![Steve Brown, left, pictured in 2023 with his best friend Harry Hill, with whom he created Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/02/06/TELEMMGLPICT000330332262_17072197215940_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNr7buqbkV04AEATLFYLNjP4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Steve Brown, Spitting Image composer who also played Glen Ponder in Alan Partridge – obituary
His debut musical Spend Spend Spend, about the Yorkshire housewife who won a fortune on football pools, beat The Lion King and Mamma Mia!
![Steve Brown, left, pictured in 2023 with his best friend Harry Hill, with whom he created Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/02/06/TELEMMGLPICT000330332262_17072197215940_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNr7buqbkV04AEATLFYLNjP4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Steve Brown, who has died aged 69, was a composer of comedy songs, notably for the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, eventually becoming its house composer; he also wrote several stage musicals, including Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera, in collaboration with his friend Harry Hill, and the Olivier-winning Spend Spend Spend, which chronicled the real-life rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Viv Nicholson, whose husband won a fortune in the football pools in the 1960s.
A dapper figure with a neat beard and a ruddy laugh, Brown worked with many of the leading figures in British comedy, including Rory Bremner, Lee Mack, Lenny Henry and Steve Coogan, with whom he appeared as the put-upon band leader Glenn Ponder in Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge (1994), Coogan’s chat-show parody. Brown’s character’s name later evolved to Glen Ponder, allowing Partridge to describe him as an anagram of Porn Legend.
In one memorable episode, Partridge presents a special French edition of his show from Paris Fashion Week, and is outraged to discover that everyone else on the set had accompanied Ponder to the Folies Bergère the previous evening, but he had not been invited.
Turning to his conductor, on air, Partridge declares in Monty Python style: “You’re sacked! You are sacked, I’m sacking you. In fact, it’s happened, it’s over, it’s already happened, you are a sacked man. You’ve been sacked. You’re the subject of a sacking, I want you off these premises in 10 minutes. Knowing me, Alan Partridge, sacking you, Glenn Ponder. A-ha!”
![Steve Brown as Glen Ponder, being sacked by Alan Partridge in Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge (1994)](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/02/06/TELEMMGLPICT000365425301_17072206829010_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqU2OcGw4mv9yCz78okQSYvmUGUA9Kry3nFbR4ZszgvlA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Brown’s greatest success, however, was undoubtedly his musical Spend Spend Spend. He had been drawn to the true story of the Yorkshire housewife Viv Nicholson, who won £152,000 on the pools then proceeded to lose it all, because, as he put it, “it had love, sex, money, power, death and loss – the stuff opera is made of.” Viv Nicholson gave him her blessing, and the show opened at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 1998, with music by Brown and lyrics in collaboration with Justin Greene.
It transferred triumphantly to the West End the next year, where The Times’s Benedict Nightingale praised the show because it “did not patronise Nicholson. It provides fun and pathos, mining-town poverty and suburban kitsch – all to some of the most pleasing songs in London theatre.” Viv herself joined the actresses to take the curtain call on the first night at the Piccadilly Theatre, where she was visibly moved, then proceeded to turn around and flash her bottom just before the final curtain fell.
Barbara Dickson, as Viv, won the Olivier Award for Best Actress, and Spend Spend Spend scooped both the Evening Standard and Critics Circle awards for Best Musical, beating its big-budget rivals The Lion King and Mamma Mia! in what The Daily Telegraph called a “David slaying Goliath” moment. Charles Spencer called it “popular entertainment at its best, devoid of the cynical contrivance of so many musicals and blessed with heart, humour and irresistible humanity”.
![Spend Spend Spend in its 2009 revival at the Watermill Theatre](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/02/06/TELEMMGLPICT000001478830_17072208985920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq_4lZL6XGyKd1IzVfh-3zqoh-1OKnoApjyaprnWnv9tw.jpeg?imwidth=350)
But Brown’s early triumph proved impossible to cap. In 2009 he staged a musical version of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life after a 19-year battle to gain the rights, though it was only seen in Ipswich. I Can’t Sing!, a send up of The X Factor written with Hill, enjoyed critical adulation at the London Palladium in 2014 but was a box-office flop and closed within six weeks. Brown confessed to Time Out that, when he was first asked to work on the project, “I thought, ‘Oh God, that is a terrible, terrible idea’.”
Brown and Hill’s next collaboration was Tony!, a “rock opera” presenting the former prime minister Tony Blair’s full Shakespearean arc from “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” to “I have no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes.”
It included a bad-taste ditty about Blair’s “people’s princess” speech and featured the panoply of New Labour grandees: John Prescott as a pugilistic Bernard Manning manqué, Robin Cook as a priapic pedant and Cherie Blair as a seductive Scouse vamp. Gordon Brown’s big number, Macroeconomics, was an operetta-style recitative taken verbatim from one of the former chancellor’s knotty speeches.
![Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera by Harry Hill and Steve Brown in 2023](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/02/06/TELEMMGLPICT000331765406_17072209873180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Tony! failed to find favour in The Daily Telegraph, however, with Dominic Cavendish comparing the show to Blair’s premiership and noting: “[It] begins promisingly, moves into a disappointing phase and then outstays its welcome.”
Steven James Brown was born on October 25 1954, the third child of Len and Marge Brown, and brought up in south-east London. At 13 he wrote his first song, a Tudor pastiche entitled My Lady’s Love has Gone Astray.
He left school with no qualifications and at 17 spent a few weeks working on a trawler. He tried telesales but ended up as a paperback salesman while writing songs, recording demo tapes and knocking on music publishers’ doors. Spotted performing above a London pub, he was offered work on a West End show and in radio comedy.
He was galvanised by watching the 1976 revue Side by Side by Sondheim. One of his prized possessions was a letter from Stephen Sondheim praising Spend Spend Spend.
![Steve Brown at work in 2011](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/02/06/TELEMMGLPICT000365424686_17072228407310_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Brown joined Spitting Image in the late 1980s and remained there for the entire 1990s. Meanwhile, he appeared on the Radio 4 comedy sketch series In One Ear and wrote several songs for Radio 4/BBC 2’s Dead Ringers, where he made a brief television appearance as Noel Gallagher to Jon Culshaw’s Liam. He also composed all the music for Harry Hill’s TV Burp and for the BBC’s The Ant & Dec Show, later writing the popular “Wonkey Donkey” theme when Ant and Dec moved to present SM:TV Live on ITV.
Brown discovered and mentored the musicians Laura Mvula and Rumer, producing their respective debut records, both of which went platinum.
In 1983 Brown married, first, the impressionist and radio producer Jan Ravens, a regular on Dead Ringers. The marriage was dissolved in 1993, and in 2010 he married, secondly, the actress Deborah Cornelius, who survives him with two sons from his first marriage, the stand-up comedian Alfie Brown and the musician Lenny Brown.
Steve Brown, born October 25 1954, died February 2 2024