Terry Hall

Terence Hall, ventriloquist: born Oldham, Lancashire 20 November 1926; twice married (two daughters); died Coventry, West Midlands 4 April 2007.

In putting Lenny the Lion in front of family audiences on stage and television, Terry Hall was one of the first ventriloquists to enthral them with a stooge in the guise of an animal, blazing a trail for entertainers such as Keith Harris and Orville (the duck) and Roger DeCourcey and Nookie Bear.

Traditionally, these sidekicks had been boy puppets, such as Arthur Worsley with Charlie Brown and Peter Brough with Archie Andrews, but Hall took advantage of the booming television medium in the 1950s to tweak the format. In the same year that Shari Lewis was introducing Lamb Chop to Americans in the children's television series Captain Kangaroo, Hall and his puppet were starting their own series on this side of the Atlantic, The Lenny the Lion Show (1957-60).

Inspired by a visit to Blackpool Zoo while performing a 1954 summer season in the seaside resort, Hall created the dummy using old fox fur, papier-mâché and a golf ball for a nose. At first, Lenny had lion-like teeth and a growling voice, but the character frightened children in the Blackpool audience and the singer Anne Shelton, also on the bill, suggested the teeth come out and the voice be made gentler. As a result, the puppet - one of the first with moving arms, as well as a lisping, falsetto voice, wide eyes and a habit of lifting a paw to his head and sighing "Aw! Don't embawass me" - kept Hall in front of television viewers for a quarter of a century.

Born in 1926 in Oldham, where his parents ran a working men's club, the budding, self-taught ventriloquist attended St Patrick's School in the town and De La Salle College, Salford, and bought his first dummy, called Bert Williams, for £2 10s (£2.50). After winning a talent contest at the age of 15, Hall joined the Carroll Levis Discoveries stage show.

His television début, with Lenny the Lion, came alongside Eric Sykes in the one-off BBC comedy-variety show Dress Rehearsal (1956), with the comedian as the harassed director and Hall as the ventriloquist contributing to the mayhem, while supposedly preparing for transmission of a live television programme.

After Hall found screen success in his own right with the BBC's The Lenny the Lion Show, the animal-puppet craze gained momentum, notably with Muriel Young on ITV, joined by Pussy Cat Willum and Ollie Beak in the children's series Small Time, Tuesday Rendezvous and The Five O'Clock Club.

Hall himself was invited to guest-star on the legendary Ed Sullivan Show in the United States (1958) and returned home to take his puppet to two more popular programmes, Lenny's Den (1959-61) and Pops and Lenny (1962-63).

The Beatles made one of their earliest television appearances in a May 1963 episode of Pops and Lenny, singing their first No 1 single, "From Me To You", and "Please Please Me", as well as joining Hall and his puppet for a song titled "After You've Gone". At the time, the future pop star David Bowie's father was working on the show and he launched the Lenny the Lion Fan Club. Hall and his stooge also released their own single, "Lenny's Bath Time" (1963).

The pair remained popular in summer seasons and pantomimes on stage and as guest stars in television variety programmes including Big Night Out (1965), David Nixon's Comedy Bandbox (1966) and The Blackpool Show (1966). Later, they enjoyed fame together with a new audience in the ITV children's educational series Reading with Lenny (1977-80), for which Hall wrote a number of accompanying storybooks featuring Kevin the Kitten.

Anthony Hayward

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