Sully was famous for many things:  brilliant writer to pictures, pilot, cartoonist, scourge of the management.  We won't see his like again.  He died in Ealing on Monday, May 27th, 2013, of brain cancer.  Obituary and funeral details to follow.

Bob Chaundy, who has written an obituary of Michael Sullivan for The Times, adds:


While researching my obit of Sully, I heard and re-heard wonderful stories about him. The threat to fly through Alan Protheroe’s office window, driving through the barriers of a car park when the attendant didn’t like being upbraided for his slowness, his feuds with the likes of Keith Graves and Kate Adie, and his subversive but hilarious cartoons are all the stuff of legends.

However, beneath the impetuousness, the aversion to authority and the bluster was a man who, though often cruel to his “enemies” was very kind to his friends and always there for a quip. When Larry Harris underwent a recent heart operation, Sully was among the first of his friends to visit him. Larry repaid the compliment not long after when he visited Sully after he’d broken his hip in a fall. When he asked him how it happened Sully replied, “I fell off a nurse.”

When cameraman Richard Hill was with Sully trying to board the sister ship to the Herald of Free Enterprise, he feared the worst when an officious woman from the Dover Harbour Board refused permission. However, when the expected onslaught didn’t materialise, Sully said, “I couldn’t lay into her, her legs were too nice.”

At the 1979 election, when reporters were being assigned to certain politicians, Sully got James Callaghan and Michael Cole got Margaret Thatcher. He whispered to Jeremy Thompson, “Cole only got Thatcher because they share the same hairdresser.” It seems everyone who knew Sully had their own story, most of them different.

Above all though, Sully was a brilliant scriptwriter. The skills he acquired in the local press in Manchester and then Hertfordshire were sharpened by his two years at PA. It was unusual for a Fleet Street hack to move to broadcasting, but he took to the new medium straight away.

He maintained rigidly his “old school” journalistic values, abhorring Americanisms, clichés and hackneyed phrases. Objects would fly towards the office TV monitor when he felt that the English language was being abused. He was an “eternal spellchecker”, a “grammarian archangel”. He was the journalist’s journalist, though Sully would probably wince at the phrase.

Another of Michael Sullivan's master pieces may be found here.

This is the text of Bob Chaundy's obituary for The Times:


MICHAEL SULLIVAN
Broadcast journalist who was a familiar face on TV though his dislike of authority did not help his career

Michael Sullivan was a familiar face as a correspondent on BBC television news for almost 30 years. With his handsome looks and shock of white hair, he reported from many of the world’s trouble spots in a style that was easy on the ear. He was a master at writing to pictures. A strict grammarian and pedant, he railed at the sound of a cliché or hackneyed phrase. His scripts always enhanced the stories he covered.

“Sully”, as he was known, was a highly amusing yet impetuous character who harboured a natural aversion to authority. Anyone in uniform raised his hackles. As one colleague put it, “He’d argue with the gasman”. Latterly, he became the scourge of BBC management with whom he seemed permanently at odds. He was convinced that less talented colleagues were given precedence over him and let it be known in no uncertain terms. In that sense he was his own worst enemy since, unsurprisingly, he found himself falling down the pecking order for some of the more plum assignments.

He would vent his anger through satirical poems and acerbic cartoons that he would pin up on noticeboards for all to enjoy. The BBC’s new Director-General, Tony Hall, was given his “head prefect” sobriquet from one such that depicted him with a cap, shorts and satchel. Even colleagues he felt were pompous or full of self-importance felt the lash of his considerable penmanship. Unable to cope with this “loose cannon”, management retaliated by installing lockable glass-fronted noticeboards to try to stem the subversion.

Sullivan’s anti-establishment leanings extended most notably to the police. He developed a particular loathing for Scotland Yard. One cliché for which he made an exception was “the police were thick on the ground”. He was, according to another colleague, “a great hater”.

Michael John Ralph Maynard Sullivan was born in Clapham, London, in 1937. His father was an HM inspector of schools and a bibliographer of the works of G. K. Chesterton. Sullivan left Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School for Boys in Barnet, Hertfordshire, at 16 to take a diploma in journalism at Regent Street Polytechnic.

In 1956 he became an apprentice on the Stretford and Urmston Advertiser in Manchester. Following his National Service he joined the Hertfordshire Advertiser in 1960 and then the Press Association agency in London in 1964. Here he honed his skills as a fast, efficient frontline reporter with impeccable shorthand.

Sullivan then joined BBC News in 1966 after the corporation had adopted a policy of hiring from Fleet Street to sharpen its news reporting. He was ideal for television. He was photogenic, and his crisp, economical writing style lent itself perfectly to the medium. He covered the long-running saga of the Rhodesian crisis in the 1970s and was continually reporting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1974, during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, he was trapped by fighting in the northern resort of Kyrenia and had to be rescued from the beach by the Royal Navy. He was present when South Vietnam fell, and he reported many times on the dying days of apartheid in South Africa. He was one of the correspondents chosen to cover the release from detention of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

He had a keen eye for pictures. During the funerals of victims of the Remembrance Day bombings in Enniskillen in 1987, he co-ordinated three camera crews, meticulously plotting the route of the corteges and working out the best camera angles in a way that far exceeded his brief.

Sullivan had a passion for aeroplanes. At the age of 15 he had witnessed the tragedy at the 1952 Farnborough Air Show when a De Havilland 110 aircraft crashed, killing 29 spectators. He built his own model plane in the basement of Television Centre and later assembled a real one and obtained a pilot’s licence. When he was passed over for a promotion, he famously threatened to fly his plane through the office window of the head of news, Alan Protheroe. Protheroe had the double “crime” in Sullivan’s eyes, of being not only a manager but also a Colonel in the Territorial Army. Sullivan dubbed him the “toy soldier”. The kamikaze threat was taken seriously.

Sullivan retired from the BBC in October 1993 and was persuaded to join the fledgling Sky News where his fast writing skills on the daily breaking news stories soon established him as the principal scriptwriter. He was cherished at Sky. In one memorable story of an Australian drought, he dispensed with the usual script, replacing it with a verse from My Country, the poem by Australian Dorothea MacKellar that included the line, “I love a sunburnt country”. It was Sullivan at his best.

He is survived by his partner, Janneke Mattson, and his two sons from an earlier marriage.

Michael Sullivan, journalist, was born on March 15, 1937. He died from a brain tumour on May 28, 2013, aged 76

Mike Smartt, a long-time friend, colleague and Ealing neighbour of Sully's, writes:

Sully’s funeral at Ealing Abbey

Friends, family and many former colleagues gathered in Ealing’s imposing Roman Catholic Abbey on Monday afternoon to remember Michael Sullivan, who died after losing his long battle with cancer on May 28.

Michael’s brother-in-law Jim Flannery led the tributes, recalling Mike the naughty schoolboy who, despite a loathing for all forms of authority, nevertheless excelled as a national serviceman before learning the craft of journalism as a junior in Manchester.  

“Sully was a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad,” said Jim,” who became an outstanding journalist and cartoonist. He was drawing scenes of the ward from his hospital bed right up until his death. He left us with a smile on his face showing great grace under pressure”.

Michael Cole, a BBC contemporary and close friend, remembered Sullivan becoming a national TV News reporter after a spell as a star of regional broadcasting. “Covering the troubles in Northern Ireland, Michael was brave when necessary and discrete when it was required,” said Cole.

“He loved reporting from South Africa and hoped his work would expose the iniquities of the apartheid regime there”.

He retold a tale, related by Sullivan against himself, in which Michael was enjoying a poolside party with fellow journalists in Johannesburg. Intrigued by a set of new scuba-diving gear, Michael decided to try it out. However, as he was inspecting the bottom of the pool, word arrived of a major news development and when Sullivan resurfaced, everyone had disappeared to the nearest airport having forgotten to alert Mike. It was one of the rare occasions when the man missed the story.

Sadly, BBC News never appreciated Michael Sullivan, said Cole, and it was something the reporter felt deeply.

It was at Sky News, where Michael moved after leaving the Corporation, that he was finally respected by management as an outstanding writer to pictures – one of the very best – said Simon Cole, his boss there as news editor.

“Michael was as good as gold at Sky,” said Cole, “well most of the time”. He added that Sullivan would also spend time helping his colleagues with the English language, about which the reporter was very particular.

“He would continue to email on points of syntax and grammar long after he left us. He was a journalist’s journo,” concluded Cole, quoting Sky presenter Jeremy Thompson.

Bob Young, of the West London Aero Club, spoke of Michael’s great passion for flying and building planes, both full size and model. He also brought his journalistic talents to bear as editor of the club’s newsletter for many years.

It was this enthusiasm for the air to which Michael’s partner, Jannie, also referred when she looked back on the almost 35 “lovely, lively years” that the two spent together. She thanked the large number of mourners for attending which, she said, truly reflected the “respect and love” people had for the man.

The order of service was decorated with a collection of Michael’s best cartoons and amongst those in the Abbey was Nicholas Witchell, who took time out from his current duties as a BBC Royal Correspondent and who was the subject of a number of Sullivan’s most famous efforts with pen and ink.

Michael Sullivan’s coffin travelled down the aisle on its final journey to the crematorium to the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five, played on the organ, but it wasn’t the day’s last musical offering.

Later, in the club attached to the Abbey, a long-preserved recording was played of There Is Nothing Like A Dame, from South Pacific – performed, in part, by a youthful junior reporter in Manchester to a collection of colleagues. When the song was over, he no doubt resumed doing what he did best all his adult life: telling stories like no other.

To view a set of pictures taken by Bob Prabhu at Sully's funeral please click here, and then select "Slideshow" at the top left corner.

Another example of Michael's rapier-wit.

This time addressed to BskyB's HR department.