This is taken from The Guardian:

Richard Drewett
Television producer, he played a key role in the development of the chat show
by Clive James
Monday February 4, 2008

Destined to be remembered as one of the most inventive television producers of his time, Richard Drewett, who has died aged 72, always had the admiration of his colleagues, but would have been a legend far beyond the borders of the television industry if only the public were able to tell what a producer does: unfortunately the competence of a television producer is never visible except when it is absent.

Richard's competence determined the tone and intelligence of every programme he put to air, so he barely left a trace. He brought the best out of everyone, and they got the credit. Since I was one of them, let me speak for the hundreds who worked with him during a career that never faltered until his illness.

Richard was born in Crowborough, East Sussex. He started out as a reporter on the Poole and Dorset Herald and then became a freelance radio scriptwriter before joining the presentation department of the BBC in 1964, working as a writer and producer on Late Night Line-Up. From 1971 to 1977 he created the chat show Parkinson, and went on to produce 132 editions. Moving to London Weekend Television in the late 1970s he was a producer, then head of special programmes responsible for series; these included those of Michael Aspel, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, Gloria Hunniford and Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage, who also featured in studio specials, as did Kenneth Williams and Dudley Moore. In the 1980s he produced A Night of 100 Stars and The Clive James Paris Fashion Show (nominated for a 1981 International Emmy) and he won a Bafta award in 1991 for Clive James on the 80s.

It is in the office, not in the studio or on location, that even the most hands-on producer does the work that makes the difference. Richard was the executive producer for every programme with my name in the title between 1982, when I left Fleet Street to go into television, and the turn of the millennium, when I left television for a retirement which would be a lot harder for me to make sense of if he had not taught me so much about the fruitful use of time. On top of his charm and good manners, that was the thing that ruled all the other things he could do. He was mad about his family and fast cars, but when he was working he was perfectly sane: far too sane to be interested in power, which he could have had, but didn't care about. He cared only about getting good programmes made.

Rendered permanently thin by the kind of metabolism which apparently imposed no necessity to eat anything at all, Richard always looked neatly correct from his fine-drawn features all the way down to his ankles, after which a strange thing happened. He wore white plimsolls, one of which had the top cut away. He never apologised for the odd effect of his footwear and quite a lot of people knew him for years without ever finding out the reason. In my role as brash colonial, I asked him, and was told that the foot in the skeletal plimsoll had been smashed up, the operation on it had been bungled, and any vertical pressure put on it would cause so much pain that he couldn't work.

Work came first. Kindly he listened to my plans for being a literary man and just walking into the studio a couple of times a week to go on air. Kindly but firmly he insisted that it couldn't be like that. If I wanted to do this stuff properly, I would have to work a full week. He set the example by being first into the office every day and the last to leave. From early on, I got a close-up of what it meant to prepare properly. It was the secret of his authority. Since he knew everybody else's job as well, he couldn't be buffaloed by expertise. On the first documentary special we did, The Clive James Paris Fashion Show, he could tell from the rushes that Terence Donovan, our director, was skimping on the bread-and-butter coverage.

Richard turned up in Paris and read Donovan the news about the necessity of doing the boring stuff properly if he wanted to make an exciting film. For the task of dressing Donovan down, Richard was wearing real shoes, a sign of how serious the situation was. When standing on his dignity he wanted the right kit. Donovan was a tough customer, but he shot the coverage. The scene taught me a lot about Richard and about life. Short on moral courage, I would always avoid telling people what they didn't want to hear. Richard didn't enjoy doing that either but he could do it.

For our studio shows, Richard was the executive producer that every producer fears most: the kind that never leaves the control room. Most of the producers who had to live with him watching their every move were grateful for the lesson.

Most of the many innovations of the studio show have by now been so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream that everybody has forgotten where they started. One-line captions over photographs, fake commentaries over re-edited news footage, satellite interviews - none of it would have been possible at that time without Richard's ability to run a creative office, because the easier the results looked the harder they were to get.

Everybody knew that Richard was the man in charge, so when Michael Grade moved to the BBC, a phone call to Richard was one of the first he made. We arrived at the BBC just in time for Grade's resignation, after which we were at the mercy of the managerial revolution. I persuaded him, when the chance came to jump ship back to ITV. Within ITV's embrace, we started Watchmaker Productions with Elaine Bedell, one of Richard's many discoveries among the new wave of female production talent. Generally we had followed the principle of not hiring anybody that we couldn't see ourselves working for when he or she came to power, and generally the applicants who got the job didn't mind being called the Drewettes. After all, it wasn't Richard who invented the term. It was one of them.

Eventually, as the turn of the millennium approached and television veered inexorably downmarket, Watchmaker was sold to its backers as per contract, and Drewett and I were left with the only real money either of us had ever made in show business. We had always been well recompensed, but on the whole, in television, nobody who cares a lot for the finished programme makes much money out of it, and we cared a lot. Richard cared even more than I did, and for a man who never had much to apologise for he gave me a deep and touching apology when he proved too ill with Parkinson's disease to supervise the editing of the last show we made, at the end of the year 2000. He was right: the show would have been better if he had seen it through to the end. Those of us who knew him well are now feeling the same about our own lives. A great one for catchphrases, he had a line with which he started every meeting: "I expect you're wondering why I've asked you all here." A lot of people said it at his funeral, and were smiling at the memory.

He is survived by his wife Jill, son Jim and daughter Catherine.

· Richard Drewett, producer, born October 22 1935; died January 18 2008