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Kim Kinnie, Comedy pioneer and TV producer. Born 6 December 1943. Died 11 February 2018, aged 74 Kim Kinnie was in the business of making people laugh. This diminutive dynamo of chuckle helped drive London's famous Comedy Store, launching, in the process, the careers of household names such as Jo Brand, Eddie Izzard and Paul Merton. In the early 1990s he arrived at STV when the Cowcaddensbased station was undergoing a renaissance in production and Kinnie was central to producing a string of light entertainment and children's programmes. He was small in stature but gigantic in personality and his natural sparkle and sound judgement led to highly watchable TV which earned the respect and affection of those he managed. He was the man with three names. Born Thomas Kinnie on 6 December 1943 he was referred to by that name by close family and friends. When the young Thomas decided that he wanted to be an actor, the Glasgow vernacular "Tam" clearly didn't sit well with his ambitions to be an aesthete. His acting did not prove a springboard to a dramatic career. I once teased him, "You could have been the Scottish Olivier". He shot back, "hardly, everything I played I sounded like a wee Glasgow fairy". The self deprecation was more to get a laugh than any expression of self doubt. Thomas Kinnie took himself to London in the mid-1960s where the opportunities were limitless compared to the narrower canvass of Scottish theatre, but not before spending some time in Paris as a dancer, in a case of from Castlemilk to Moulin Rouge.
In 1966 in London he met Michael Burrell, a writer and theatre director of some sophistication and taste. Burrell was a man of whimsical humour, steeping his conversation in rich anecdote and advertising in an understated way that he was a man of intellectual pursuits. Michael would have broadened the horizons of young Thomas...