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Message started by Trevor on Aug 23rd, 2022, 5:39pm

Title: Nick Utechin
Post by Trevor on Aug 23rd, 2022, 5:39pm

Sad news that Nick Utechin died last week. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour earlier this year and passed away in a care home. Nick produced Feedback, Any Questions, Call Nick Ross and was a producer on Today. He was editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal and a highly respected Sherlockian. He began his broadcasting career at BBC Radio Oxford and still maintained close links to the city where he lived. Details of the funeral will be posted when available.

Title: Re: Nick Utechin
Post by George Eykyn on Dec 22nd, 2022, 9:17am

This excellent obituary was published by The Times:

Nick Utechin obituary
BBC Radio 4 producer with an impressive sideline in Sherlock Holmes scholarship


Thursday December 22 2022, 12.01am, The Times


When Nick Utechin captained the Glasgow Academy team in the final of Transworld Top Team in Toronto in 1968, he was not to know that this first encounter with a microphone would herald a lengthy career in broadcasting. Talking to the BBC producer for the programme, Bill Wright, he discovered that Wright had produced the live broadcast of the Queen’s coronation. Utechin was inspired.

He went on to produce many of the flagship news and current affairs programmes on BBC Radio 4, starting with Today in 1982. He later moved on to produce other topical programmes, including Any Questions (for which he won a Sony Radio Award in 1996), Any Answers, Call Nick Ross, Election Call and The Commission. Away from current affairs, he produced All in the Mind and Feedback.

He showed skill in organising and controlling phone-ins on Call Nick Ross, elevating the format of such programmes into a serious contribution to national debate. With Any Questions, he enjoyed the challenge of putting together quality panels for the chairmen Jonathan Dimbleby and Nick Clarke. He once stepped in at the last minute as chairman himself when a train delay prevented Clarke from reaching the venue in time — Utechin carried it off with aplomb. Indeed, whenever he forsook the production desk for the microphone (all too rarely in the opinion of many), it was clear that, in the words of a broadcasting colleague, “he was blessed with the voice of authority”.

This, then, was Utechin the broadcaster; but there was another Utechin, equally eminent in a very different world — that of Sherlock Holmes scholarship. It is, of course, a “game” of pseudo-scholarship, but it is a game which, as Dorothy L Sayers wrote, “must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s”.

And for Utechin the game was always afoot. Captivated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories as a young boy, he read a fictional biography of the detective and was hooked. He joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of London at the age of 14 and before long was also a member of its American equivalent, The Baker Street Irregulars. In 1976, he became editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal and held the post for 30 years.

Admired by fellow enthusiasts (“Holmesians” in the UK, “Sherlockians” in the US), he published more than 600 works, from short articles to monographs and books. What set him apart was the range of his interests, whether revealing which university Holmes had attended in Sherlock Holmes at Oxford (1977) or uncovering the activities of a long-forgotten group of Holmesians in The Milvertonians of Hampstead (2020). He was endlessly curious and would turn ideas into print in minimum time.

Much of his best work came in the last decade of his life, one highlight being The Complete Paget Portfolio (2018), in which he brought together for the first time all 356 of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Conan Doyle’s stories in The Strand Magazine.

While this and other works assume a certain familiarity with the canon, the general reader seeking an insight into all things Holmesian need look no further than Utechin’s Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Sherlock Holmes (2012).

When, in 2015, Utechin heard that the cricket bat with which Conan Doyle once scored a century at Lord’s lay in pieces in the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Lucens, Switzerland, he played a key role in arranging for its repair and long-term loan to the MCC Museum at Lord’s. Utechin himself never managed a century at Lord’s but he regularly donned his whites for the annual cricket match between the Sherlock Holmes Society and the PG Wodehouse Society.

Nicholas Rathbone Utechin was born in Oxford in 1952, the only child of Professor Sergei Vasilievich Utechin, who wrote and lectured on Russian history and political thought, and Pat Utechin (neé Rathbone), who was Sir Isaiah Berlin’s personal assistant. His parents later separated. That he was third cousin twice removed to Basil Rathbone, for many years the definitive Holmes on screen and radio, was for Utechin a lasting badge of honour. He attended Bryanston School and Glasgow Academy before reading modern history at University College, Oxford.

He was president of the University Broadcasting Society, which produced a regular programme on BBC Radio Oxford. He graduated in 1973 and his first job in broadcasting was as a newsreader on LBC. By 1978, he had become presenter of Radio Oxford’s morning programme. While working for the radio station he met Annie Pender-Cudlip. They married in 1981 and had two sons, Christopher and James. All three survive him.

While these early roles demonstrated his on-air presence, it was as a producer that he subsequently made his mark at Broadcasting House, seemingly ubiquitous in the schedules at times. Then, in 1998, he was inexplicably asked by the BBC to reapply for his job.

He chose to go freelance instead and was welcomed by the independent production company Testbed, where his expertise in producing debate and phone-in programmes led to the creation of Straw Poll, Straw Poll Talkback and Taking Issue. He also produced several documentaries and presented a history of parliamentary sketch-writing. Alongside this work, he wrote music and theatre reviews for The Oxford Times.

Utechin was an ebullient host who delighted in good conversation and was a natural raconteur. His wide interests included the singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s, the Boston Red Sox and Test Match cricket.

A lover of fine wine, he attended tastings regularly and enjoyed visiting vineyards in Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhône valley during family holidays in France.

One of his greatest passions was the films of Lillian Gish; he corresponded with her in the 1970s and was thrilled to interview her for Today in 1983.

He turned to Sherlock Holmes for consolation in the months after his cancer diagnosis and his final article, an evaluation of the Sherlockian scholar Jay Finley Christ, was published in The Baker Street Journal shortly before his death. As an American podcast tribute commented, he left a large footprint in the world of Sherlock Holmes fans, “larger than the footprints of a gigantic hound”.

Nick Utechin, radio producer, was born on January 11, 1952. He died of cancer on August 17, 2022, aged 70

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