What sad news about a very funny man.

We first met during some infamous "Stewart Morris"- type LE shows in London.
Our paths crossed again in that beloved heartland of northern humour that was The Playhouse Theatre (i.e "The Hulme Hip.").

So many happy memories, such fun, such laughter.

Thank you Mike, for your friendship.

This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Mike Craig
12:00PM GMT 26 Nov 2010

Mike Craig, who died on October 29 aged 75, was a BBC comedy writer and producer, and a leading authority on the history of British comedy.

He created more than 1,000 television and radio shows, and from 1964 wrote for stars such as Ken Dodd, Harry Worth, Jimmy Tarbuck, Tommy Trinder and Arthur Askey.

In 1976 Craig and his long-standing collaborator Lawrie Kinsley wrote the sketch for The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in which the BBC's only female network newsreader Angela Rippon, 31, emerged from behind a desk to reveal her shapely long legs in a dance number.

The unbuttoned appearance of the ballet-trained Miss Rippon in the top-rated show of the year, with 27 million viewers, prompted a tabloid frenzy – "Good evening, here is the knees", announced the Daily Mirror – and comparisons with the legs of Betty Grable. The critics agreed with the BBC's own research, which judged that the sketch was the "definite highlight" of "a brilliant show".

The dance routine transformed Miss Rippon from a serious-faced newsreader into a glamorous star, with a manager, agent and PR consultant, a booking to compère the Eurovision song contest and an invitation to star in cabaret in Las Vegas.

Craig became a BBC staff producer the following year, going on to create several successful radio comedy series, notably for The Grumbleweeds, Richard Stilgoe, Ken Dodd and Al Read in Such Is Life.

Hugh Michael Craig was born on March 11 1935 at Batley, west Yorkshire. His father worked in an accountant's office by day and played in a dance band by night.

When he was six, Mike's mother took him to the Dewsbury Empire and parked him on the end seat in the front row of the circle. The sound of a packed theatre laughing en masse at the patter of the northern comedian Albert Modley fired the boy's ambition to work in comedy.

At Wheelwright Grammar School, Dewsbury, he earned a reputation as the class joker, and after national service with the RAF, in 1955 he joined the Huntley & Palmer biscuit company as a travelling salesman. In his spare time he produced shows for the Batley Amateur Thespians' Society – an experience, he noted, that acquainted him with almost as many "lemon puffs" as the biscuit business – and met Lawrie Kinsley, with whom he wrote comedy sketches which they performed locally.

When the Yorkshire comedian Jack Platts advertised in a local newspaper for writers, Craig and Kinsley started turning out gags for him.

In 1964 Platts used some on a television programme called Let's Laugh, produced by Barney Colehan, and other comics asked who had written the material. One was Freddie "Parrot Face" Davis, with whom Craig and Kinsley worked for several years.

Craig enjoyed a long association with Ken Dodd, and produced many of his radio shows. After a recording, but before the edit, Craig's custom was to ask the comedian back for dinner at his house. Sitting at opposite ends of the long dining table, the two men would invariably start arguing about what should be left in and what taken out. These good-natured exchanges would end with Craig insisting: "I'm the producer."

Dozens of anecdotes Craig recorded with Dodd and other leading performers were featured in his popular Radio 2 interview programme It's A Funny Business.

Craig took early retirement from the BBC in 1993. His encyclopedic knowledge of comedians, and their routines and reputations, had made him a sought-after and popular after-dinner speaker, and from 1983 he also presented his own one-man show, The ABC of Comedy, aboard the QE2, Canberra and other cruise ships operated by P&O, Cunard, Saga and the Fred Olsen line.

In his four-volume series of books recalling highlights of 20th-century British comedy, Look Back With Laughter, Craig drew perceptive portraits of many leading comedians from the music hall era to the television age. His play about the comedian Robb Wilton, The Day War Broke Out, was premiered in Craig's home town of Batley in 1988.

He was a Lord's Taverner and proud to be the only BBC producer in the Grand Order of Water Rats, the showbusiness charity for which, as Scribe Rat, he recorded (none too seriously) the organisation's proceedings in the minute book.

In March 1988 he was given a tribute lunch by the Variety Club of Great Britain to mark his contribution to comedy over 25 years.

Mike Craig married, in 1957, Christine Thornes, with whom he had a son and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1982, when he was guest speaker at the Fylde Coast Ladies' Luncheon Club, he found himself swapping divorce stories with the chairman, Susan Thomas, whom he married two years later.

Both wives survive him with the children of his first marriage and three stepchildren from his second.

I used to live in the same Dorset village as actor/comedian Tom Mennard.

He and Mike were good friends and I think I'm right in saying he was behind 'Tom Mennard's Local Tales' which went out on R4.

A great loss to UK comedy.