Last modified on Mon 10 May 2021 16.18 EDT
“I’d like to be remembered as the Dreaded Marcel Stellman,” Marcel Stellman once told me. “That’s what Spike Milligan called me. I produced I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas with the Goons in 1956 and I thought it would be a Christmas release. Spike insisted that it came out in the summer. It was a Top 10 hit and we followed it with The Ying Tong Song.”
Stellman, who has died aged 96, had a long career in the music industry, both as a record executive and producer with Decca, and as a song lyricist whose hits included Tulips from Amsterdam. He was also, unexpectedly, the man who brought the popular television show Countdown to the UK.