Robert Christy

Robert Christy, who has died aged 95, was a theoretical physicist and astrophysicist who, as a member of the Manhattan Project team at Los Alamos, New Mexico, designed a vital gadget used in the first nuclear device ever detonated, and in “Fat Man”, the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945.

The Los Alamos Laboratory was organised in 1942 to design a nuclear weapon that would bring an end to the Second World War. A relatively simple “gun-type” fission weapon was developed (in which one lump of uranium-235 was fired at a second lump to create a supercritical mass — it was this type of bomb that devastated Hiroshima). In parallel, reactors were constructed in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium. However the gun-type method proved impractical with plutonium, which tended to pre-detonate or “fizzle”. So in 1944 the Los Alamos scientists decided to develop the concept of “implosion” — the uniform compression of plutonium into a supercritical mass .

Christy, a member of the Los Alamos Theoretical Physics division, had been doing studies that led him to believe that a solid or near-solid sphere would implode more uniformly than a hollow sphere. The “Christy Gadget” involved the manufacture of two hemispheres to contain the plutonium, each coated with nickel to prevent it from oxidising, along with detonators, fuses and high-explosive lenses.

On Saturday July 14 1945 the assembled device was hoisted to the top of the 100ft tower at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, where it was due to be detonated two days later. No one knew exactly what to expect. Enrico Fermi was heard taking side-bets that the bomb would incinerate New Mexico and as a precaution a no-doubt startled state governor was warned that an evacuation of the state might be necessary.

At 5:29am on July 16 the device exploded with a force of 21,000 tons of TNT, evaporating the tower on which it stood. “The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” recalled Brigadier General Thomas Farrell. “It was golden, purple, violet, grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range ... Seconds after the explosion came first the air blast pressing hard against the people, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained awesome roar that warned of doomsday.”

Immediately after the test Farrell turned to his superior, General Leslie Groves: “The war is over,” he observed. “Yes,” came the reply. “Just as soon as we drop one or two of these things on Japan.”

The son of an electrical engineer who had emigrated to Canada from England, Robert Frederick Christy was born on May 14 1916 in Vancouver, British Columbia. His parents died when he was young and he was brought up by relatives. It seemed unlikely that he would be able to afford to go to university. However, by coming top in the state in his school exams, he won a scholarship to the University of British Columbia, where he studied Physics. He was then accepted as a graduate student by Robert Oppenheimer, the leading American theoretical physicist, at the University of California, Berkeley.

After taking a PhD in 1941 Christy joined the Illinois Institute of Technology, but was soon recruited by Enrico Fermi to join a team at the University of Chicago, involved in the effort to design the first nuclear chain reactor. As he later recalled, there was no suggestion at the time that the objective was to develop a bomb; rather it was presented as a solution to submarine propulsion, avoiding the need for the vessels to carry tons of conventional fuel.

When Oppenheimer formed the Los Alamos Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project, Christy was one of the first recruits to join the Theory Group under Hans Bethe. After the war, Christy joined the University of Chicago Physics department briefly before being recruited to join the Physics faculty at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1946.

He remained at Caltech for the rest of his academic career, working, first, on cosmic rays and later in astrophysics, investigating Cepheid variables, a class of pulsating stars which, due to the strong direct relationship between their luminosity and pulsation period, are used for establishing galactic distance scales. He won the Royal Astronomical Society’s Eddington Medal for this work in 1967 and the same year spent six months at Cambridge as a Churchill Fellow.

Christy served as chairman of Caltech’s Physics department and in 1970 became Caltech’s provost, a post he held for the 10 years. During an interregnum in 1977 he served as acting president of the institute.

Although he felt that the Bomb had probably saved lives, observing that the Japanese “probably would have lost millions if they had had to defend themselves against an invasion, and we would have lost hundreds of thousands”, Christy admitted that pictures of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been “very sobering” and after the war, like Robert Oppenheimer and others involved in the Manhattan Project, he opposed the further development of nuclear weapons.

This put him at odds with his former colleague Edward Teller (the “father” of the hydrogen bomb), with whom he and his wife had shared living quarters for a time after the war. When Teller testified against Oppenheimer during Atomic Energy Commission security-clearance hearings, in 1954, he was appalled: “I viewed Oppenheimer as a god ... and I was sure that he was not a treasonable person.” Less than a week later, Christy was visiting Los Alamos when he ran into Teller: “He approached me with his hand out to shake my hand. And I very deliberately refused to shake his hand,” Christy recalled. Later, Teller told an interviewer that the snub caused him to break down and weep: “I realised that my life as I had known it was over.”

Robert Christy was twice married. His first marriage was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Juliana, by their two daughters, and by the two sons of his first marriage.

Robert Christy, born May 14 1916, died October 3 2012

Geoffrey Hughes

Geoffrey Hughes, who has died aged 68, was known for his memorable television roles as Eddie Yeats, the roly-poly Scouse binman in Coronation Street; the slobbish Onslow in Keeping Up Appearances; the ironically named Twiggy in The Royle Family; and the roguish Vernon Scripps in Heartbeat.

He first appeared on television in the 1960s, in series including Z-Cars and The Likely Lads, and was the voice of Paul McCartney in the film Yellow Submarine. Although usually cast in supporting roles, the 17-and-a-half stone Hughes invested them with a distinctive character which captured the hearts of television audiences. Meanwhile, his self-effacing but professional approach to acting meant that over nearly 50 years in the business he barely had a day’s unemployment.

Hughes was hugely popular as the soft-hearted petty criminal turned binman Eddie Yeats, a role he played from 1974 to 1983. In fact, the part was not his first on Coronation Street: in 1965 he had appeared in three episodes as Eric Fairbrother, the bricklayer who beats up professional grumpy old man Albert Tatlock (Jack Howarth). For this he expected some abusive letters. “All I got,” he recalled, “were two saying I should have killed him.”

But it was as Eddie that Hughes became a household name. His character, an ex-Borstal boy, was introduced in 1974 as Minnie Caldwell’s lodger, newly paroled from prison, and provided a figure of comic relief in succession to his cellmate Ged Stone (played by Kenneth Cope).

With his distinctive torn hat and habit of getting into scrapes, Eddie soon won a following among Street fans, providing a foil, with Stan Ogden (Bernard Youens), to Stan’s much put-upon wife Hilda (Jean Alexander). Eddie helped out on Stan’s window-cleaning round, and the pair embarked on several get-rich-quick schemes, including hiring out a timid guard dog, brewing beer in the bath, and (in Hilda’s absence) renting out rooms chez Ogden at number 13 Coronation Street. Eventually Eddie became the Ogdens’ lodger and they treated him like their own son.

In 1976 it was Eddie who was responsible for the famous “muriel” (mural) that adorned the Ogdens’ sitting-room wall, having realised that some of the cut-price wallpaper he had acquired was faded old stock. “It’s your muriel feature scenic panorama contrast wall,” he explained to a sceptical Hilda. “Dead trendy.”

In Hughes’s own favourite episode, broadcast in 1981, the Ogdens’ washing ends up on the local refuse tip after Eddie, in his professional capacity, removes the washing that Hilda has placed in a plastic bin liner. For many fans the ups and downs of their friendship represented a high point of the series.

In 1982 Hughes’s character took up CB radio, using the handle “Slim Jim” and falling in love with “Stardust Lil”, who turned out to be a florist’s assistant, Marion Willis (Veronica Doran). But with an on-screen shotgun wedding in the offing, Hughes himself had become unsettled; he had found playing in a weekly television soap limiting, feeling that he was regarded as Eddie Yeats rather than as an actor, and that his weekly trips to the Granada studios in Manchester were keeping him away too long from his family and farm in Northamptonshire.

In 1983 his misgivings about his character being married off proved decisive. “He saw Eddie as a bachelor,” recalled the producer, Bill Podmore, “and in the end decided to head off for pastures new ... a great blow to the programme.”

The elder of two sons of a Liverpool docker, Geoffrey Hughes was born at Wallasey, Cheshire, on February 2 1944. After attending Abbotsford Secondary Modern School, Norris Green, Liverpool, he worked for a time as a salesman in a department store, performing in his spare time with an amateur group called the Merseyside Unity Theatre.

Hughes got his break when the playwright Alun Owen came to watch him performing in one of his plays, accompanied by the actor Tom Bell. That night, Hughes recalled, Bell came back and stayed at the Hughes family home: “He told me to pack my bags there and then, go down with him to London, and he’d find me an agent.”

Hughes was unsure, and took a job in repertory in Stoke, but six months later took up Bell’s offer. Within a year he was starring in the West End in the Lionel Bart and Alun Owen musical Maggie May. During his television career Hughes continued to make regular appearances in West End productions, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Say Goodnight to Grandma; The Secret Life of Cartoons; and Run for your Wife.

Though best known for “cuddly rogue” roles, Hughes was a versatile actor capable of tackling more testing parts of the dramatic canon. As well as numerous appearances on television in crime, adventure and comedy series, he played Trinculo in a televised version of The Tempest for the BBC and the uncouth Squire Clodpoll in Good Friday 1663 (1995), an avant garde opera on Channel 4. In 2007 he was the Angel Gabriel in the BBC’s Liverpool Nativity.

He also appeared in several films, including Smashing Time (1967); Till Death Us Do Part (1965); The Bofors Gun (1968); The Virgin Soldiers (1969); Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1972); and Carry On At Your Convenience (1971).

Away from acting, Hughes retreated to Lilford Park, his 240-acre farm in the Nene valley, Northamptonshire, where he kept a small flock of sheep and renovated many of the old buildings, turning one into a craft centre which was run by his wife, Sue.

A keen yachtsman, he later became a popular figure at the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club at Cowes, and in 2003 he moved permanently to the Isle of Wight. He was an active supporter of many charities, national and local, including the Red Squirrel Trust (of which he was patron), the Earl Mountbatten Hospice, Cowes Inshore Lifeboat, the RNLI and St Mary’s Hospital. In 2009 he was appointed Deputy Lord Lieutenant for the island.

In 1996, during his spell as the beer-swilling Onslow in Keeping Up Appearances, Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had major surgery and appeared to make a full recovery: within six weeks of the operation he was touring Australia in Alan Ayckbourn’s play Bedroom Farce. In subsequent years he appeared in two short comedy films in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, Expresso (2007) and Waiting in Rhyme (2009). In August 2010, however, he learned that the cancer had returned.

Geoffrey Hughes is survived by his wife, whom he first met in the Navigation Inn at Buxworth in the High Peak of Derbyshire, then owned and run by Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street).

Geoffrey Hughes, born February 2 1944, died July 27 2012

Ernest Borgnine

Ernest Borgnine, the actor, who has died aged 95, was one of Hollywood’s most popular villains.

Once described as having “an executioner’s grin”, he specialised in playing sadistic bullies, and is best remembered for performances such as the brutal sergeant Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity (1953), and as an ageing outlaw in Sam Peckinpah’s bloodthirsty epic The Wild Bunch (1969).

Ernest Borgnine

Off-screen Borgnine was a mild-mannered man given to bouts of domestic cleaning. “My mother made me do all the housework as a boy,” he once recalled. “I still do it, even in hotels. To this day I clean better than most maids.”

He married five times, but his liaisons were notoriously unsuccessful — none more so than his 39-day marriage to Ethel Merman. After his fourth, in 1965, Borgnine was accused by his estranged wife Donna Rancourt of plotting to murder her and of hiring two “hit men” to carry out the plan.

In his later career Borgnine appeared in a series of substandard “disaster movies” (invariably playing similar roles). These included The Neptune Factor (submariners trapped after deep sea earthquake), Fire (villagers trapped by forest fire) and When Time Ran Out (villagers trapped after volcanic eruption).

Ermes Effron Borgnine was born on January 24 1917 at Hamden, Connecticut, the son of Italian immigrants originally called Borgnino. His mother was an impoverished Italian countess, the daughter of a one-time financial adviser to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy.

After leaving school in New Haven, Connecticut, he joined the Navy for a six-year term, but in the event served for 10. He re-enlisted in 1941 and spent the rest of the Second World War as a chief gunner’s mate serving in battleships in the South Pacific.

Borgnine recalled developing a strong interest in air conditioning during the war and started a correspondence course in air conditioning maintenance. “It was so hot on those ships all you could think about was cool,” he remembered. “You used to have to stand on planks because the iron on the decks got red hot.”

In 1945 he was demobilised and returned to New Haven. “I kind of lost interest in air conditioning as winter drew on,” he remembered, “and I felt too old at 28 to study.” Uninspired by the prospect of work at the local factory, Borgnine described himself “mooning around and scratching my neck and pacing up and down”. His mother suggested he take up acting as a legitimate way of “making a fool of himself”. Borgnine duly won a place at a drama school 40 miles from New Haven and spent the next year commuting for six hours a day. “I had to get up at 7am to get to school,” he recalled, “and then I didn’t get home until two the following morning.”

After a year he joined a travelling repertory company which toured the United States. In an average year the company covered 30,000 miles. After making his Broadway debut in a six-week run of Harvey, Borgnine returned to the touring company. “It was the right move,” he maintained. “We were invited to Denmark and were the first American company to perform Hamlet at Elsinore.”

In the early 1950s Borgnine moved to Hollywood where, after several minor film roles, he gave an excellent performance as the sadistic Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity. He followed this with another memorable appearance, as the snakelike villain in Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), taunting the one-armed Spencer Tracy.

His sensitive portrayal of a loveless butcher in Marty (1955) brought him film star status. Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Delbert Mann, the film won Oscars for best actor (Borgnine), best director (Mann) and best screenplay (Chayefsky). Borgnine recalled that he was appearing in a Western when Delbert Mann auditioned him (against type) for the part. “He came on set and heard me read,” Borgnine remembered. “He told me later that he was really moved because I cried when I read it. He liked the idea of this big tough guy crying.”

Borgnine followed his first major success with two more leading roles. He was perhaps ill-advised in his choice of scripts, making little impact in The Best Things In Life Are Free (1956) and Wedding Breakfast (1958). The former dealt with the biographies of the songwriting trio De Sylva, Brown and Henderson; the latter (co-starring Bette Davis) told the story of a family preparing for a wedding. Later the same year he appeared (opposite Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis) as the rotund warrior Ragnar in The Vikings.

Borgnine divorced Rhoda Kemins in 1958 and married his second wife, the actress Katy Jurado, in 1960. Friends described this marriage as “volatile at best” and remembered the Borgnines’ first anniversary party as “a fiasco”. Guests were surprised to see their hosts quarrelling openly, and the party ended abruptly after Jurado accused Borgnine of having an affair.

In 1961 Borgnine was cast in the unlikely role of Gina Lollobrigida’s father in Go Naked into the World. He followed this with Barabbas (1962), starring Anthony Quinn. Katy Jurado also appeared in the film, and Borgnine later claimed that his marriage had not been helped by watching Quinn and Jurado together on screen.

In 1963 he met Ethel Merman, to whom he became “instantly attracted”. He separated from his wife and proposed to Merman only four weeks after their first meeting. In 1964 he and Jurado divorced, and he married Merman later that year in an elaborate wedding ceremony attended by 500 guests. Prior to their marriage Ethel Merman claimed that she had “never felt so protected, this is forever, for keeps”. Borgnine rejected suggestions that the age difference (Merman was 10 years his senior) would affect their relationship.

After a honeymoon in Japan the couple returned to the United States, where they separated after only a month of marriage. Merman immediately divorced Borgnine, claiming that she had suffered “extreme mental cruelty”. In her memoirs, Merman covered the marriage by leaving two pages blank. Within a year, Borgnine was married to 37-year-old Donna Rancourt.

Throughout the 1960s Ernest Borgnine seemed undiscriminating in his choice of roles, accepting good and bad scripts with equanimity. He appeared in the distinctly average McHale’s Navy (1964, based on a television series); as an Army general, Sam Worden, in Robert Aldrich’s Dirty Dozen (1967), filmed partly in Hertfordshire; Seduction in the South (1968), an Italian-made Western; and Ice Station Zebra (1969). It was then that he starred in Peckinpah’s excellent The Wild Bunch.

During the early 1970s Borgnine appeared almost exclusively in Westerns, starring in The Adventurers (1970), set in a South American republic, and Hannie Caulder (1971), in which he was very much in type as a murderer and rapist.

After a reunion with Bette Davis (as a pair of ageing bank robbers disguised as hippies) in the forgettable Bunny O’Hare in 1972, Borgnine accepted a role in The Poseidon Adventure, one of the long series of “disaster movies” in which he appeared during the Seventies and Eighties. Borgnine and an all-star cast (including Gene Hackman, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowell and Shelley Winters) spent two hours fighting their way through the sinking wreckage of an ocean liner.

He followed this with another underwater disaster film, The Neptune Factor (1973). Despite two changes of name — to Underwater Odyssey and The Neptune Disaster — the film failed to make a success at the box office and was accused by critics of duplicating the plot of Marooned.

When not appearing in disaster movies, Borgnine continued to play what he described as “tough guy” roles. In 1975 he starred in the bizarre Sunday in the Country as an insane, Bible-quoting hillbilly who captures and tortures a group of bank robbers. Later that year he and Carol O’Connor starred as a pair of vigilante policemen in Law and Disorder. In Hustle (1976), Borgnine was promoted to police chief, and he attained centurion status in Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977).

In 1977 Borgnine returned to familiar territory with an appearance in the turgid Fire. Critics complained that the film relied almost entirely on library footage of forest fires and failed to create suspense. After a brief interlude as the sheriff in Convoy — Sam Peckinpah’s celebration of truck drivers and their vehicles — Borgnine returned to disaster films with an appearance in Black Hole (1979) , about a spaceship sucked towards oblivion by a black hole .

Throughout the 1980s Ernest Borgnine maintained his interest in action films. He appeared as the violent leader of a strange religious cult in Deadly Blessing (1981) and followed it later the same year with High Risk. He went on to star in a series of “teen exploitation pictures” — films such as Hollywood Hookers, Graduates of Malibu High (both 1982) and Young Warriors (1983) .

After a brief interlude in comedies , Borgnine returned to action films with a series of starring roles in The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (1985); Codename: Wildgeese (1986); The Dirty Dozen: Deadly Mission; and The Dirty Dozen: Fatal Mission (both 1987).

His work rate was prodigious. In 1989, at the age of 72, he appeared in six different films, with titles including Tides of War, Laser Mission and Real Men Don’t Eat Gummy Bears. In 1990 he starred in the television film Appearances and in 1991 was in Moving Target. Towards the end of the decade he became the voice of Mermaid Man in the children’s animation SpongeBob SquarePants.

Age did not slow him down. But it affected his career, as many in the business assumed he was dead. “I keep telling myself, 'Damn it, you gotta go to work,’” he said in an interview in 2007. “But there aren’t many people who want to put Borgnine to work these days. They keep asking: 'Is he still alive?’”

Borgnine was an active Freemason, and held the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite of Masonry as well as the Grand Cross, the highest honour for service to the Scottish Rite.

He was 88 when he gave up driving the bus in which he enjoyed touring the United States, stopping to talk with locals along the way.

With his first wife, Rhoda Kemins, Borgnine had a daughter . With Donna Rancourt, he had a son and two daughters.

In 1973 he married Tova Traesnaes, who survives him with his four children. Not only did his fifth marriage endure, it also brought with it an unusual business partnership: she manufactured and sold beauty products under the name of Tova and used her husband’s rejuvenated face in her advertisements.

Ernest Borgnine, born January 24 1917, died July 8 2012

Eric Sykes

Eric Sykes, the comedian, who has died aged 89, became a national figure through his long-running television partnership with Hattie Jacques.

The series, entitled either plain Sykes or Sykes and a [whatever was the theme of that week’s episode], ran from 1960 to 1965 — at which point Sykes announced that he was finished with it for ever — and then from 1972 to 1979. As the scriptwriter, Sykes was able to create his own comic persona, compounded of natural diffidence, an eagerness to please, and an infallible tendency to get things wrong. But somehow the character’s innate optimism survived all disasters.

The show’s action frequently turned upon a new “toy” (such as a recently installed telephone) or a bright idea (such as running a bus route that stopped at individual people’s homes) which Sykes and his screen sister would explore unto disaster. Richard Wattis was the arrogant next-door neighbour, and Derek Guyler the local policeman.

Sykes responded to Hattie Jacques’s tyranny with unfailing stoicism, though he would wince with visible pain as his large, loud-mouthed but not unaffectionate sister examined the fruits of his domestic labours and inevitably found them wanting.

Confronted with such a commanding personality, he seldom ventured into insubordination, and tried to carry on smiling in the face of every humiliation — though he would occasionally risk a sotto voce oath, or a black look when his persecutor turned away.

It was innocent, gentle humour that charmed rather than savaged, and wisely never sought to transgress its own bounds. If Sykes was never really at ease in any other character, his performance sufficed to make him one of Britain’s most popular comedians. Offstage, though, he seemed a good deal more complex, with a reputation for coldness and quick temper. “It’s looking so miserable as keeps me funny,” he once remarked.

The son of a millworker, Eric Sykes was born at Oldham on May 4 1923. He would develop a belief that all the best comics hailed from the north-west of the country. “My theory is that we are all idiots,” he explained. “The people who don’t think they’re idiots — they’re the ones that are dangerous.”

Eric’s mother, who had been gaining a reputation in musical comedy, died at his birth, and he was brought up by a stepmother in conditions of extreme poverty, never having a bed to himself before he joined the RAF. At Ward Street Central School, he discovered a talent for making people laugh as a defence against bullying and went on to do comic turns in the pub. He also played the drums in his own Blue Sparks quartet.

Unable to take up an art scholarship, at 14 Sykes left school and took up odd jobs in a cotton mill and at a greengrocer's. In 1941, four days before his 18th birthday, he joined the RAF. Trained as a wireless officer, he served on the beaches of Normandy (where the noise of the guns affected his hearing) and at the siege of Caen, and was present at the German surrender on Luneberg Heath.

Sykes also had the opportunity to join an entertainments section run by the actor Bill Fraser, later Snudge in the television series Bootsie and Snudge. Sykes then joined a show put on by Army Welfare Services, which created some confusion over his status: his RAF unit had been disbanded and the Army gave him a 15cwt truck to drive round Germany until he found a unit from which he could be demobbed. Eventually his case was raised in the House of Commons, with the happy upshot that he was discharged six months after he had been due for release but with two years’ back pay.

The only way, he felt, that the country would get another crop of comedy writers such as himself, Spike Milligan, Dennis Norden and Johnny Speight would be to have another war. He considered that the war afforded valuable experience for a comedian, better perhaps than that acquired by modern comics, straight down from university.

After the war Sykes wrote scripts for Bill Fraser and worked for the Oldham Rep. Sacked for demanding a pay rise from £3 to £4, he toured the variety halls. Then Frankie Howerd invited him to provide material for the radio show Variety Bandbox. “Stick to writing,” was Howerd’s advice.

Sykes was soon working for Tony Hancock and Hattie Jacques, both of whom he met on the Educating Archie series. He was also occasionally called upon to emulate Spike Milligan as scriptwriter for The Goon Show. Nevertheless, he always longed to perform on his own account.

His first television appearances were as an incompetent compère, but from 1960, when he went on the air, there were no more doubts about his potential as an actor. And after his show finished in 1965, he went on stage to play another victim — this time a timidly obliging factory worker who was the butt of Jimmy Edwards’s roaring red-faced bully in the theatrical romp Big Bad Mouse.

The show had two separate West End runs. Edwards’s and Sykes’s genius for ad-libbing allowed them to indulge all kinds of spontaneous humour as Sykes found himself suspected of lechery and Edwards bore down upon him as the magistrate. Those who saw Big Bad Mouse more than once were liable to see two different shows.

The Daily Telegraph’s Eric Shorter asked. “When was an evening constructed with such a deliberate yet delightful determination to veer away from the original without losing its theatrical impulse? And when was there a display of such farcical timing that our applause for it stops the show again and again?”

But around 1979 Sykes’s television career began to run into the sands. In that year his show with Hattie Sykes ended (she died in 1980), and it was 10 years before he was given another television series, and then not by the BBC (towards which he had come to feel some bitterness) but by Television South West.

This was The Nineteenth Hole, written by Johnny Speight, in which Sykes, a keen golfer in real life, played a male chauvinist secretary at a smart golf club. The series was soon dropped as racist, sexist and unfunny, rather giving the lie to Sykes’s habitual claim that he represented good, clean British humour.

From the 1970s Sykes had increasing trouble with deafness and his balance. He had lost most of the hearing in his right ear after a mastoid operation in 1952 (his future wife, a Canadian, was one of the nurses), and in 1963 he underwent further surgery to save the hearing of his left ear. Later in his career he wore spectacles as a concealed hearing aid.

But not much seemed to go right. In 1977 The Eric Sykes Show, for ITV, showed only that the meek and mild personality which he had so carefully built up hardly suited the big time. As for the BBC: “Every time I suggest something, it seems to get shelved,” he complained in 1985. Increasingly he worked abroad, in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and New Zealand, often in his own show, A Hatful of Sykes.

Big Bad Mouse was finally abandoned in 1981 after a poor reception in Australia. That year Sykes played the first of several pantomime seasons as a surprisingly cantankerous Alderman Fitzwarren in Dick Whittington at the Wimbledon Theatre. But in 1985 he had to pull out of the same pantomime at Aberdeen, after collapsing at his home. In 1995 he toured in Two of a Kind, with Sir John Mills.

He directed a number of films with an emphasis on visual humour, notably The Plank (1979), with Arthur Lowe and a cameo role for Frankie Howerd, and Rhubarb (1969), which featured Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards and Hattie Jacques.

Sykes had long acted in the cinema, and was especially good as a gipsy in Heavens Above (1963) and as Terry-Thomas’s factotum in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965). His other film credits included The Bargee (1963), One-Way Pendulum (1964), Rotten to the Core (1965), Shalako (1968), Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) and The Boys in Blue (1983).

Despite his disability, he continued to work into old age, appearing alongside Nicole Kidman in the film The Others (2001) and in the same year starring in the West End farce Caught In The Net. In 2003 he appeared in productions of The Three Sisters and As You Like It. He continued to take small roles on television in series such as Heartbeat and New Tricks.

He published several books, including Sykes of Sebastopol Terrace (1981), about his famous television series; two novels, The Great Crime of Grapplewick (1997) and Smelling of Roses (1998); and a memoir, If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Else Will (2005).

In the 1960s Sykes lived on St George’s Hill, Weybridge, next door to John Lennon. Later he moved to Esher. He also owned a large Edwardian building in Bayswater, with floors of offices including his own.

He was appointed OBE in 1986 and CBE in 2005 .

Eric Sykes married, on Valentine’s Day 1952, Edith Milbrandt; they had a son and three daughters.

Eric Sykes, born May 4 1923, died July 4 2012

Bert Weedon

Bert Weedon, the guitarist, who has died aged 91, inspired and influenced the first generation of British post-war pop musicians and, through his bestselling Play In A Day manual, showed them how to strum a tune, thus setting them on the road to stardom.

Bert Weedon in 1965 

An unassuming musician of the old school, Weedon played the guitar with great technical accomplishment but — in the view of some — with all the individuality of a speak-your-weight machine. Consequently not everyone was a fan of the Weedon way, John Lennon, in particular, taking a dim view of his twangy guitar sound.

Nevertheless, many famous figures in rock music — including Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend of The Who and Eric Clapton — honed their guitar skills by studying Weedon’s teach-yourself method.

Through his skimpy manual, which first appeared in 1957, Weedon introduced aspiring musicians to the three basic chords that underpinned most of the simple rock and roll hits of the Elvis era, and explained what to do next. As Clapton acknowledged: “I’d never have felt the urge to press on without the tips and encouragement that Play In A Day gave me.” With its red cover, illustrated with a photograph of Weedon with his big white Hofner guitar, Play In A Day sold some two million copies. Its sequel Play Every Day, and updated video and DVD versions continued to provide Weedon with a handsome income well into his old age.

As a television performer in the late 1950s, when he was in his thirties, Weedon cut a curious figure, looking more like a bank manager than a guitar hero. He had crinkly hair, beady eyes, a blob of a nose and a roguish smile, and invariably appeared in a dark suit and white shirt.

In the recording studio, Weedon provided the guitar intros, riffs and solos that punctuated many of the hits of the early stars of British rock and roll, such as Tommy Steele, Adam Faith and Marty Wilde.

Classically trained by a music teacher in the East End of London, Weedon could sight-read, which meant that he was regularly called in to provide guitar backing for many clueless young stars. He also owned one of the few electric guitars in Britain, having imported a heavy custom-made model that had cost him £40 in the late 1940s. In 1959 he had his own first chart success with Guitar Boogie Shuffle, which launched him on a life of touring with singers and groups a generation his junior, many of whom came to regard him as a father figure.

Rejecting their offers to share the drink and drugs lifestyle, the mild-mannered Weedon spent his free time visiting historical sites and scouring local markets to add to his collection of antique silver spoons.

Herbert Maurice Weedon was born on May 10 1920 at East Ham, London. His father, a tube train driver on the District Line, performed an amateur song-and-dance act with the guard of his train, under the name of Weedon and Walmisley. When Bert was 12 his father bought him his first guitar, from Petticoat Lane Market, for 15 shillings .

Having started playing the instrument in the classical style, he converted to the popular repertoire of the 1930s, forming his first dance band with a group of friends in 1934. Because it featured the local butcher’s son on drums, the band was named after the contents of the shop’s deep freeze, playing as Butch Townsend and the Cold Shoulders.

Weedon made his first solo appearance in public at East Ham town hall in 1939. During the Second World War he volunteered for the rescue services and served with them through the worst of the London Blitz. Fumes from German bombs are said to have given him lung problems , which he cured by sitting at the end of Southend Pier and breathing the beneficial vapours from the mud below.

His big musical break came after the war, when he joined Stephane Grapelli’s group as a replacement for Django Reinhardt, then progressed through the rhythm sections of various popular dance bands of the day, including those of Harry Leader, Lou Praeger and Harry Gold. By the early Fifties, Weedon was resident guitarist with the BBC Showband under Cyril Stapleton and worked on regular radio sessions.

Signed to EMI’s Parlophone label as a solo artist, Weedon’s first record, Stranger Than Fiction, was released as a 78rpm single in 1956. As the recording industry expanded, he was much in demand as a session guitarist, backing such stars as David Whitfield and Alma Cogan, as well as visiting American artists including Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole and Judy Garland.

With the coming of rock and roll, Weedon also recorded with Laurie London, Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard. Although Parlophone released a further five of Weedon’s solo guitar singles during 1957 and 1958, none reached the charts.

His fortunes improved when he switched to EMI’s new Top Rank record label in 1959, his cover version of the American hit Guitar Boogie Shuffle reaching No 7 in the British charts in June that year. Further releases fared less well until, in August 1960, Weedon’s version of The Shadows’ chart-topping hit Apache reached No 24. The Shadows acknowledged their debt to Weedon by writing Mr Guitar for him. It entered the charts at No 47 in May 1961 and was Weedon’s last singles chart entry.

Throughout the 1960s Weedon released 14 further singles on EMI’s HMV label, and although two of them, Some Other Love and South Of The Border, came close in 1962, neither was a hit.

At the same time Weedon became a prolific broadcaster, appearing regularly on children’s television shows such as Tuesday Rendezvous and Five O’Clock Club, as well as on radio and fronting his own long-running ITV series. He continued to give live shows at theatres across Britain, and in February 1963 performed in the window of a garage showroom at Salisbury, Wiltshire, for the children of two mechanics who had repaired his broken car windscreen.

Abandoning the singles market, in 1970 Weedon signed to the Contour budget label, for which he recorded a series of themed albums ranging from The Romantic Guitar of Bert Weedon to The Gentle Guitar of Bert Weedon and Bert Weedon Remembers. These comprised cover versions of hits by middle-of-the-road artists such as Nat “King” Cole and Jim Reeves, and sold a quarter of a million copies apiece. In 1971, following a successful live appearance at a rock and roll revival concert, his album Rockin’ At The Roundhouse also proved a bestseller but, as a budget release, was excluded from the British album charts.

In the mid-1970s Weedon’s album on the Warwick label, 22 Golden Guitar Greats, struck a nostalgic chord with British audiences. Heavily promoted through a television advertising campaign, it topped the British album chart for one week in November 1976 and became the bestselling recording of Weedon’s career, earning him a gold and then a platinum disc and selling more than a million copies.

As a middle-aged grandfather, he continued to sell steadily in the nostalgia market, with the occasional backward glance to his rock and roll heyday, as in Rockin’ Guitars, his 1977 single featuring a medley of six rock classics. He continued to release an average of two albums a year well into the 1980s.

For many years Weedon was an active member of the Grand Order of Water Rats, the entertainment business’s charity, and was King Rat in 1992. He was appointed OBE in 2001.

He had two sons from his first marriage, and lived in Buckinghamshire with his second wife, Maggie.

Bert Weedon, born May 10 1920, died April 20 2012

Dick Clark

Dick Clark, who has died aged 82, hosted American Bandstand, the first US television show to feature rock and roll and which became a central cultural reference for two generations of post-war Americans.

Dick Clark surrounded by fans on American Bandstand Photo: AP

6:29PM BST 19 Apr 2012

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, scarcely any newly-released pop record would chart in the USA without it having been featured on Clark’s peak-time show. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly were among the stars who received their first national exposure on American Bandstand.

Clark invariably favoured the kind of pop that teenagers could dance to over the hairier manifestations of rock, prompting charges of blandness. He promoted a clean-cut image of himself — one critic likened him to “an all-American choirboy” — and always kept proceedings wholesome : girls were not allowed to wear slacks or tight sweaters, boys dressed in jackets and ties, and smoking and chewing gum were banned.

Under Clark’s stewardship, American Bandstand became a national institution. It ran for 30 years from 1957 until the late 1980s, making it the longest-running music show in American television history.

Initially running five days a week in the afternoon before switching to a prime time Saturday night slot in the 1960s, a typical show would feature one or two guest artists who would lip-synch their current hits, chat with Clark about their careers and sign autographs. Shrewdly, Clark kept tapes of their appearances with permission to use them in the future, assembling a valuable archive of early pop history.

Such was the show’s influence in promoting chart success for the songs it featured that in 1959 Clark attracted the attention of a US Senate subcommittee investigating corrupt business practices in the music business, including bribery and payola. They discovered that he owned partial copyrights to 150 songs, including many played on American Bandstand, and had links to music-related companies.

In the end they found that Clark had done nothing illegal, but ABC ordered him to give up his outside businesses or the show. He kept the show, a decision that he estimated cost him $8 million. His holdings included partial ownership of Swan Records, which later released the first American version of the Beatles’ 1963 hit She Loves You.

Curiously Clark never booked the Beatles or the Rolling Stones for American Bandstand. Elvis Presley also never appeared, although Clark did manage an on-air telephone interview while Presley was serving in the US Army.

But no one doubted his entrepreneurial acumen, for Clark was one of America’s most successful media moguls: Dick Clark Productions supplied films, game shows and even beauty contests to the television networks. For some 40 years Clark also hosted a live New Year’s Eve televised outside broadcast from Times Square in New York. For a time during the 1980s Clark had shows on all three US networks and was listed among the Forbes 400 of the wealthiest Americans.

Richard Wagstaff Clark was born on November 30 1929 in Bronxville, New York, the son of a radio sales manager. At the AB Davis high school in nearby Mount Vernon, he joined the drama club and was voted “The Man Most Likely To Sell The Brooklyn Bridge”, on account of his extrovert and persuasive personality. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1951.

Having taken holiday jobs in various radio stations as a student, Clark moved to Philadelphia in 1952 to host a weekday record radio show on WFIL called Dick Clark’s Caravan Of Music. Shortly afterwards, the station’s local television affiliate launched a successful afternoon programme called Bandstand, and when in 1956 the resident host was fired for drink-driving, Clark took over.

The show went coast-to-coast the following year, attracting daily weekday audiences of six million for its simple format, summed up by Clark himself with characteristic brevity: “I played records, the kids danced, and America watched.” Many black entertainers received their first television airing on the programme, now renamed American Bandstand, and it helped to popularise a succession of 1960s dance crazes including the Twist, the Watusi and the Harlem Shuffle.

To supplement his earnings, Clark became a partner in several music-related companies, bought a record-pressing business and a share of a management agency. By the age of 30 he was a millionaire. His company, Dick Clark Productions, went public in 1986.

His image as “the world’s oldest teenager” became strained after Clark was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 1994. He suffered a stroke in 2004 .

Twice divorced, Dick Clark had a son with his first wife, Barbara Mallery, and a son and daughter with his second wife, Loretta Martin. He married his business partner Kari Wigton in 1977.

Dick Clark, born November 30 1929, died April 18 2012

Bingu wa Mutharika

Bingu wa Mutharika, who has died aged 78, was an eccentric and wayward president of Malawi who threw away a reputation for being modestly successful and began leading his bewildered country to ruin.

A brittle and mercurial man, Mutharika’s behaviour grew so erratic that some Malawians would question his sanity. He abandoned his presidential palace in Lilongwe not out of shame over inhabiting its 300 luxurious rooms, built for $100 million in a country suffering abject poverty, but because he declared it to be haunted and claimed that invisible rodents were running all over him at night.

Exorcists were duly summoned to this vast residence, set in 1,300 acres of grounds (constructed, in fairness, not by Mutharika himself but by Malawi’s equally eccentric first president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda). A sleepless and terrified Mutharika went to stay elsewhere while his aide for religious affairs urged sympathetic priests to “pray for the New State House to exorcise evil spirits”.

That incident in 2005 might have been put down to a heartfelt belief in the supernatural that remains almost universal in Africa. But Mutharika proceeded to fling rationality to the winds and cast Malawi into an economic and social crisis that blighted many lives.

He began the path to national self-destruction in familiar fashion by condoning the harassment of critics and of the independent press, passing a law that allowed the closure of any publication deemed to threaten the public interest.

Last April, Fergus Cochrane-Dyet, the British High Commissioner in Lilongwe, noted in a cable to London that Mutharika was becoming “ever more autocratic and intolerant of criticism”. Unfortunately for the diplomat, this missive was leaked and promptly appeared in a local newspaper, causing Mutharika to fly into a rage. The best way to disprove the charge of intolerance was, he decided, to expel the envoy for daring to voice private criticism.

This was an unprecedented decision: no African leader in recent memory had thrown out a British High Commissioner. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe might have revelled in his poisonous relations with London, but even he had never expelled a British envoy, preferring instead to keep them in Harare where they could be lectured on the errors of their ways.

Britain, Malawi’s largest bilateral aid donor, could hardly refrain from responding to Mutharika’s decision. Malawi’s High Commissioner was duly ordered out of London; William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, noted a “worrying sign that the Malawian government is expending its energies in this way, rather than focusing on the real and substantial challenges”.

Foremost among these was a burgeoning economic crisis, which saw inflation reach triple figures . When this led to street protests in Blantyre and Lilongwe last July, Mutharika responded ruthlessly. He banned any gatherings and sent masked members of the youth wing of his Democratic Progressive Party to assault and threaten key organisers. When marches took place anyway, on July 20 and 21 last year, soldiers and police used live rounds and tear gas, killing about 18 demonstrators. Mutharika, utterly unrepentant, threatened to “use any measure I can think of” against his opponents.

This bloody episode was an indelible stain on Mutharika’s reputation. Led by Britain, international donors cancelled their aid, causing the economic crisis to worsen.

Earlier, Mutharika had fallen out with his vice-president, Joyce Banda, who proved to have an awkward willingness to question his decisions. After the biggest demonstrations, she issued a remarkable public statement, on July 23, deploring the bloodshed and sympathising with the protesters, saying: “I hear the voices of the people and I relate to the issues being raised.”

Mutharika promptly blamed her and the opposition leaders for all the violence. “The blood of these people who have died is on you,” he said. “Let their spirits haunt you at night. This time I’ll go after you! Even if you hide in holes I’ll smoke you out!” The protesters, he added, were “led by Satan”.

When national strikes were called two months later, Mutharika’s belligerence was undimmed. “You can’t bully me into submission. Government can’t be taken to ransom by a few disgruntled individuals hiding in the name of civil society,” he said. “If you stop people from going to work, I will deal with you!”

Bingu wa Mutharika was born with the name Brighton Webster Ryson Thom on February 24 1934 in the British Crown Colony of Nyasaland. The son of a teacher, he excelled at school and won a scholarship to read Economics at the University of Delhi, India, shortly after Nyasaland achieved independence as Malawi in 1964. In keeping with the anti-colonial spirit of the era, he changed his name to one that carried a more African ring.

Mutharika joined the Malawian civil service and later the World Bank, taking a doctorate in Development Economics from Pacific Western University in Los Angeles. Given his academic training and his habit of referring to himself as Malawi’s “economist-in-chief”, it was bitterly ironic that economic collapse was the most salient feature of Mutharika’s presidency.

He began his rise in politics in 2002 when he was appointed minister of economic planning and national development in the administration of President Bakili Muluzi. A portly, pompous and cosmically vain main, Muluzi could not come to terms with the fact that the end of his second term was approaching and that Malawi’s constitution forbade him from seeking a third.

Deciding that his country could not manage without his leadership, Muluzi resolved to rewrite the constitution to expunge term limits and allow him to seek re-election. But this gambit failed when Malawi’s parliament admirably refused to pass the necessary amendments.

Muluzi’s “plan B” was to install a pliant and malleable successor – and his eye fell on the studious, technocratic figure of Mutharika. Lacking a power base and viewed primarily as an academic economist, he seemed to fit the bill as a president whom the canny Muluzi could control from behind the scenes.

Accordingly, Mutharika was elected president in May 2004 with the blessing of his predecessor. But Muluzi’s gamble failed in spectacular fashion. Mutharika denounced his patron for trying to be a “back seat driver”, accused Muluzi of corruption and allowed him to be harassed and briefly jailed.

Mutharika walked out of the United Democratic Front, which Muluzi still led, and set up his own Democratic Progressive Party.

Many Malawians despised Muluzi and quietly cheered these displays of independence by his determined successor. Mutharika’s first term as president was generally successful: he managed to increase Malawi’s agricultural output by dramatically improving the provision of seed, tools and fertiliser. This ended Malawi’s dependence on food aid and restored the country’s self-sufficiency, even allowing a surplus for export.

Buoyed by this achievement, Mutharika won re-election for a second term in 2008. Free of the shadow of his predecessor and intoxicated by the acclaim that his agricultural policy had brought, Mutharika’s autocratic and eccentric streak began to show through.

Dissatisfied with Vice-President Banda for her independence, he installed his own brother, Peter, as foreign minister and groomed him for the succession. In a fit of pique last year, Mutharika briefly sacked his entire cabinet and took all their portfolios for himself. Although most ministers were reappointed, this episode showed his liking for keeping his colleagues permanently on edge.

When Mutharika suffered a cardiac arrest in Lilongwe on April 5, his government had no idea who would take over the presidency. Would it be his legal successor, Joyce Banda, or the usurper-in-waiting, Peter Mutharika?

Although Mutharika probably died instantly, his demise was not officially confirmed for two days while his colleagues worked out what to do and the inevitable backroom intrigue took place. During this time, the president’s inert body was flown to a South African hospital, where officials kept up the pretence that he was undergoing treatment.

Britain, America and the African Union all made clear that constitutional proprieties must be observed – and Banda was confirmed as the new president after this unseemly interval.

Bingu wa Mutharika married, first, Ethel Zvauya, a Zimbabwean who predeceased him in 2007. He then married his minister of tourism, Callista Chimombo, in 2010. Mutharika is survived by his second wife and by four children from his first marriage.

Bingu wa Mutharika, born February 24 1934, died April 5 2012