Victor Lewis-Smith is a British film, television and radio producer, a TV and restaurant critic, a satirist and newspaper columnist. He is Executive Producer of the ITV1 National Food & Drink Awards. He is a music graduate of the University of York. He has been a contributor to Private Eye fortnightly magazine since June 1993.
Associated-Rediffusion
Lewis-Smith founded a film, TV and radio production company called Associated-Rediffusion. Lewis-Smith was executive producer of a 2012 documentary about Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party, presented by Keith Allen for Channel 4. His critically acclaimed documentary, The UndiscoveredPeter Cook, was the first in a series transmitted on BBC Four in November 2016. In December 2018, Lewis-Smith made three more documentaries in the style of The Undiscovered Peter Cook for Sky Arts, this time concerning Peter Sellers, Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock. Lewis-Smith is executive producer of a series of more than 60 TV programmes called 21st Century Bach - The Complete Organ Works. The series started on BBC Two in June 2003, and has since aired on Sky Arts. He is the executive producer of In Confidence presented by Laurie Taylor, a series of 76 hour-long interviews for Sky Arts.
Television
Lewis-Smith has appeared in a number of his productions for British television:
In 1989, he wrote and presented eighteen episodes of Buy-gones for Club X on Channel 4, and contributed sketch scripts for Central's Spitting Image
Up Your Arts
Inside Victor Lewis-Smith . This BBC2 series purported to be based within the Frank Bough Memorial Zip Injury Wing of St. Reith's, a BBC hospital for its fallen stars. The series takes place inside the head of a man completely saturated with television, and suffering from a hyperactive spleen.
In 1989 he made his first programme for BBC Radio 1, with producer John Walters, under the pseudonym Steve Nage, parodying the Simon Bates-style mid-Atlantic nasal delivery of Radio 1 disc jockeys of the time. Lewis-Smith's company Associated-Rediffusion made two series of the comedy show Victor Lewis-Smith for BBC Radio 1, for which he won a Best Comedy Radio Programme award in the 1990 British Comedy Awards. Lewis-Smith's prank calls attracted some controversy at the time of their first broadcast: in The Sunday Times on 15 April 1990, Paul Donovan opined that Lewis-Smith's hoaxes were "repugnant". However, The Guardian's Lucy Mangan described some of the recordings as being "touched with genius". Writing about Lewis-Smith's hoax phone calls in The Times Higher Education, Sally Feldman observed that "He chooses his victims carefully, pricking the pompous and the powerful in the very best traditions of satire. His favourite target is the media, his pranks intended to expose their smugness, their laziness and their gullibility."
Writing
In the 1980s Lewis-Smith took over from Julie Burchill in writing weekly columns for Time Out magazine. He also wrote weekly columns during the same period for the short-lived Sunday Correspondent and The Mail on Sunday, as well as Esquire magazine. He has also written as food critic for The Independent, and was restaurant critic for Harpers & Queen magazine from 1995 to 1998 as well as The Guardian, where he combined comedy writing and food criticism to help create the now commonplace modern genre of amusing food writing. In 1992, Lewis-Smith began a long association with the London Evening Standard, contributing daily television reviews along with other writers, as well as occasional restaurant reviews and travel articles. It was announced in June 2007 that he would be retiring from his daily television column. Since 1993, he has been compiler of the "Funny Old World" column of bizarre news items in Private Eye, where he replaced Christopher Logue. In 2011, he was living in Cumbria and never visited the magazine's London office. He wrote a weekly page for the Daily Mirror for some years until 2003. From autumn 2004 to April 2005 he was the resident restaurant critic of The Guardian's Saturday magazine supplement. His books include Buy-Gones and Inside the Magic Rectangle, a collection of his early Evening Standard TV reviews and TV Reviews, a collection of his Evening Standard TV reviews since 2000.
Legal
In June 2006, the television chef Gordon Ramsay, his production company and his producer accepted an out-of-court settlement of £75,000 from Associated Newspapers, after an article in London's Evening Standard written by Lewis-Smith alleged that Ramsay had faked television scenes and installed an incompetent chef. Ramsay said at the time, "We have never done anything in a cynical, fake way." However, a year later, Channel 4 admitted that a scene in another of Ramsay's programmes had been faked, and apologised to viewers. On 28 July 2006, hypnotistPaul McKenna successfully sued the Daily Mirror for libel over articles written by Lewis-Smith from 1997 alleging that McKenna had a fake PhD, having obtained the qualification from a non-accredited institution in the United States whose principal had since been imprisoned for making misleading claims about the status of degrees he handed out to candidates. He later accepted damages of £25,000.
