Peter York on David Abbott: 'As close as adland gets to a registered saint'

David Abbott didn't fit any of the colourful stereotypes in my well-worn taxonomy of adland. He wasn't a well-connected Chelsea Boy account director, a street-smart, big- deal, big-bellied media director, a creative wild boy, nor a geek intelligentsia type from "planning". But they could have done with more like him. Startlingly handsome, but in a rather ascetic saint-like way, he was extremely dignified adland doesn't really do dignified and seemed more like a Great Writer in a television arts programme.

He was a Great Writer, of course. He had adapted the new approach of Bill Bernbach, the man who made American advertising modern in the early 1960s, to a British sensibility and British conversational rhythms and turned it into the best persuasive prose imaginable.