Name Ted Kavanagh Role Writer | Died 1958 | |
How Itma Is Written (1945)
Ted Kavanagh (1 March 1892 – 17 September 1958) was a British radio scriptwriter and producer.
Kavanagh was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1892. He initially studied medicine in Edinburgh before pursuing a career as a writer. He is best remembered as the writer of It's That Man Again (ITMA), a radio comedy series which ran for a decade from 1939 and was immensely successful, It was intentionally devised by Kavanagh, producer Francis Worsley and the comedian Tommy Handley as Handley's specific vehicle; Kavanagh had been writing for him since 1924.
Kavanagh's biography of Handley was published in 1949, the year of the comedian's death and the end of their radio show. A prolific writer, ITMA and his work for Handley constituted only a small proportion of his total oeuvre.
He died in London in September 1958 at the age of 66. His son was the poet P. J. Kavanagh who described childhood among the ITMA characters in his autobiographical The Perfect Stranger (1966).