by John B Hobbs, who has died aged 87, founded his first theater company at the age of 12, and the stage was his first love. He even continued to write and stage shows around the country while enjoying a successful career as a producer-director for the BBC’s television staff.
Making the last two series of ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1991-92) nearing the end of his days at the BBC, Hobbs not only wanted to demonstrate his experience in the craft of popular television, but also his diplomacy in working with a team that had established a great program without him.
Robin Nash, the comic leader, sent him to dinner with Gorden Kaye, who was the owner of the cafe René Artois, in the middle of the action in David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd’s creation in German-occupied France during the second war global and intended. as a parody of the BBC drama Secret Army.
“I’m glad to say we did very well,” Hobbs told journalist Richard Webber. “The BBC were keen to do another series and they wanted to keep Gorden sweet, so they gave him the courtesy of meeting me first rather than telling him I was going to be the next producer.” Hobbs described the program’s humor as “seaside postcards with an enormous amount of prejudice”.
The producer of ‘Allo ‘Allo! Having similarly completed the last two series of Bread (1990-91), Carla Lane’s sitcom about an unemployed Liverpool family playing the system, with Jean Boht as the acid-tongued matriarch, Nellie Boswell, is kept in order.
His track record producing and directing sitcoms over the past decade was impressive. He started with the fourth series of Terry and June (1982), with Terry Scott and June Whitfield in a suburban marriage, before seeing others from the beginning to the end.
Most people who were facing life changes were portrayed by pure coincidence: Keith Barron and Susan Hampshire struggling with divorce in Leaving (1984-85), another Lane creation; John Duttine turning hermit after a broken marriage in Lame Ducks (1984-85); Barron and Nanette Newman confront mid-life parenthood in Late Expectations (1987); and Wendy Craig in chaotic post-divorce situations in Laura and Disorder (1989).
Hobbs also took on other producers to direct Three Up, Two Down (from 1986 to 1989), with Angela Thorne as a snob and Michael Elphick, whom she looked down on as a cockney oik, and Brush Strokes (from 1990 to 1991), with Karl Howman playing an amorous house painter.
He was born in Bristol to Margaret (née Britton) and Jack Hobbs, a milkman. At the age of 12, he founded the Marivale Players, acting, producing, painting scenery and making props with a company of 40 boys and girls aged between 11 and 17 who performed in hospitals, halls villages and YMCAs. Two years later, he wrote his own version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He also learned tap-dancing and appeared in Bristol Shakespearean Society productions.
Leaving St George’s grammar school at 15, Hobbs continued in amateur theater but, seeking a regular income, put aside thoughts of going professional to become a junior clerk at an aviation company BAC of the city.
After acting on BBC radio’s Children’s Hour at their Bristol studios, he found the lure of show business enough to persuade him to leave BAC to try his luck as an actor. , singer and dancer. He even donned a wig and dress to stand in for Arthur Lucan as the mother in the dining-hall diet Old Mother Riley and her Daughter Kitty, along with Lemkin’s wife, Kitty McShane.
His efforts to join the BBC led to an offer of a job as a junior accounts clerk on the Radio Times in London. He moved on to the gramophone library before becoming a floor assistant working on programs such as the sci-fi series A for Andromeda (1961), then floor manager on Play School (1964) and other shows.
He spent the 1970s as a production assistant. Among the tasks he took on was extra money in francs from a documentary bag while filming Clochemerle (1972) in France; finding an articulated lorry and driver for a 1973 stunt in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, with Michael Crawford skating under the vehicle; and clearing a beach in Dorset of 200 tourists for the opening title sequence of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79).
By the time he worked on To the Manor Born (in 1979) and another Lane sitcom, Butterflies (1978-80) – adding director and assistant producer to his CV – Hobbs was a full-fledged producer. His last sitcom was Down to Earth (1995), starring Richard Briers as a landscape gardener.
Outside the BBC, he spent 21 years directing shows for Sixty One, an amateur theater company he founded in 1961. He also ran evening classes for the Central London Education Authority and staged spring musicals and Christmas pantomimes at Acton town hall. The final performance was a special production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel at the Westminster Theater in 1982.
Hobbs then directed professional actors at the Mill, Sonning, in Berkshire (1986-92), and across Britain for leading pantomime producer Nick Thomas Enterprises (1989-95).
When he left the BBC in 1994, he continued to direct stage productions. He toured with the musical Happy As a Sandbag (1995), the farces Out of Order (2000) and Business Affairs (2001), both reuniting with Kaye, then Just Pearl (2003), a one-woman show by Juliette Kaplan reflecting on her. Character Last Wine of the Summer.
His only film, La Passione (1996), written by singer Chris Rea, was less successful.
Hobbs is survived by his partner of 55 years, Iain McCorquodale, who worked with the company Sixty One.
• John Brian Hobbs, producer and director, born 14 May 1936; died 29 February 2024
