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I’d like to add to what Derek Malcolm and Peter Bradshaw have said about the kindness of Philip French. In 1965, I was a struggling young critic in London and Philip, as a BBC producer, gave me not only a vast amount of constructive advice but also vital commissions: he first asked me to review two short BBC Third Programme plays by a then totally unknown writer just out of Bristol called Tom Stoppard. For those of us who went on to work on The Critics and Critics’ Forum, Philip’s advice to “keep the first round short” is forever engraved on our hearts.

I also had wonderful evidence of Philip’s encyclopedic memory. Flattered to be included in the same batch of OBEs as Philip two years ago, I ended a congratulatory telephone call with the jokey line, “See you at the palace.” Quick as a flash, he replied,...

Thunderbirds creator who made some of the most popular children's TV shows of the 1960s

Gerry Anderson, who has died aged 83 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was the main mover behind a number of puppet series commissioned by Lew Grade's Independent Television Corporation. They made the company a fortune from the space age: perhaps the best known was Thunderbirds (1965-66), and among the others were Fireball XL5 (1962-63), Stingray (1964) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68).

Anderson embarked on Thunderbirds in 1964. For Grade, international sales – particularly into the Us market – were a key concern. So Thunderbirds focused on the Tracy brothers, with first names borrowed from the Us astronauts Scott Carpenter, Virgil Grissom, Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Gordon Cooper. Enormously popular in its time, the series is still being repeated today.

Scott and the others were members of International Rescue, based on a south Pacific island, set up,...

Director of eerily atmospheric Hammer horror films including The Kiss of the Vampire

In 1962, Don Sharp was a minor ex-actor, hack writer and jobbing director of British B-films, when he was offered the chance to make a gothic horror movie for Hammer, "the studio that dripped blood". In the event, The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) rescued both Sharp, who has died aged 90, and Hammer from the doldrums.

The studio, which had suffered several expensive flops, turned to Sharp due to his experience in low-budget film-making. Sharp, who claimed to have never watched a horror movie, let alone directed one, quickly steeped himself in the Hammer style by spending a week or so watching past successes, principally those directed by Terence Fisher and Freddie Francis. The Kiss of the Vampire, made with a smaller budget and an unstarry cast, recruited mostly from television, scored at the box office, and Sharp became associated with horror movies thereafter.