"The most inventive man I've ever met"

Derek Jewell Sunday Times

Computer buffs of a certain age will remember Ivan Berg as the man who invented home and educational software publishing in the early 1980s. BBC Mastermind, The Patrick Moore Astronomy Program, Know Your Own Personality, and programs for early learning and GCE Revision were part of a range of highly popular titles published for Commodore’s VIC 20 and 64, the BBC Micro, and the Acorn Electron. More than a million copies were sold in the short-lived home computer boom months of 1983/84.

What they won’t know is that Ivan Berg ran away to sea at 16 after reading too many sea stories, that he introduced his shipmate Thomas “call me Tommy” Hicks (Steele)* to his friends Lionel Bart* and Mike Pratt*, sparking off Brit Rock’N’Roll in 1956, that he wrote the scripts for the one and only children’s TV series about Motor Racing, ‘The Chequered Flag’ while he was in the RAF, that he pioneered audio publishing, (Checkout 'Ivan and Inge Berg' on Amazon), and made 250,000 cassette copies of Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book* recorded in five languages, including Arabic, for distribution at a festival in Cuba.

He got the better of Robert Maxwell* in a software publishing deal after Maxwell pulled a flanker, wrote a film script for Billy Graham*, two books on Motor Sport and one on Trad Jazz – and a pile of weekly adventure stories for boys for TV Express comic.

He was a founding member of BBC Top Gear magazine, created the first motoring magazine website, www.topgear.com, produced the infamous Top Gear Full Metal Racket tapes and co-authored the best-seller 'Top Gear Motor Mania' with his son Nik.

*google them if you don't know who they are.