www.silverguide.site –

Ready Steady Go! captured the mood of the Swinging 60s when it was launched as a live ITV pop show on Friday evenings in 1963 with the catchphrase “The weekend starts here!”. The show’s title came from Daphne Shadwell, one of its studio directors and a pioneering programme-maker in those early days of commercial television. “Most TV directors counted down ‘ten, nine, eight etc’,” she said. “I was different. I used to end the countdown with, ‘Ready, steady, go!’”

The chaotic format mixed live acts with interviews, and featured teenagers dancing on the disco set and cameras in shot. Its launch presenter, Keith Fordyce, was later joined by the miniskirt-wearing Cathy McGowan, whose youthfulness and fashion sense embodied the excitement and energy of the era.

In 1966, the series came to an end, but Shadwell, who has died aged 98, remained at ITV’s London weekday franchise holder, Rediffusion, and its successor, Thames Television, for another quarter of a century.

She worked on a wide range of programmes, but most successfully as a producer and director of children’s shows. One of the first, featuring pop music, quizzes and hobby items, was Five O’Clock Club (1963-66). Aimed at under-12s, it was hosted by Muriel Young, initially with Howard Williams, then Wally Whyton, accompanied by the fondly remembered glove puppets Ollie Beak and Fred Barker.

Shadwell was also in the director’s gallery for the anarchic sketch show Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967-69), billed as “written for teenagers with adults in mind”. It starred Denise Coffey, David Jason and the future Monty Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, as well as the comedy music group the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. The programme’s madcap humour won it an award at the 1968 Prix Jeunesse international festival in Munich.

But Shadwell, a woman in a predominantly male world of TV directors at the time, found two of the pre-Python cast members tricky. “They wouldn’t be directed,” she recalled. “Terry would sometimes. Eric Idle wouldn’t. I found them very difficult … [and] they felt I was difficult … But it was a shame.”

She was happier filming on location for the Captain Fantastic segment of the programme, featuring Jason, in a bowler hat and buttoned-up raincoat, parodying a superhero, with Coffey playing his nemesis, Mrs Black, “the most evil woman in the world”. It was shot without sound and featured slapstick and speeded-up scenes.

In a more conventional TV mode, Shadwell produced and directed The Sooty Show when it switched from the BBC to ITV in 1968, with Harry Corbett hiding his hand behind a desk to operate the small bear glove puppet. It was her first programme for Thames Television and she recalled Corbett being “locked into Sooty” on and off screen, adding: “He was utterly blinkered. He lived only for that desk, the props, the doll … mayhem used to be going on around him and he never knew.”

Later, throughout the 1980s, Shadwell directed episodes of the lunchtime preschool programme Rainbow, featuring the squabbling puppets Bungle the bear, George the hippopotamus and Zippy, an indeterminate creature, and, from its second series, hosted by Geoffrey Hayes.

After Thames lost its ITV franchise at the end of 1992, she finished her television career with Sky, directing the Saturday-morning children’s show Fun Factory, featuring animated series and once again working with puppets, until it was axed in 1994. “It was just my cup of tea because it was just like Rainbow and I understand and like puppeteers very much indeed,” she said. “It was like the good old days.”

The youngest of four sisters, Daphne was born in Wandsworth, south London, to Mary (nee Winters), a singer, and Charles Shadwell, a musical director who went on to conduct the BBC Variety Orchestra, when he achieved some notoriety through his exchanges with Tommy Handley during broadcasts of the radio comedy It’s That Man Again (widely known as ITMA).

Her eldest sister, Joan (using her mother’s maiden name, Winters), acted in radio shows, while her other sisters, Sheila and Hazel, were BBC secretaries. Daphne became one herself in the Near East Service in 1945, moving on to the BBC’s recorded programmes department, then children’s TV as a production secretary in 1950.

During this time, she found an outlet for her own theatrical ambitions by performing on stage with the Ariel Players, the BBC staff amateur dramatics club. In 1954 she married John Hamilton, a sound engineer with the corporation, and both moved to Associated-Rediffusion (the original name of the ITV company) the following year shortly before the commercial channel’s launch. She began there as personal assistant to Lloyd Williams, who had left the BBC to become the assistant controller of programmes and promised that she could train as a director.

Her chance to direct came in 1956 with women’s programmes and advertising magazines (long-form commercials, before they were banned). She was soon directing or producing across departments.

As a director, she made the dramas Murder Bag and Crime Sheet (the predecessors to No Hiding Place) between 1958 and 1961, and the light entertainment series Stars and Garters (1963-66) and The David Nixon Show (for its first run, 1972), as well as the pop show Cool for Cats at various times during its run (1956-61).

Other children’s programmes she produced included Object Z (1965) and Object Z Returns (1966), Pardon My Genie (1972-73) and Hold the Front Page (1974). She also directed episodes of Sexton Blake (1969).

John, who became a producer and director as well, died in 2001. She is survived by a nephew, Peter, and a niece, Alison.

• Daphne Monica Winstanley Shadwell, producer and director, born 22 December 1927; died 25 May 2026