James Casey (variety artist)

In 1982 he retired from the BBC, just before Ken Dodd could ask him to produce yet more radio shows. Upon retiring from radio, Casey revived his father's variety act to great acclaim with Roy Castle and Eli Woods, on The Michael Parkinson Show on BBC television in 1982. As a result of that appearance, they were invited to include the act in that year's Royal Variety Performance. With Woods, Casey then worked the surviving variety theatres with the act for the following 25 years.

A career in the law was not to be, though, and when he came out of the Army at the end of the war he tried to sort out his father's disastrous financial affairs. Though teetotal, Jimmy James was a compulsive gambler, and went bankrupt three times. On the final occasion on which he faced the bankruptcy court, completely deadpan, he announced to the surprised assembly: "I presume I have now won the Official Receiver outright!" Before he died in 1965, Jimmy James was earning £275 a week as top of the bill at Skegness; a huge sum for the time.

His most successful series for BBC Radio was creating, producing and co-writing The Clitheroe Kid, starring the diminutive comic Jimmy Clitheroe, which ran continuously for sixteen years on the BBC Light Programme and BBC Radio 2, running from 1957 to 1972 inclusive, based on a chance meeting with Jimmy Clitheroe on a Variety bill in 1952.

He also teamed up with Jimmy Clitheroe, who already had film experience and had worked with Jimmy James in Variety. Only 4'3" tall, before he became famous Clitheroe played Frank Randle's dummy in ventriloquist sketches, at the end of which he would jump from the fake ventriloquist's knee and run off into the wings to show he wasn't in fact a doll. In 1955, at Casey's prompting, Clitheroe appeared in Call Boy, a radio variety series featuring popular stars of the day including Ted Lune, Margery Manners and Dennis Goodwin. Written mainly by Casey, writing under his stage name 'Cass James', assisted by Frank Roscoe and Ronnie Taylor, the initial sketches featuring Jimmy Clitheroe were short 8-minute items, but within three years had expanded into the full-length situation comedy The Clitheroe Kid, written mainly – and produced solely – by James Casey, who was now writing and producing under his real name.

His most notable discoveries during his career at BBC Radio in Manchester, between 1954 and 1982, were the radio comedian Jimmy Clitheroe, the comedian Les Dawson, the comedian Ken Dodd, and the comedy double-act known professionally as Hinge and Bracket, each of whom he launched into a career in radio light entertainment with their own BBC series.

A promising Des O'Connor radio series was ruined by the BBC reneging on the promise of a prime weekend timeslot; but Mike Yarwood and the young Morecambe and Wise also profited from Casey's witty scripts. He also worked closely with Eric and Ernie's eventual tv scriptwriter Eddie Braben (in the comedy sketch series The Worst Show on the Wireless – in which his son David Casey, and his cousin Eli Woods, also featured), produced Roy Castle on radio in Castle's on the Air (Roy Castle had begun his career, in the 1950s, as a member of Jimmy James and Co in the variety theatres), and he discovered and promoted a young Alison Steadman (also in The Worst Show on the Wireless).

During the Second World War he served in the ranks in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1941 and as an officer in the Durham Light Infantry from 1944, landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day with the 9th Battalion DLI in 1944. He was interviewed at length about his wartime experiences by the Imperial War Museum as part of their Durham Light Infantry oral history project.

In the 1940s, he and Eli Woods appeared in his father's variety act, known as Jimmy James and Co. After retiring from the BBC in the 1980s, he resurrected the act and toured the surviving variety theatres performing it with Woods for the following twenty five years.

James Casey (16 August 1922 – 23 April 2011), known professionally as Jim Casey, was at various times during his long career a Variety comedian on the English music-halls, a scriptwriter for BBC Radio's variety shows and situation comedies, and a senior BBC Radio Light Entertainment producer.

James Casey, born in 1922 at Stockton-on-Tees in England, was the son of the variety comedian Jimmy James. While his two children were still young, he moved to London; but within a couple of years his wife's favourite aunt was taken seriously ill, and the family moved to Liverpool to take care of her. It was here Casey began writing comedy for the BBC's Light Entertainment Department, submitting scripts to BBC Radio's North Region under the pen name Cass James (which was, at that time, his usual stage name). These were such a success that he would spend the next 26 years commuting between Crosby on Merseyside and BBC Broadcasting House in Manchester.