boiled or fried?' " It wasn't always husbands who gave dopey answers, but mostly. Perma-smiling Batey, with his dapper bouffant and unflappable geniality, was a perfect foil to such follies. The show made him a national star.

Until 1967, though, he had been merely a presenter and interviewer on Border Television, the long-defunct ITV franchise based in Carlisle. In that year, he saw a tape of a Canadian version of the show that had been on air for four years, and he realised its potential. "I liked it and decided to run a Border Television version of it for 13 weeks. The response from our viewers was fantastic and it stayed in our local schedule every year from then until daytime television opened up in 1973, when it was taken by the full ITV network and was an immediate hit nationally."

He presented Mr and Mrs 500 times on television and 5,000 times on stage. For 12 years from 1975, he presented a Sunday-night stage version of Mr and Mrs at Blackpool's Central Pier.

Batey was born in Brampton, Cumbria, and won a scholarship to the local grammar school. He developed showbiz aspirations after watching variety acts including Arthur Askey, Will Fyffe, Ted Ray and Harry Lauder, and ventriloquist AC Astor, at Her Majesty's theatre, Carlisle.

In 1940, he bought a ventriloquist's doll for three guineas and called him Alfie. One day, little Derek was practising his ventriloquism act in the bedroom. "I heard a sort of squeaking noise behind me and turned round to see our window cleaner just about to fall off his ladder at the sight of a 12-year-old boy talking to a wooden doll in a mirror." After leaving school in 1944 to become articled to a firm of accountants, he continued with semi-professional "vent shows" several nights a week.

Batey's break came when he was booked by the BBC to perform his ventriloquism act, improbably, on local radio. Later he became a radio reporter on The Voice of Cumberland and Points North, a radio show from Manchester introduced by Brian Redhead. In 1957, he moved to TV as a regional compere on Come Dancing. In 1960 he was lured to become a presenter on the newly launched Border Television; there he produced and presented programmes about religion, politics and sport, and wrote calypso numbers.

As well as for Mr and Mrs, Batey was known in the 1970s for Look Who's Talking, a talk show whose guests included Ken Dodd, Norman Collier, Dukes and Lee, and Jim Bowen. At the height of his celebrity, Batey was on ITV three times a week – he also hosted Your 100 Best Hymns. In 1978, he joined Border's board of directors.

After retirement, Batey divided his time between homes in St Anne's in Lancashire (where he kept his collection of ventriloquist's dolls, including the venerable Alfie), Gran Canaria and Florida.

ITV axed Mr and Mrs in 1988, but in 2006 the production company Celador considered a version with gay and/or unmarried contestants. Batey, who owned the rights to the show, frowned on the idea, saying: "It is a format that has lasted throughout the times and I see no reason to change it." But it did change: now Phillip Schofield presents a celebrity version of Mr and Mrs on ITV.

Batey is survived by his wife, Edith, and daughter, Diane.

• Derek Batey, television presenter, born 8 August 1928; died 17 February 2013

Western authority on the culture of Japan, his adopted homeland

Donald Richie, who has died aged 88, wrote extensively on Japan, his adopted homeland after his arrival in 1947 with the US occupation forces. He was best known for his books on cinema, including The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1959), the first major English-language study of the subject, co-written with Joseph L Anderson; The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965); Ozu: His Life and Films (1974); and A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (2001). Richie played a pivotal role in introducing the director Yasujiro Ozu to foreign audiences and curated, in 1963, the first international Ozu retrospective, at the Berlin film festival. In 1983, he received the first Kawakita award, for individuals or organisations that have contributed to Japanese film culture.

Though recognised as the most important figure in introducing Japanese cinema to the west, Richie saw himself as a writer foremost and a film critic secondarily. His fictional work includes Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai: A Historical Novel (1999), A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories (2004) and Tokyo Nights (2005). His interests stretched to topics as diverse as the country's literature (Japanese Literature Reviewed, 2003), modern fashion (The Image Factory, 2003) and travel. Twenty years after its publication, his personal travelogue The Inland Sea (1971) was turned into an award-winning documentary by Lucille Carra and Brian Cotnoir. Richie narrated the film himself.

He cultivated the persona of a stranger in a strange land, self-consciously positioned between two cultures. His early posting as a civilian administrator with the occupation forces provided an escape route from the small-town provinciality of Lima, Ohio, where he was born. Richie openly embraced the country that would fuel his art over the next six decades, flouting rules against fraternising with the locals. As he wrote in a 1947 entry in his candid memoir Japan Journals (2004): "Little America, try though it does to impart democracy and individualism, is always a territory where the Japanese are worried over, and are made objects of condescension … I soon see I will experience nothing, learn nothing if I stay within these commodious and American folds."

In the late 1940s, Richie's articles on such topics as kabuki drama, ikebana (the art of flower arrangement) and Japanese festivals were published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes US military magazine, and marked the beginning of a lifelong exploration of the country's culture and lifestyle. However, he always remained strongly aware of his intermediary status, as he explained when I interviewed him in 2003 for the website Midnight Eye: "My interest in Japan is – in a literal sense of course, but in sort of a metaphorical sense – that I'm using the idea of the outsider, the foreigner, as my own vehicle as well. He flourishes here because he knows he can't join."

Upon returning to Japan in 1954, after taking a degree in English from Columbia University, he supported himself by teaching at Waseda University, in Tokyo, and writing film and literary criticism for the Japan Times, which he continued to do until suffering from a stroke in 2009. Over the decades he mingled with the novelists Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, the actor Toshiro Mifune, the composer Toru Takemitsu, the Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetz Suzuki and another great western chronicler and translator of Japanese culture, Edward Seidensticker. Richie also played host to foreign guests including Truman Capote, Igor Stravinsky, W Somerset Maugham, Susan Sontag and Francis Ford Coppola. Yet, apart from his marriage to the American writer Mary Evans between 1961 and 1965, the openly bisexual Richie spent his time in Tokyo living alone.

From 1969 to 1972, he was curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Richie's own experimental short films, such as Wargames (1962) and Five Filosophical Fables (1967), revealed a more ribald side, often hidden in his writings on Japanese culture, and inspired visual artists such as Takahiko Iimura, Yoichi Takabayashi and Nobuhiko Obayashi, alongside whom he received a group award at the Knokke-le-Zoute experimental film festival in Belgium in 1964. In 2007, an exhibition of Richie's paintings from the 1970s and early 1980s was held at the Nippon Gallery in Tokyo.

For generations of scholars, critics and artists who have made Japan their field, Richie was a hugely influential and inspirational presence, opening a window on a ceaselessly fascinating world. Those who knew him personally will remember him for his endless approachability, enthusiasm, energy and generosity with his time, even in his final years of illness.

Richie is survived by a sister, Jean.

• Donald Richie, author, film critic and artist, born 17 April 1924; died 19 February 2013

Ian Breach was a superb TV scriptwriter and a passionate advocate for the environment. His skills were much in evidence in a documentary we made for BBC South West in 1987, Tarka's Troubled Water, about the river Torridge in Devon, the home of Henry Williamson's fictional otter Tarka. The film was praised by Ted Hughes, who wrote to the controller of BBC2 urging a network showing. It was originally slated for Christmas Day. The schedulers hadn't realised it was not a soft wildlife feature but a well-argued tale of a river heavily polluted by agricultural slurry, sanitary towels and used condoms. The documentary was still shown, but a couple of days later. Ian went on to make many powerful regional films for BBC South West including the first on the Camelford water disaster. He was inquisitive, challenging of pompous authority, and a beautiful crafter of television prose.

My friend Joan Tyers, who has died aged 94, was a community activist and peace campaigner, a former mayor of Redditch, Worcestershire, and a founder of the Redditch Friends Housing Association.

Born Joan Linley in Studley, Warwickshire, as one of four children, she knew poverty and hardship from early on. Her parents were educated, but her father, a blacklisted trade unionist, found work difficult to get in those depression years. A move to Sheffield followed, but the pay in the food factory where he eventually found employment was barely sufficient for his family. When he died, exhausted, at the age of 39, Joan's teacher training had to cease as she was now the family's principal wage earner, working in the same factory.

On moving to Worcestershire, Joan met and married Cecil Tyers, a pioneer of historic canal restoration. This was a happy marriage, which lasted until his death in 1976.

Soon afterwards, she became involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, taking part in the early Aldermaston marches. In 1982, cruise missiles were installed at RAF Greenham Common, in Berkshire. Joan was an ardent participant in the women's peace camp there and became, with her husband, a committed Quaker. The newly formed network of Quaker Peace Friends then impelled her on to a number of initiatives aimed at raising public consciousness of the arms race and atomic war. These included the Mothers for Peace (now Women to Women for Peace) marches across the then Soviet Union and the US. In America, the marchers were sprayed by cattle farmers from head to foot with manure; this did not deter Joan.

Following Cecil's death, Joan became engrossed in Labour politics, served as an articulate and feisty Redditch councillor from 1986 until 1998, and was mayor in 1990. After the start of the Iraq war in 2003, she posted her torn-up party membership card to Tony Blair. She continued, however, to work tirelessly for her community; she had set up with fellow Quakers in 1973 the Redditch Friends Housing Association for single-parent families, and remained active as its chair, and later as life president. She was a regular contributor to charities including Greenpeace and Save Africa.

Joan loved opera and sang her way around house and work. Her friends and colleagues remember her as a witty and steely personality; her children recall an inspiring parent.

She is survived by three children, Adrienne, Andrew and Lizzy.