Jack Good died on September 24, apparently without much of a fanfare…
The early British TV producer Jack Good, whose shows included Six-Five Special and Oh Boy!, also found and managed UK rock ‘n’ roll stars Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, and Cliff Richard, and is also behind the legacy of P J Proby in the UK, having brought him over from the US and given him a break.
Born in London in 1931, he joined the BBC in the 1950s for the live music show ‘Six-Five Special’, which at its height attracted 12 million viewers.
He launched ‘Oh Boy!’ in 1958, up against his former Saturday evening shows.
Jack re-introduced the teen show 12 months later and renamed it ‘Boy Meets Girls’. He made sure his talent for spotting talent was kept in the public eye by writing a column for the magazine Disc.
He was the brains behind a 1964 TV special ‘Around the Beatles’, all about the Fab Four. Although best known in the UK,
Jack found some ground in the US with ‘Shindig!’, a show on ABC running from September 1964 to January 1966. He played in the group Lord Rockingham’s XI, on chart hits with Hoots Mon (There’s loose moose about this hoose).
As a theatrical producer, he created Elvis the Musical, and put P J Proby on stage in ‘Catch My Soul, a play based on Shakespeare’s Othello at The Roundhouse, London, with P J as the lead. “Devil Catch my soul. Desdemona, I do love thee, and when I love thee not, chaos comes.”