Ned Sherrin: no Somerset ‘ham’!

Edward George (Ned) Sherrin was born in February 1931. As he later wrote, “I was born between the villages of High and Low Ham in the county of Somerset. For a long time I thought how neat it would be to go to the House of Lords as Lord Sherrin of High and Low Ham – the perfect theatrical title; but no call came.”

He lived on the family farm, Gawler’s Farm, until 1934, when the family moved to Lower Farm, Kingweston, a former coaching inn. He described his pre-war Somerset childhood in his autobiography, including “summer fortnights at a boarding house, ‘a stone’s throw from the front’ at Burnham-on-Sea… Mystery tours [in the family Austin Seven] might dwindle into a visit to check on cattle on Butleigh Moor or flower into summer visits to the strawberry fields of Cheddar or expeditions as far afield as Minehead and Dunster. … [A] boiling radiator for exasperation on Porlock Hill. Smashing small crabs on the muddy beach at Blue Anchor.”

Young Ned went to nearby Barton St David School, where he gave his first theatrical performance in an Empire Day pageant dressed in a makeshift smock as a New Zealand sheep farmer. From there he moved on at 11 to Sexey’s Schoool at Bruton as a weekly boarder, which he enjoyed in comparison to his relatively solitary life on the farm.

While studying law at Exeter College, Oxford, he also pursued his theatrical interests. His putative career at the bar was diverted when a chance meeting with a friend in 1955 got him into the new world of commercial television. Later he joined the BBC, working on the popular Tonight show, and most famously producing the notorious, if short-lived, satire show, That Was The Week That Was (‘TW3’), in 1962-63. He then spent many years also writing and producing for theatre and the screen, as well as on BBC Radio hosting both the musical quiz, Counterpoint, and the chat show, Loose Ends, for 20 years from 1986 until he became too ill with throat cancer. He was made a CBE in 1997.

He never lost contact with his Somerset roots. For example, he was a guest speaker at the 11^th birthday party of the Langport & Somerton Inner Wheel Club, at the All Saints Room, in July 1960, when he regaled the audience with some of his experiences as a television producer. When TW3 began its run in late 1962, the Central Somerset Gazette proudly noted the local farming origins of its producer, even informing their readers that “his father and brother exhibited the champion beast, a Devon steer, at the recent Shepton Mallet Christmas Fatstock Show”! When he presented an edition of Loose Ends from the Brewhouse Theatre, Taunton in 1994, a man in the audience told him he had bought items from the auction of farm implements – a cider press and an apple mill – when Sherrin’s brother had finally retired from the family farm: “He was well pleased with his bargain.”

He died in October 2007 at his Chelsea home, aged 76. The BBC’s online obituary noted his Somerset origins, “a million miles away from the theatrical and broadcasting world he came to embody.” However, a Somerset newspaper’s obituary proudly declared that “he could be described as the Noel Coward of Somerset”, and quoted the then manager of Strode Theatre as saying that Sherrin “never apologised for coming from Somerset and was very proud of his origins.”