William Clotworthy, TV Exec and ‘SNL’ Censor Dubbed ‘Dr. No,’ Dies at 95
William Clotworthy, a former NBC standards and practices executive who served as the on-set censor for “Saturday Night Live” between 1979 and 1991, has died at the age of 95.
According to an obituary which ran in the New York Times on Monday, Clotworthy died peacefully in Hospice in Salt Lake City, Utah on Thursday.
After getting his start as an NBC page in the 1940s, Clotworthy went on to a career in advertising at the firm BBDO. He later moved back to NBC, joining the standards and practices department in the 1970s. He went on to work on set at “Saturday Night Live,” where he earned the nickname “Doctor No.”
He would go on to publish a book about his time on the show, titled “Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender.” The book was described as “an attempt to put a human face on one of the most maligned creatures in broadcasting – the Censor.”
“Somebody asked me one day, ‘What’s the first thing you do when you read these [“Saturday Night Live”] scripts?’ I said, ‘I laugh.’ Now after I laugh, I may go in and cut it to ribbons, but we were human people and we had senses of humor,” Clotworthy said in a 2006 interview with the Television Academy. “We also had a job to do to help keep the network on the air and I think we did it pretty well.”
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