The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[regexcellent]

Why, the porn star rule?

[Wezil]

I had a rather lengthy post on my earlier questions and your responses thus far but apparently it has been lost in e-space.

Re - terrorists. I appreciate the difficulty in definition. My problem (and maybe this will help explain where I am coming from) is not with the picking of terrorists as it is with the verifying of their death. I don't trust the US governmet further than I can spit (if that far) and don't want to rely upon them for verification. Case in point - the terrorist picked, killed and claimed last year had been reported killed two years earlier. That is simply no good for a Dead Pool. I mentioned in an earlier thread that the location of the "terrorist" is important in this respect. If they are in hiding and presumably on a US Hit List (another reason to disqualify btw, as per Death Row inmates) verification becomes impossible. Kissinger may or may not be a terrorist depending upon your definition but I am certain his death will be verified.

Ming - Of course it depends on the definition of "celebrity" but we already try to define it but placing limits. Their "importance" as a celebrity is not a factor - how they gain their celebrity is. Death row inmates, porn stars, famous for old, famous for illness are all excluded. Frankly eligibility rules in our pool are looser than any other DP I've seen (and I've seen more than a few) as are the reporting requirements. I accepted an obit off a company webpage a couple years back.

Rich people - I think it comes down to the issue of philanthropy. We generally hear of them when they are giving large amounts of money away. In essence, with 2nd+ generations, they are giving someone else's money away... With ColdWizard's permission (it was one of his subs that he may wish to use in a future year) I will post the name that brought this issue to mind. CW's pick was eligible for another reason, but without that reason I'm not sure I would have been comfortable accepting them.

Reality TV - This was how we ended up with the Kardashians (3 of them) in last year's pool. While Kim arguably has celebrity through other means, the two other K- kids made the list do to their TV show. I'm open to keeping them (I can verify their "celebrity" and their death) but I do see them as porn stars of a sort.

Youtube - There have to be more thoughts/arguments on this issue...

Finally, regarding "my rules". Of course it ultimately comes down to me to set and enforce the rules but I have never run this thing as a top-down "my way or the highway" sort of affair and I don't intend to start now. I start these rules discussions not to generate animosity or ill will but to get a sounding of what you the players think would be fair and reasonable. I don't take respectful disagreement as a personal challenge and am quite open to your thoughts/ideas. It wouldn't be much of a game without you guys (although I may actually win for a change rather than be perrenial bridesmaid) so your input is important to me.

That said, if you really don't care then that's also cool. I'll take that to mean you will go with what the rest of us decide.

[Wezil]

Why, the porn star rule?

A couple reasons -

1) Actually defining what is a porn star is difficult. We can all imagine a "traditional" California bimbo in the latest porn redo of a currently popular movie, but what about the chick that uploads a bunch of videos to PornoTube? It is a pretty diverse industry.

2) Verification. Just finding out who they even are could be problematic. "Stage names" change frequently as the bimbos repackage themselves and real names are hard to come by for obvious reasons. Only the most famous of the bunch would be verifiable and I don't want to get into having to decide which ones are "big" enough (no pun intended).

edit - No one has tried yet but I would accept "crossover" porn stars if their crossover fame would otherwise qualify them. I'm thinking Traci Lords, Nina Hartley, Sasha Grey, etc.

[Wezil]

Here's a thought.

Almost everyone (if not all) of the celebritities this year have a wiki page. Could that be the only requirement (absent any of the disqualifying categories of course)? Of course someone could in theory start a webpage for someone they want to pick but I have to imagine that is unlikely with the honourable players we have here...

[ricketyclik]

Yes, yes, nice job well done Wezil, blah blah blah, but I want an underline under my team name in the Full Team Roster

[-Jrabbit]

In my view, network and basic cable reality TV participants = celebrities. Pretty much by definition.

As for YouTube, I don't see why this is an issue. I don't know the bus lady, but there are a number of people whose fame I was unaware of before I started entering dead pools. I don't doubt there might be people who say "who?" when I pick the occasional old baseball player, while I scratch my head at the apparent fame of old European footballers and Icelandic comedians. Celebrity comes in many forms, and fame can come through various filters.

Until there's a YouTube channel devoted to videos of people who are dying, I don't see an issue.

[SlowwHand]

You're just going to let that concept pass? Can I use it?

[Wezil]

Patti Page, who made "Tennessee Waltz" one of the best-selling recordings ever, has died. She was 85.

Page died on New Year's Day in Encinitas, Calif., according to her manager.

She was one of the top-selling female singers in history with more than 100 million record sales and created a distinctive sound for the music industry in 1947 by overdubbing her own voice when she didn't have enough money to hire backup singers for the single, "Confess."

I'll update later today.

Alright - Update finished. I could have sworn one of you guys picked Patti Page but I don't see her on my list.

[Wezil]

Yes, yes, nice job well done Wezil, blah blah blah, but I want an underline under my team name in the Full Team Roster

See what happens when you miss a couple years?

[-Jrabbit]

You're just going to let that concept pass? Can I use it?

Go for it. I hope you get rich.

[Sava]

This isn't so much a pick as it is me wishing that Kardashian hoebag dies in childbirth in a murder suicide. Her and Kanye's murder... the kid suicides.

[Uncle Sparky]

I'm winning!

[molly bloom]

One to watch, alas.

It's hard to imagine a more poignant piece of work than the crossword compiled by the Guardian's Araucaria - aka 91-year-old Rev John Graham.


Araucaria, who takes his name from the Latin term for monkey puzzle tree, used his own puzzle to inform readers that he has terminal cancer.



The Cryptic crossword No 25,842 was accompanied by the special instructions: “Araucaria has 18 down of the 19, which is being treated with 13 15.”

The solution explained: cancer, oesophagus, palliative, care. Among other clues, the puzzle also alluded to "chemotherapy", which Rev Graham's doctors have decided against.

The news first emerged when the same puzzle was issued in the December issue of 1Across, Araucaria's magazine, but its appearance in the Guardian has prompted many moving tributes.


‘andamooka’ wrote: “The grace of the man, to manipulate his malady into a crossword. Warmest wishes from Down Under, Monkey Man. “



And ‘spottedhorse’ added: “I hope for both an uneventful recovery and the balls to be able to exhibit such aplomb if it is ever my fate to be in a similar position. Thank you for the joy you have brought to my life, sir.”

http://news.uk.msn.com/blog/trending-blogpost.aspx?post=9f20e412-c7ce-49bd-b695-cde14fca33fe&_nwpt=1

[molly bloom]

Another Brit goes into the ether:

Robert Kee, who has died aged 93, belonged to a vanishing tradition of great TV documentary makers and presenters with roots in print journalism and books. He might be presenting the BBC's Panorama or ITN's lunchtime news programme of the early 1970s, First Report, but his roots and style were always back in the puritanical tell-it-as-it-is ethic of Picture Post magazine. Thus, of the Famous Five who in 1983 founded the commercial breakfast television station TV-am, he was the least glitzy.

His passion for justice, exercised on subjects such as Ireland or British Asian immigrants, was always tempered by his objective sense that both sides of a question must be ventilated. He seemed increasingly a throwback once more raucous and less scrupulous voices had become fashionable in the media.

He did not look a populist, and was not, either as a documentary maker or as the author of many books of history. The finely chiselled, rather saturnine features and piercing eyes were those of a colonial magistrate rather than a bland television personality.

This was consistent with his personal background. He was born in Calcutta, now Kolkata, the son of a Scottish jute trader, himself the son of a Liberal mayor of Greenock, on Clydeside. Robert's father was successful in business in the 1920s and 30s, but rather looked down upon by the "aristocracy" of the army and the Indian civil service.

His father, who was fond of humming the popular ballad Keep Right on to the End of the Road, lost his job in the great depression of the early 1930s. He received a payoff of £900 and no pension, forcing him to work at various makeshift jobs until he was 74. In speaking and writing about his father, Robert showed far more than usual emotion.

All this might have created a reach-me-down revolutionary. With him, it led to an icy determination to pursue the truth wherever it might lie. He gained a scholarship to Stowe school, Buckinghamshire, and an exhibition to study history at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was taught by and became a friend of AJP Taylor. With the second world war under way, he joined the RAF and in 1942 became a bomber pilot, a role that might not have sat as easily on many of his successors in television. While flying over the Netherlands, he was shot down and captured by the occupying Germans and taken to a camp in Poland.

He made two efforts to escape. One took him out of Poland and into Germany as far as Cologne, before he was recaptured on a train while trying to contact the Belgian resistance. He later wrote that it was "all rather fun", and that having attended an English public school was good training for survival in a prison camp.

After the war Picture Post beckoned. Kee slaved away on features about the way Britain was shaping up for the future and trying to live down its colonial past. Then he was briefly a picture editor, a special correspondent for the Observer (1956-57) and the Sunday Times (1957-58), and literary editor of the Spectator (1957). He really began to make his mark in 1958, when he joined BBC TV to work on Panorama, reporting on danger spots including Algeria during its war of independence from France.

Kee exulted in the freedom danger gave. There were no camera stands or static shots, there was no producer or director to tell him what to do. In the view of some colleagues, Kee single-handedly revolutionised television reporting.

From 1964 to 1978 he worked for various ITV companies. Asked by Jeremy Isaacs to join Associated Rediffusion's This Week programme, Kee made his prerogatives crystal clear even in London. Isaacs remembered trying to look over Kee's shoulder at the script Kee was working on and then offering a suggestion. Kee told him: "Oh do shut up. I'm writing this."

Working for the BBC, he displayed the same sovereignty of mind. His 13-part Ireland: A Television History (1980-81) sought, in his words, to "ungarble the past" in telling the island's story over the 1,000 years from the time of Brian Boru. During the Falklands war of 1982 he interviewed in what many thought was an unfair and brutal way the foreign secretary who appeared to have fumbled the warning signs of imminent war, Lord Carrington. But when a documentary he made on the Falklands was edited by the producer in such a way as to give what Kee considered disproportionate coverage to the minority opponents of the war, he split with the BBC. Nothing that transformed the writer into a glove puppet of the manipulators of the media was acceptable to him.

Times were changing. By the time he joined the Famous Five – himself, David Frost, Anna Ford, Michael Parkinson and Angela Rippon – to set up TV-am, heavyweight people such as himself were going out of fashion: audiences were moving towards more comfortable and ordinary presenters in sweaters. Within weeks the Five disintegrated and, scenting blood, the media crowded outside the doors of the studios in Camden Town, north London. Anyone entering or leaving the building was questioned. Frost came and went in his polished blue Bentley, Kee almost unnoticed in a muddy car of lesser make.

As a historian, either in his TV documentries or his books, he was most effective when he had a clear point of view. His books on 1939 and 1945, The World We Left Behind and The World We Fought For, published in the mid-80s, relied on press reports and did not add a great deal, but his books on Ireland – The Green Flag (1972), Ireland: A History (1980) and The Laurel and the Ivy (1993), a dispassionate study of the nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell – made the best of his narrative skills and human insight. Trial and Error (1986), about the Guildford Four, was especially influential in challenging a suspect verdict.

In his later years, Kee campaigned in a quiet way for his main thesis that justice must rest on truth – which was not an easy argument to put across in an age of spin doctors and other partisan manipulators.


He justified The Laurel and the Ivy primarily on the grounds that it might enable British people to understand Ireland better, seeing it from the Irishman's point of view. In order to pursue his goal of home rule, Parnell had at first cultivated the support of the Fenians, seeking outright independence. One interviewer asked Kee: "Had you been an Englishman in 1870, would you have supported Parnell?" This produced the answer: "Yes, I would have been pro-home rule. I might have been, as a lot of home rulers had originally been, a Fenian, but by the 1870s, if one had been a Fenian, one would think them absolutely out of court, not relevant."

The interviewer found it singular that Kee replied from an Irishman's perspective rather than an Englishman's. It was this ability to empathise with conflicting points of view that made him such a good historian, but as a campaigner in his 70s he left many people puzzled.

Kee found himself able to support British governments of any political shade who tried to find a solution to the Irish problem, but he was not the sort of man to indulge himself in the approval of fudges. When the 1993 Anglo-Irish declaration on Ulster was signed by John Major and Albert Reynolds, he pointed out that the key ingredient – that there must be the consent of the Northern Irish majority in deciding whether there was a united Ireland – had been there for 72 years.

"If this is indeed, in Mr Ashdown's cliche of the week, 'a clear sign of a new way forward', the IRA could have found it was such any time in the past 24 years," he said tartly. "It did not do so, and continued to kill and destroy in pursuit of its goal, arousing Protestant paramilitary retaliation."

Immigration, too, was something on which he permitted himself a campaigning as well as an analytical stance. In the early 1990s panic began to set in among the prosperous Hong Kong British subjects that their future after Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997 might be bleak. Kee wrote arguing that the precedents with Asians fleeing from Idi Amin in Uganda in 1972 were not conclusive, because most of the Asian Ugandans had been traders, whereas most of the Hong Kong British subjects wanting sanctuary would be civil servants, teachers and professionals. The worries about the Ugandan Asians' presence in Britain had been unfounded, and it might well be that one day the fears of the Hong Kong British subjects would be viewed as exaggerated.

"Perhaps one day," said Kee, "Britain will even evolve a coherent immigration policy which is something more than a series of kneejerk reactions to emergency situations, concerned, in the initial phase at any rate, with keeping certain people (usually non-white) out."

Kee had three marriages, of which the first two ended in divorce: to Janetta Woolley, by whom he had a daughter; to Cynthia Judah, by whom he had a daughter and two sons, of whom one predeceased him; and to Kate Trevelyan. He is survived by Kate and three children.

• Robert Kee, writer and broadcaster, born 5 October 1919; died 11 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jan/11/robert-kee-obituary

The ranks of women in science are further diminished (Rita Levi-Montalcini died December last year ):

Brigitte Askonas, widely known as Ita, who has died aged 89, was one of the leading figures of modern immunology. She built on the work of the science's earlier pioneers, Louis Pasteur and Paul Ehrlich, by increasing understanding of the immune system as an intricate network of many cell types interacting and producing mediators to control their complex functions.

The principal base for her work was the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), north-west London, which she joined in 1952. She spent 36 years there, the last 12 of them as head of the immunology division.

Her studies of milk proteins led to her important research on the origin and synthesis of antibodies. She was the first to clone memory B cells, and studied macrophages, the large cells that act as scavengers, capturing proteins, viruses and bacteria. They then present them to lymphocytes, the white blood cells that can respond to infectious pathogens by releasing antibodies. These contributions led to her election as an FRS in 1973.

It was only then that she began her seminal work on the role of T lymphocytes in infection, especially infections with the influenza and respiratory syncytial viruses, now widely regarded as her major contribution. She showed that cytolytic T cells, which kill cells infected with viruses, had an ability to recognise multiple subtypes of viruses, unlike antibodies, which recognise a single virus subtype. This principle has important implications for the development of new vaccines against the infections that cause HIV/Aids, malaria, TB and pandemic influenza.

Her work on respiratory syncytial virus, which afflicts infants, also led to major insights into disease pathogenesis. She thus provided the crucial intellectual basis for modern vaccine development.

Ita was born in Vienna of Czech parents. Her father and his brother owned knitting mills in several European countries. Her mother had studied fine art, and her parents built a collection, most of which was lost in the early days of the second world war. Ita loved both art and classical music, often the focus of her travels on holiday.

The family left Vienna in March 1938 shortly after the Anschluss that united Austria with Germany. Protected by their Czech citizenship, they moved around Europe before arriving in New York. Lacking the visa required to stay in the US, they finally settled in Canada in 1940.

Ita spent two years at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, before going to McGill University, Montreal, from which she graduated in biochemistry in 1944 and five years later gained an MSc. She said that she studied biochemistry because she admired the dean of science, David Landsborough Thomson, for his brilliance as a lecturer and his sense of humour – an important factor to her in cultivating warm relations with friends and colleagues. It was her unrestrained laughter at a James Thurber cartoon above his desk, she maintained, that got her a post at the newly founded Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry at McGill.

There she worked on the biochemistry of dementia with Karl Stern, which gave her scope for observing both the foibles of human nature and how talent could be nurtured. Then Thomson suggested she go to the biochemistry department at Cambridge University to do a PhD on muscle enzymes (1949-52).

Many successful immunologists began their careers as Ita's PhD or postdoctoral students, and many others, including several Nobel laureates, were deeply influenced by her work. Throughout her career and her no less active retirement, Ita enjoyed fostering an interest in immunology in young scientists and supporting them in the development of their careers. In research, she always insisted on rigorous scientific method and careful interpretation of data.

After her departure from the NIMR, Ita was a regular visitor to colleagues at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford and the departments of leucocyte biology and respiratory medicine at Imperial College London. In 2007 she was awarded the Robert Koch Gold Medal.

She is survived by her sister-in-law, Madge Askonas, two nieces, a nephew, four great-nieces and two great-nephews.

• Ita (Brigitte Alice) Askonas, immunologist, born 1 April 1923; died 9 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/10/brigitte-askonas-obituary

Best known for a film I have yet to see:

The brazenly trashy, cheap-and-cheerful B-movie is more or less defunct in modern cinema. One of its few authentic latter-day practitioners was the film-maker David R Ellis, who has been found dead at the age of 60 in a hotel in South Africa, where he was preparing to make a live-action version of the violent anime Kite.

'It taps into people's two biggest phobias: fear of flying and snakes,' Ellis said of his film. Photograph: Getty Ellis came to widespread attention in 2006 when he directed Snakes on a Plane, the exploitation action thriller with a title that doubled as its own synopsis. Samuel L Jackson played an FBI agent on board a flight packed with venomous snakes planted to kill the witness who is in his care. There have been dumber and more precarious murder plots in the movies, but not many.

Ellis was brought in as a replacement for the original director, Ronny Yu. When word circulated online of a proposed title change (to the humdrum Pacific Air Flight 121), the blogosphere protested as one and the movie, still unmade at that point, became a phenomenon. Online enthusiasts concocted their own poster images and speculated on the contents of the script; the studio, New Line Cinema, incorporated some of these suggestions, turning Snakes on a Plane into the first movie shaped directly by its prospective fans.

"It was really about halfway during the film when I saw how big the buzz was becoming," said Ellis. "That's when I started following it, interacting with [fans] and thinking about what I could do to make the movie more of a fanbase movie." He believed the picture worked "because it's fresh and unusual and also taps into people's two biggest phobias: fear of flying and snakes. Also we have the balls to call the movie what it is." Critics were less kind.

Ellis was born in California, where he developed a passion for surfing and became a junior professional surfer. He began acting in his teens, and had minor roles in films and on television, including the family comedy The Strongest Man in the World (1975), starring Kurt Russell. His aptitude for surfing led to stunt work the following year, and he remained active in stunts and stunt co-ordination for most of his career.

Car chases dominated mainstream US cinema in the 1970s, and Ellis had a hand in some of the most popular examples, such as the Burt Reynolds action-comedies Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Hooper (1978). He landed his first job as a stunt co-ordinator on Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Subsequent work in this capacity included Fatal Attraction (1987), Misery (1990), Patriot Games (1992) and a stint on the 1990s television series Baywatch. Ellis also served as a stunt performer on films including Scarface (1983), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Lethal Weapon (1987) and Days of Thunder (1990).

From 1986, he also began getting work as a second unit director. "Being a good second unit director is duplicating the style of the first unit director so that it's a seamless piece of photography," he explained. He was in charge of second unit on movies such as The Devil's Own (1997), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and The Matrix Reloaded (2003). He specialised in shooting in and around water, with all the difficulties that entailed, in films including Waterworld (1995), Deep Blue Sea (1999), The Perfect Storm (2000) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). Among the sequences of which he was proudest was the ambush on vehicles trapped in a narrow alley in Clear and Present Danger (1994) and the complex and protracted freeway chase in The Matrix Reloaded.

Ellis made his directing debut in 1996 with Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco, a live-action animal adventure featuring the voices of Michael J Fox and Sally Field. His next film was another sequel, but this one, Final Destination 2 (2003), was far more representative of his taste for unpretentious, titillating thrills. The Final Destination films are essentially disaster movies with horror trimmings, featuring photogenic young actors being dispatched in increasingly gory and ingenious ways by fate itself. Ellis made two instalments in the series – he later directed the fourth film, The Final Destination (2009), which was shot in 3D.

His other movies were Cellular (2004), a tense kidnapping story starring Kim Basinger, Jason Statham and the Captain America star Chris Evans, and the horror film Asylum (2008). Shark Night (2011), his last completed picture, was a distant 3D cousin of the likes of Jaws and Piranha.

At the time of his death, Ellis had completed second unit work on several films due for release this year: the martial arts adventure 47 Ronin, starring Keanu Reeves; R.I.P.D. with Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in a fantasy thriller about undead cops; and Winter's Tale, a historical fable with Will Smith and Russell Crowe.

He is survived by his wife, Cindy, and three children.

• David Richard Ellis, actor, stuntman and film director, born 8 September 1952; found dead 7 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/09/david-r-ellis

Probably better known to Brits, but he famously came into conflict with the Right wing of the Establishment:

When Alasdair Milne, who has died aged 82, was appointed director general of the BBC in 1981, he must have seemed the ideal choice. He had known no career other than broadcasting and no employer other than the BBC, though he had once left the corporation briefly to set up an independent production company. Furthermore, he had come up from current affairs television, by then the recognised launchpad to the top.

Yet his term as director general ended prematurely, in January 1987, when he resigned to avoid the ignominy of being sacked. The ostensible cause was a succession of public gaffes by the BBC in 1985-86, plus a costly out-of-court libel settlement over a 1984 edition of Panorama, all of which Tory ministers, the Times, the Daily Mail and others were able to exploit. Politics was at the root of all the complaints, even those aroused by The Monocled Mutineer, a drama serial set in the first world war and advertised as a true story, although most of the exploits of its deserter "hero" who flouted authority were in fact conjectural.

There had also been a row when two plays about the Falklands war were commissioned, but only the anti-war one was produced. But the loudest uproar of all had come in 1985 over a pair of interviews, with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin and Gregory Campbell of the Democratic Unionists, for a documentary on Northern Ireland in the Real Lives series.

Margaret Thatcher had earlier that year stated that broadcasters should deny terrorists "the oxygen of publicity". Leaked details of the programme prompted a letter from the then home secretary, Leon Brittan, demanding that it be pulled from the schedules. With Milne absent abroad, the BBC board of governors viewed the programme and stopped it from going out. BBC journalists went on strike in protest and Milne was able to reinstate the item later in the year, if at the cost of renewed hostility from governors and government alike.

The final clash was set off by The Secret Society, a BBC Scotland series which was not transmitted until after Milne's departure. It was supposed to reveal how on the one hand individual privacy was being eroded, while on the other hand government departments were exercising ever greater secrecy. While the series was still in preparation, Special Branch raided the BBC's Glasgow studios and carried off tins of film. These were for an episode intended to blow the whistle on a satellite warning system, Zircon, being quietly developed by the Ministry of Defence. Milne had already viewed rough-cuts of the series and scrubbed this episode. It made no difference. His enemies had all they needed.

It was bad luck rather than bad judgment. Milne had taken over just when the paranoiac suspicion of the BBC first displayed by Harold Wilson in the 1960s was being reinvigorated by Thatcher. One of the ploys of both prime ministers was to appoint a powerful chairman of the governors to "curb" the director general, in Milne's case Marmaduke Hussey. As for the governors, they happened to be suffering a periodic urge to cease being a bunch of dim nobodies and turn themselves into dim busybodies. It was their decision, Hussey told Milne, that he had to go.

That a Scottish production should have precipitated Milne's fall was an extra irony. He came from an east of Scotland family, and the happiest years of his BBC career were to be the five he spent as controller of BBC Scotland. His parents lived in India, where his father was a surgeon, so the children were largely brought up by grandparents in Edinburgh. The young Alasdair was sent to school at Winchester college, and on to New College, Oxford. He graduated, and also married, in the summer of 1954, with no idea of how he wanted to earn a living. It was his wife, Sheila, who spotted a BBC advertisement for general trainees.

These traineeships were highly sought-after, and hundreds of graduates applied each year. Milne and Patrick Dromgoole, who would wind up as managing director of HTV, were the lucky ones in 1954. They started off in radio, but within a year Milne was at the Lime Grove television studios, working for the two high flyers, Donald Baverstock and Antony Jay, with whom he would long be associated.

They devised the early evening show Tonight, hived themselves off from the rest of the Talks Department as a private empire called Tonight Productions, and launched the legendary Saturday night satire of the early 1960s, That Was the Week That Was. But its over-ambitious successor Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, was a flop. By 1965 Jay had quit, while Baverstock's dizzy progress up the ranks was grinding to a halt.

He and Milne decided to leave the BBC and join Jay in setting up an independent outfit, Jay, Baverstock & Milne. Alas, it was 20 years before the advent of Channel 4 and Thatcher's politics of deconstruction would make independents an accepted part of the broadcasting system. The main work they had was making information films for ICT computers. But if they could not sell programmes to the TV companies, they could sell them their services. Milne went to Rediffusion to run its respected current affairs show This Week.


This was probably an asset when in 1967 he rejoined a BBC that was at last beginning to accept the idea that its staff need not necessarily be lifers, and that experience of the big world outside might be useful. Milne dodged an invitation to return to current affairs shows, though, and angled to take over BBC Scotland – his first deed was to have the "Scotland" added to the brass plate outside Broadcasting House in Glasgow.

The Milne family settled into a house on the outskirts of the city. Nationalism was in the air after a famous SNP byelection victory at Hamilton. Milne was able to increase Scotland's presence on the TV network, and left regretfully when in 1973 he was lured back to London as director of programmes, television, but he was still only 43, and ambitious.

The BBC's two channels each had its own chief to run day-to-day programming. Milne's overall responsibility tended to be noticed only when trouble flared, in the 1970s mainly over questions of taste and censorship. He handled these better than the most notorious instance suggests, his decision in 1976 to withdraw Dennis Potter's play Brimstone and Treacle from the schedules. He also pushed through the BBC's introduction of breakfast television ahead of the opposition.

And so to the director generalship. How this would have been viewed had he been allowed to run his full term, probably another four years, is hard to say. He wasted time and money on a premature attempt to take the BBC into satellite broadcasting. Having got rid of his able managing director, television, Aubrey Singer, he gave the job to an ex-light entertainment specialist, Bill Cotton. And why not? But to then bring in another warrior from the ratings front line, Michael Grade, as director of programmes tilted the balance too far. BBC Television suddenly seemed to be more interested in audience figures than excellence, in buying popular shows from the US than making its own programmes.

In fact, the criticism which broke out when the BBC put on an imported serial, The Thorn Birds, in 1984, while ITV basked in the wide acclaim for The Jewel in the Crown, can be seen as the first shot in the political campaign that led to that bitter day in 1987 when Milne was deposed.

In time he recovered and began to take part in the institutional deliberations that lie in wait for retired broadcasters. In 1988 he published DG: the Memoirs of a British Broadcaster. And for his old mentor Baverstock, he took on for a while the administration of a family business Donald and his wife, Gillian, had inherited, overseeing the income from the work of Gillian's mother, Enid Blyton.

Milne told a meeting of the Royal Television Society in 2006 that when no further TV work presented itself: "I decided to go and spend the summer fishing and the winter shooting in beloved Scotland."

Sheila died in 1992. Milne is survived by two sons, Ruairidh and Seumas, and a daughter, Kirsty.

• Alasdair David Gordon Milne, television executive, born 8 October 1930; died 8 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/09/alasdair-milne

[molly bloom]

Another Brit goes into the ether:

Robert Kee, who has died aged 93, belonged to a vanishing tradition of great TV documentary makers and presenters with roots in print journalism and books. He might be presenting the BBC's Panorama or ITN's lunchtime news programme of the early 1970s, First Report, but his roots and style were always back in the puritanical tell-it-as-it-is ethic of Picture Post magazine. Thus, of the Famous Five who in 1983 founded the commercial breakfast television station TV-am, he was the least glitzy.

His passion for justice, exercised on subjects such as Ireland or British Asian immigrants, was always tempered by his objective sense that both sides of a question must be ventilated. He seemed increasingly a throwback once more raucous and less scrupulous voices had become fashionable in the media.

He did not look a populist, and was not, either as a documentary maker or as the author of many books of history. The finely chiselled, rather saturnine features and piercing eyes were those of a colonial magistrate rather than a bland television personality.

This was consistent with his personal background. He was born in Calcutta, now Kolkata, the son of a Scottish jute trader, himself the son of a Liberal mayor of Greenock, on Clydeside. Robert's father was successful in business in the 1920s and 30s, but rather looked down upon by the "aristocracy" of the army and the Indian civil service.

His father, who was fond of humming the popular ballad Keep Right on to the End of the Road, lost his job in the great depression of the early 1930s. He received a payoff of £900 and no pension, forcing him to work at various makeshift jobs until he was 74. In speaking and writing about his father, Robert showed far more than usual emotion.

All this might have created a reach-me-down revolutionary. With him, it led to an icy determination to pursue the truth wherever it might lie. He gained a scholarship to Stowe school, Buckinghamshire, and an exhibition to study history at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was taught by and became a friend of AJP Taylor. With the second world war under way, he joined the RAF and in 1942 became a bomber pilot, a role that might not have sat as easily on many of his successors in television. While flying over the Netherlands, he was shot down and captured by the occupying Germans and taken to a camp in Poland.

He made two efforts to escape. One took him out of Poland and into Germany as far as Cologne, before he was recaptured on a train while trying to contact the Belgian resistance. He later wrote that it was "all rather fun", and that having attended an English public school was good training for survival in a prison camp.

After the war Picture Post beckoned. Kee slaved away on features about the way Britain was shaping up for the future and trying to live down its colonial past. Then he was briefly a picture editor, a special correspondent for the Observer (1956-57) and the Sunday Times (1957-58), and literary editor of the Spectator (1957). He really began to make his mark in 1958, when he joined BBC TV to work on Panorama, reporting on danger spots including Algeria during its war of independence from France.

Kee exulted in the freedom danger gave. There were no camera stands or static shots, there was no producer or director to tell him what to do. In the view of some colleagues, Kee single-handedly revolutionised television reporting.

From 1964 to 1978 he worked for various ITV companies. Asked by Jeremy Isaacs to join Associated Rediffusion's This Week programme, Kee made his prerogatives crystal clear even in London. Isaacs remembered trying to look over Kee's shoulder at the script Kee was working on and then offering a suggestion. Kee told him: "Oh do shut up. I'm writing this."

Working for the BBC, he displayed the same sovereignty of mind. His 13-part Ireland: A Television History (1980-81) sought, in his words, to "ungarble the past" in telling the island's story over the 1,000 years from the time of Brian Boru. During the Falklands war of 1982 he interviewed in what many thought was an unfair and brutal way the foreign secretary who appeared to have fumbled the warning signs of imminent war, Lord Carrington. But when a documentary he made on the Falklands was edited by the producer in such a way as to give what Kee considered disproportionate coverage to the minority opponents of the war, he split with the BBC. Nothing that transformed the writer into a glove puppet of the manipulators of the media was acceptable to him.

Times were changing. By the time he joined the Famous Five – himself, David Frost, Anna Ford, Michael Parkinson and Angela Rippon – to set up TV-am, heavyweight people such as himself were going out of fashion: audiences were moving towards more comfortable and ordinary presenters in sweaters. Within weeks the Five disintegrated and, scenting blood, the media crowded outside the doors of the studios in Camden Town, north London. Anyone entering or leaving the building was questioned. Frost came and went in his polished blue Bentley, Kee almost unnoticed in a muddy car of lesser make.

As a historian, either in his TV documentries or his books, he was most effective when he had a clear point of view. His books on 1939 and 1945, The World We Left Behind and The World We Fought For, published in the mid-80s, relied on press reports and did not add a great deal, but his books on Ireland – The Green Flag (1972), Ireland: A History (1980) and The Laurel and the Ivy (1993), a dispassionate study of the nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell – made the best of his narrative skills and human insight. Trial and Error (1986), about the Guildford Four, was especially influential in challenging a suspect verdict.

In his later years, Kee campaigned in a quiet way for his main thesis that justice must rest on truth – which was not an easy argument to put across in an age of spin doctors and other partisan manipulators.


He justified The Laurel and the Ivy primarily on the grounds that it might enable British people to understand Ireland better, seeing it from the Irishman's point of view. In order to pursue his goal of home rule, Parnell had at first cultivated the support of the Fenians, seeking outright independence. One interviewer asked Kee: "Had you been an Englishman in 1870, would you have supported Parnell?" This produced the answer: "Yes, I would have been pro-home rule. I might have been, as a lot of home rulers had originally been, a Fenian, but by the 1870s, if one had been a Fenian, one would think them absolutely out of court, not relevant."

The interviewer found it singular that Kee replied from an Irishman's perspective rather than an Englishman's. It was this ability to empathise with conflicting points of view that made him such a good historian, but as a campaigner in his 70s he left many people puzzled.

Kee found himself able to support British governments of any political shade who tried to find a solution to the Irish problem, but he was not the sort of man to indulge himself in the approval of fudges. When the 1993 Anglo-Irish declaration on Ulster was signed by John Major and Albert Reynolds, he pointed out that the key ingredient – that there must be the consent of the Northern Irish majority in deciding whether there was a united Ireland – had been there for 72 years.

"If this is indeed, in Mr Ashdown's cliche of the week, 'a clear sign of a new way forward', the IRA could have found it was such any time in the past 24 years," he said tartly. "It did not do so, and continued to kill and destroy in pursuit of its goal, arousing Protestant paramilitary retaliation."

Immigration, too, was something on which he permitted himself a campaigning as well as an analytical stance. In the early 1990s panic began to set in among the prosperous Hong Kong British subjects that their future after Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997 might be bleak. Kee wrote arguing that the precedents with Asians fleeing from Idi Amin in Uganda in 1972 were not conclusive, because most of the Asian Ugandans had been traders, whereas most of the Hong Kong British subjects wanting sanctuary would be civil servants, teachers and professionals. The worries about the Ugandan Asians' presence in Britain had been unfounded, and it might well be that one day the fears of the Hong Kong British subjects would be viewed as exaggerated.

"Perhaps one day," said Kee, "Britain will even evolve a coherent immigration policy which is something more than a series of kneejerk reactions to emergency situations, concerned, in the initial phase at any rate, with keeping certain people (usually non-white) out."

Kee had three marriages, of which the first two ended in divorce: to Janetta Woolley, by whom he had a daughter; to Cynthia Judah, by whom he had a daughter and two sons, of whom one predeceased him; and to Kate Trevelyan. He is survived by Kate and three children.

• Robert Kee, writer and broadcaster, born 5 October 1919; died 11 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jan/11/robert-kee-obituary

The ranks of women in science are further diminished (Rita Levi-Montalcini died December last year ):

Brigitte Askonas, widely known as Ita, who has died aged 89, was one of the leading figures of modern immunology. She built on the work of the science's earlier pioneers, Louis Pasteur and Paul Ehrlich, by increasing understanding of the immune system as an intricate network of many cell types interacting and producing mediators to control their complex functions.

The principal base for her work was the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), north-west London, which she joined in 1952. She spent 36 years there, the last 12 of them as head of the immunology division.

Her studies of milk proteins led to her important research on the origin and synthesis of antibodies. She was the first to clone memory B cells, and studied macrophages, the large cells that act as scavengers, capturing proteins, viruses and bacteria. They then present them to lymphocytes, the white blood cells that can respond to infectious pathogens by releasing antibodies. These contributions led to her election as an FRS in 1973.

It was only then that she began her seminal work on the role of T lymphocytes in infection, especially infections with the influenza and respiratory syncytial viruses, now widely regarded as her major contribution. She showed that cytolytic T cells, which kill cells infected with viruses, had an ability to recognise multiple subtypes of viruses, unlike antibodies, which recognise a single virus subtype. This principle has important implications for the development of new vaccines against the infections that cause HIV/Aids, malaria, TB and pandemic influenza.

Her work on respiratory syncytial virus, which afflicts infants, also led to major insights into disease pathogenesis. She thus provided the crucial intellectual basis for modern vaccine development.

Ita was born in Vienna of Czech parents. Her father and his brother owned knitting mills in several European countries. Her mother had studied fine art, and her parents built a collection, most of which was lost in the early days of the second world war. Ita loved both art and classical music, often the focus of her travels on holiday.

The family left Vienna in March 1938 shortly after the Anschluss that united Austria with Germany. Protected by their Czech citizenship, they moved around Europe before arriving in New York. Lacking the visa required to stay in the US, they finally settled in Canada in 1940.

Ita spent two years at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, before going to McGill University, Montreal, from which she graduated in biochemistry in 1944 and five years later gained an MSc. She said that she studied biochemistry because she admired the dean of science, David Landsborough Thomson, for his brilliance as a lecturer and his sense of humour – an important factor to her in cultivating warm relations with friends and colleagues. It was her unrestrained laughter at a James Thurber cartoon above his desk, she maintained, that got her a post at the newly founded Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry at McGill.

There she worked on the biochemistry of dementia with Karl Stern, which gave her scope for observing both the foibles of human nature and how talent could be nurtured. Then Thomson suggested she go to the biochemistry department at Cambridge University to do a PhD on muscle enzymes (1949-52).

Many successful immunologists began their careers as Ita's PhD or postdoctoral students, and many others, including several Nobel laureates, were deeply influenced by her work. Throughout her career and her no less active retirement, Ita enjoyed fostering an interest in immunology in young scientists and supporting them in the development of their careers. In research, she always insisted on rigorous scientific method and careful interpretation of data.

After her departure from the NIMR, Ita was a regular visitor to colleagues at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford and the departments of leucocyte biology and respiratory medicine at Imperial College London. In 2007 she was awarded the Robert Koch Gold Medal.

She is survived by her sister-in-law, Madge Askonas, two nieces, a nephew, four great-nieces and two great-nephews.

• Ita (Brigitte Alice) Askonas, immunologist, born 1 April 1923; died 9 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/10/brigitte-askonas-obituary

Best known for a film I have yet to see:

The brazenly trashy, cheap-and-cheerful B-movie is more or less defunct in modern cinema. One of its few authentic latter-day practitioners was the film-maker David R Ellis, who has been found dead at the age of 60 in a hotel in South Africa, where he was preparing to make a live-action version of the violent anime Kite.

'It taps into people's two biggest phobias: fear of flying and snakes,' Ellis said of his film. Photograph: Getty Ellis came to widespread attention in 2006 when he directed Snakes on a Plane, the exploitation action thriller with a title that doubled as its own synopsis. Samuel L Jackson played an FBI agent on board a flight packed with venomous snakes planted to kill the witness who is in his care. There have been dumber and more precarious murder plots in the movies, but not many.

Ellis was brought in as a replacement for the original director, Ronny Yu. When word circulated online of a proposed title change (to the humdrum Pacific Air Flight 121), the blogosphere protested as one and the movie, still unmade at that point, became a phenomenon. Online enthusiasts concocted their own poster images and speculated on the contents of the script; the studio, New Line Cinema, incorporated some of these suggestions, turning Snakes on a Plane into the first movie shaped directly by its prospective fans.

"It was really about halfway during the film when I saw how big the buzz was becoming," said Ellis. "That's when I started following it, interacting with [fans] and thinking about what I could do to make the movie more of a fanbase movie." He believed the picture worked "because it's fresh and unusual and also taps into people's two biggest phobias: fear of flying and snakes. Also we have the balls to call the movie what it is." Critics were less kind.

Ellis was born in California, where he developed a passion for surfing and became a junior professional surfer. He began acting in his teens, and had minor roles in films and on television, including the family comedy The Strongest Man in the World (1975), starring Kurt Russell. His aptitude for surfing led to stunt work the following year, and he remained active in stunts and stunt co-ordination for most of his career.

Car chases dominated mainstream US cinema in the 1970s, and Ellis had a hand in some of the most popular examples, such as the Burt Reynolds action-comedies Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Hooper (1978). He landed his first job as a stunt co-ordinator on Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Subsequent work in this capacity included Fatal Attraction (1987), Misery (1990), Patriot Games (1992) and a stint on the 1990s television series Baywatch. Ellis also served as a stunt performer on films including Scarface (1983), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Lethal Weapon (1987) and Days of Thunder (1990).

From 1986, he also began getting work as a second unit director. "Being a good second unit director is duplicating the style of the first unit director so that it's a seamless piece of photography," he explained. He was in charge of second unit on movies such as The Devil's Own (1997), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and The Matrix Reloaded (2003). He specialised in shooting in and around water, with all the difficulties that entailed, in films including Waterworld (1995), Deep Blue Sea (1999), The Perfect Storm (2000) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). Among the sequences of which he was proudest was the ambush on vehicles trapped in a narrow alley in Clear and Present Danger (1994) and the complex and protracted freeway chase in The Matrix Reloaded.

Ellis made his directing debut in 1996 with Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco, a live-action animal adventure featuring the voices of Michael J Fox and Sally Field. His next film was another sequel, but this one, Final Destination 2 (2003), was far more representative of his taste for unpretentious, titillating thrills. The Final Destination films are essentially disaster movies with horror trimmings, featuring photogenic young actors being dispatched in increasingly gory and ingenious ways by fate itself. Ellis made two instalments in the series – he later directed the fourth film, The Final Destination (2009), which was shot in 3D.

His other movies were Cellular (2004), a tense kidnapping story starring Kim Basinger, Jason Statham and the Captain America star Chris Evans, and the horror film Asylum (2008). Shark Night (2011), his last completed picture, was a distant 3D cousin of the likes of Jaws and Piranha.

At the time of his death, Ellis had completed second unit work on several films due for release this year: the martial arts adventure 47 Ronin, starring Keanu Reeves; R.I.P.D. with Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in a fantasy thriller about undead cops; and Winter's Tale, a historical fable with Will Smith and Russell Crowe.

He is survived by his wife, Cindy, and three children.

• David Richard Ellis, actor, stuntman and film director, born 8 September 1952; found dead 7 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/09/david-r-ellis

Probably better known to Brits, but he famously came into conflict with the Right wing of the Establishment:

When Alasdair Milne, who has died aged 82, was appointed director general of the BBC in 1981, he must have seemed the ideal choice. He had known no career other than broadcasting and no employer other than the BBC, though he had once left the corporation briefly to set up an independent production company. Furthermore, he had come up from current affairs television, by then the recognised launchpad to the top.

Yet his term as director general ended prematurely, in January 1987, when he resigned to avoid the ignominy of being sacked. The ostensible cause was a succession of public gaffes by the BBC in 1985-86, plus a costly out-of-court libel settlement over a 1984 edition of Panorama, all of which Tory ministers, the Times, the Daily Mail and others were able to exploit. Politics was at the root of all the complaints, even those aroused by The Monocled Mutineer, a drama serial set in the first world war and advertised as a true story, although most of the exploits of its deserter "hero" who flouted authority were in fact conjectural.

There had also been a row when two plays about the Falklands war were commissioned, but only the anti-war one was produced. But the loudest uproar of all had come in 1985 over a pair of interviews, with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin and Gregory Campbell of the Democratic Unionists, for a documentary on Northern Ireland in the Real Lives series.

Margaret Thatcher had earlier that year stated that broadcasters should deny terrorists "the oxygen of publicity". Leaked details of the programme prompted a letter from the then home secretary, Leon Brittan, demanding that it be pulled from the schedules. With Milne absent abroad, the BBC board of governors viewed the programme and stopped it from going out. BBC journalists went on strike in protest and Milne was able to reinstate the item later in the year, if at the cost of renewed hostility from governors and government alike.

The final clash was set off by The Secret Society, a BBC Scotland series which was not transmitted until after Milne's departure. It was supposed to reveal how on the one hand individual privacy was being eroded, while on the other hand government departments were exercising ever greater secrecy. While the series was still in preparation, Special Branch raided the BBC's Glasgow studios and carried off tins of film. These were for an episode intended to blow the whistle on a satellite warning system, Zircon, being quietly developed by the Ministry of Defence. Milne had already viewed rough-cuts of the series and scrubbed this episode. It made no difference. His enemies had all they needed.

It was bad luck rather than bad judgment. Milne had taken over just when the paranoiac suspicion of the BBC first displayed by Harold Wilson in the 1960s was being reinvigorated by Thatcher. One of the ploys of both prime ministers was to appoint a powerful chairman of the governors to "curb" the director general, in Milne's case Marmaduke Hussey. As for the governors, they happened to be suffering a periodic urge to cease being a bunch of dim nobodies and turn themselves into dim busybodies. It was their decision, Hussey told Milne, that he had to go.

That a Scottish production should have precipitated Milne's fall was an extra irony. He came from an east of Scotland family, and the happiest years of his BBC career were to be the five he spent as controller of BBC Scotland. His parents lived in India, where his father was a surgeon, so the children were largely brought up by grandparents in Edinburgh. The young Alasdair was sent to school at Winchester college, and on to New College, Oxford. He graduated, and also married, in the summer of 1954, with no idea of how he wanted to earn a living. It was his wife, Sheila, who spotted a BBC advertisement for general trainees.

These traineeships were highly sought-after, and hundreds of graduates applied each year. Milne and Patrick Dromgoole, who would wind up as managing director of HTV, were the lucky ones in 1954. They started off in radio, but within a year Milne was at the Lime Grove television studios, working for the two high flyers, Donald Baverstock and Antony Jay, with whom he would long be associated.

They devised the early evening show Tonight, hived themselves off from the rest of the Talks Department as a private empire called Tonight Productions, and launched the legendary Saturday night satire of the early 1960s, That Was the Week That Was. But its over-ambitious successor Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, was a flop. By 1965 Jay had quit, while Baverstock's dizzy progress up the ranks was grinding to a halt.

He and Milne decided to leave the BBC and join Jay in setting up an independent outfit, Jay, Baverstock & Milne. Alas, it was 20 years before the advent of Channel 4 and Thatcher's politics of deconstruction would make independents an accepted part of the broadcasting system. The main work they had was making information films for ICT computers. But if they could not sell programmes to the TV companies, they could sell them their services. Milne went to Rediffusion to run its respected current affairs show This Week.


This was probably an asset when in 1967 he rejoined a BBC that was at last beginning to accept the idea that its staff need not necessarily be lifers, and that experience of the big world outside might be useful. Milne dodged an invitation to return to current affairs shows, though, and angled to take over BBC Scotland – his first deed was to have the "Scotland" added to the brass plate outside Broadcasting House in Glasgow.

The Milne family settled into a house on the outskirts of the city. Nationalism was in the air after a famous SNP byelection victory at Hamilton. Milne was able to increase Scotland's presence on the TV network, and left regretfully when in 1973 he was lured back to London as director of programmes, television, but he was still only 43, and ambitious.

The BBC's two channels each had its own chief to run day-to-day programming. Milne's overall responsibility tended to be noticed only when trouble flared, in the 1970s mainly over questions of taste and censorship. He handled these better than the most notorious instance suggests, his decision in 1976 to withdraw Dennis Potter's play Brimstone and Treacle from the schedules. He also pushed through the BBC's introduction of breakfast television ahead of the opposition.

And so to the director generalship. How this would have been viewed had he been allowed to run his full term, probably another four years, is hard to say. He wasted time and money on a premature attempt to take the BBC into satellite broadcasting. Having got rid of his able managing director, television, Aubrey Singer, he gave the job to an ex-light entertainment specialist, Bill Cotton. And why not? But to then bring in another warrior from the ratings front line, Michael Grade, as director of programmes tilted the balance too far. BBC Television suddenly seemed to be more interested in audience figures than excellence, in buying popular shows from the US than making its own programmes.

In fact, the criticism which broke out when the BBC put on an imported serial, The Thorn Birds, in 1984, while ITV basked in the wide acclaim for The Jewel in the Crown, can be seen as the first shot in the political campaign that led to that bitter day in 1987 when Milne was deposed.

In time he recovered and began to take part in the institutional deliberations that lie in wait for retired broadcasters. In 1988 he published DG: the Memoirs of a British Broadcaster. And for his old mentor Baverstock, he took on for a while the administration of a family business Donald and his wife, Gillian, had inherited, overseeing the income from the work of Gillian's mother, Enid Blyton.

Milne told a meeting of the Royal Television Society in 2006 that when no further TV work presented itself: "I decided to go and spend the summer fishing and the winter shooting in beloved Scotland."

Sheila died in 1992. Milne is survived by two sons, Ruairidh and Seumas, and a daughter, Kirsty.

• Alasdair David Gordon Milne, television executive, born 8 October 1930; died 8 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/09/alasdair-milne