Pertti Pasanen, generally known to the Finnish public as "Spede", died on Friday last of a heart attack midway through a round of golf. The 71-year-old entertainer was a true pioneer of Finnish comedy, both on radio and TV and in the cinema.

   

He began his career as a scriptwriter and performer in radio shows, moved to television, and then continued his career as a producer of feature films and TV sitcoms, soap operas and game-shows, several of which are still going strong.

   

He was also among the first to recognise the potential for television game-shows that contained an element of gaming by the viewers themselves, and the national lottery organisation Veikkaus benefited greatly from these weekly additions to the traditional Lotto and football pools.

Pasanen is probably best-known

to cinema audiences here for the creation of the series of farces starring Uuno Turhapuro, an amiable but incredibly stupid and bone-idle caricature of the Finnish male. Never the darling of the critics, Pasanen nevertheless hit the motherlode of popular taste, and the series of around 20 films, some considerably better than others, were consistently the best-selling movies of their year.

   

He ran into difficulties during the 1970s as the then left-leaning cultural establishment refused to support his films (though they needed precious little backing except from the paying public), and it is to Pasanen's credit that ultimately the Finnish Film Foundation acknowledged that one cannot make films, however good, without having an audience to watch them. .