My friend David Stafford, who has died aged 74 of lung cancer, sustained a varied career as a writer and broadcaster for more than 40 years. For a decade from the late 1980s, he contributed a much-loved weekly column to the Saturday Guardian, latterly known as Staffordshire Bull.
His comedy writing career took off after he met Alexei Sayle in 1980, which resulted in several successful writing collaborations including the Time Out column Great Bus Journeys of the World, an award-winning Capital Radio series, Alexei Sayle and the Fish People (1981), and the Channel 4 film Itch (1991), directed by Beeban Kidron.
