[BITList] I was a Camera

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2012-06-04



Routh,  John Reginald Surdeval  [Jonathan]  (1927-2008), television presenter, author, and painter, was born at Northwoods, Gosport Road, Bridgemary, near Gosport, Hampshire, on 24 November 1927, the only son of Captain (later Colonel) Herbert Charles Edric Routh (1894-1984), Royal Artillery officer, and his wife, Ella Margaret, nee Whitehouse (1900-1987). His father claimed to be able to trace the family's history back to one of the knights who was with William the Conqueror during his invasion of England.

Routh went to Uppingham School, Rutland, as a scholar, and then read history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, for only a year but he edited Granta, the university magazine, and was involved with the Footlights dramatic society. Helped by this he got a job on the national magazine Everybody's as its show-business editor. As the magazine specialized substantially in historical figures, he had energy to spare, and found relief in hoaxing. For the BBC's Third Programme he invented a fictional eighteenth-century poet, Jeremy Feeble, and he became a presenter for Radio Luxembourg's Candid Mike, which borrowed its format from Allen Funt's successful American radio series Candid Microphone. On 2 April 1949, at St Luke's Church, Chelsea, Routh married Renate Sophia (Nandi) Heckroth (1926/7-1972), a film costume designer, and daughter of Heinrich Heckroth, artist; they had two children.

Routh set about seriously selling himself as a practical joker when, in 1957, he put an advertisement in The Times saying, 'Practical joker with wide experience of British sad gullibility organises, leads and guarantees success of large-scale hoaxes.' The 'wide experience' included dispatching himself through the post to Wandsworth covered in £2-worth of stamps, and trying to take a tube journey with a grand piano.

Candid Camera was launched on BBC TV in 1960, based on Allen Funt's similarly named series, which had run on American television since 1948, and which consisted of pointing a hidden camera at innocent victims of hoaxes and practical jokes. It was presented by Bob Monkhouse, with the beetle-browed and intense Routh and Arthur Atkins as the troublesome characters who set up and appeared in the jokes. In the first programme they were in a car that ran downhill straight into a garage forecourt. The driver asked the attendant to fill up his oil. Raising the bonnet, the startled man found that the car had no engine. Later jokes included having Routh dress up as a tree and, while standing at a bus stop, asking disconcerted would-be passengers, as a bus arrived: 'Does this go to Sherwood Forest?' The humour in the ingenious and sometimes unkind jokes was in the always puzzled and sometimes horrified reaction of the victims as they were, for instance, asked to lean against Nelson's Column to prevent it falling down, or asked to allow a car park attendant to park their Rolls-Royces for them, when the 'attendant' had just been seen badly scraping and denting two previous cars as he parked them. The formula became so popular with viewers that they sent in 1000 ideas a week. It was rare for the victims not eventually to enter into the spirit of the thing, though Routh was once chased by a man wielding a crowbar, and the heavyweight boxer Sid Richardson gave him a black eye. Public taste and the fast-altering mores of society as a whole proved more formidable opponents. The increasing permissiveness of the 1960s resulted in contrived practical jokes not being regarded as so outrageous as they had once been, and Candid Camera came to an end in 1967. Routh subsequently joined Kenny Everett and Germaine Greer in a variation of the Candid Camera format called Nice Time (1968). Some of the production team wanted less victimizing of innocent members of the public, but as this was the essence of Routh's anarchic art the programme did not last long. An attempt to revive Candid Camera in 1976 was also brief.

In the troughs of his career Routh took to writing off-beat books reflecting his tastes. His autobiography, The Little Men in My Life, was published in 1953. His Good Loo Guide (1965) was subtitled Where to Go in London. Then came The Good Cuppa Guide (1966), the Guide Porcelaine to the Loos of Paris (1966), and The Better John Guide (1966), with Serena Stewart, extending the survey to New York. Among his other books were one on hangovers, one on disasters entitled So You Think You've Got Problems (1967), and the even more jokey Leonardo's Kitchen Note Book (1987), which was allegedly 'translated' with his second wife, Shelagh, and had the premise that all the machines in the drawings by Leonardo da Vinci were in fact illustrations of the making of pasta. In 1970 Routh began painting in the naive style, and was to confess that he had never had any money, but spent his life staying in the homes of friends, in the UK and elsewhere, who did. He often bartered his paintings for restaurant meals and other living costs.

Routh's private life was as anarchic and bizarre as his professional life. Separated from his wife, in 1969 he began a relationship with Eileen (Bobbie) Hamlyn (b. 1926/7), wife of Paul Hamlyn, the publisher. She committed suicide two years later, after her husband had divorced her and Routh had left her for the heiress Olga Deterding (1926-1979). In 1972 his wife Nandi's car hit a tree and she died. In 1975 he married Shelagh Marvin, a film publicist, with whom he lived in Rome before they settled in Jamaica in 1980. There Routh shared a three-roomed hut with no electricity, rising with the sun to paint. He had a penchant for painting nuns. His oeuvre included nuns on trampolines, driving racing cars, picnicking in the jungle, and being shot from cannon. Some of his nuns found their way into a series of children's books, starting with The Nuns Go to Africa (1971). He also wrote and illustrated Jamaica Holiday: the Secret Life of Queen Victoria (1984). His Mona Lisa paintings showed the woman naked and holding a tin of spaghetti. He died in London on 4 June 2008 and was survived by his wife, Shelagh, and the two sons of his first marriage.

Dennis Barker 

Sources  J. Routh, The little men in my life (1953) + The Times (6 June 2008) + Daily Telegraph (6 June 2008) + The Independent (7 June 2008) + The Guardian (9 June 2008) + b. cert. + m. cert. [1949]
Archives  FILM BFINA, documentary and light entertainment footage SOUND BL NSA, performance recordings
Likenesses  photographs, 1960-99, Rex Features, London · photographs, 1962-87, PA Photos, London · obituary photographs · photograph, Rex Features, London [see illus.]




========================================================================
©    Oxford     University    Press,    2004.    See     legal    notice:
http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/legal/

We hope you have enjoyed this Life of The Day, but if you do wish to stop
receiving   these   messages,   please   EITHER   send   a   message   to
LISTSERV at WEBBER.UK.HUB.OUP.COM with

signoff ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L

in the body (not the subject line) of the message

OR

send an  email to  epm-oxforddnb at oup.com, asking us  to stop  sending you
these messages.



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20120606/6086f614/attachment-0001.shtml