Geoffrey Perkins

Geoffrey Perkins, died aged just 55, was a comedy writer, producer and performer and, as head of comedy at BBC Television from 1995 until 2001, presided over such popular series as The Royle Family and Jonathan Creek; in a broadcasting career spanning more than 30 years he worked with stars including Harry Enfield, Angus Deayton and Catherine Tate. He first made his mark as a radio producer with the cult classic The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and, also on Radio 4, the mystifyingly daft Mornington Crescent segment on I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue, the show billed as "the antidote to panel games". A relaxed, calm figure with a wry sense of humour, Perkins not only delivered a string of modern hit series during his six years in charge of the BBC television comedy output - including The Royle Family and The Fast Show - but also persuaded David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst to star in a fresh series of the 1980s classic Only Fools and Horses, the first of which was screened at Christmas 2001. Perkins often confessed himself frustrated by the corporation's "maddening" bureaucracy, and internal hostility towards situation comedy, which he often heard dismissed as "lowbrow fodder". After six years in the job, he returned to making programmes in the independent production sector. Geoffrey Howard Perkins was born on February 22 1953 and educated at Harrow County Grammar School where his friends included Nigel Sheinwald (now, as Sir Nigel, British ambassador to Washington), Michael Portillo and Clive Anderson, with whom he ran the debating society. From an early age he took an active part in school drama and by the time he was a teenager was known as one of the school's comedians. In 1970 he and Clive Anderson wrote a revue, Happy Poison, which was produced as a Christmas entertainment to raise money for charity. After Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read English as an exhibitioner, Perkins asked about joining the BBC but was advised to take a job in commercial shipping. Joining the Ocean Transport and Trading Company (in the same intake as his confrère Portillo), Perkins was put to work studying waste timber in Liverpool. Neither recruit lasted long. In 1977, having written and directed the Oxford University revues of 1974 and 1975, Perkins joined a vintage intake of talent to BBC Radio's light entertainment department that included Cambridge graduates such as John Lloyd and Griff Rhys-Jones. Encouraged by the new department head David Hatch, one of Perkins's first tasks was to rejuvenate I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue, launched in 1972, by introducing the deliberately incomprehensible Mornington Crescent round. It became one of the show's enduring highlights. Early in 1978 Perkins, at 25, took over from Simon Brett as producer of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the science-fiction based comedy being devised by Douglas Adams, a famously slow writer with a history of missed deadlines. Perkins had to chivvy Adams along, and while Adams's old Cambridge friend John Lloyd was drafted in to write large sections of the later episodes, it was Perkins who helped Adams finish the scripts. Drawing on the resources of the Radiophonic Workshop, Perkins also marshalled his sound sources into weird new forms, and devised a range of voice treatments for the actors playing aliens that broke new ground. The result was one of the funniest and most original comedies of postwar radio, winning critical and popular acclaim and - by appealing to both high- and low-brow tastes - managing to alter entrenched public perceptions of Radio 4. "The intellectuals compared it to Swift," noted Perkins, "and the 14-year-olds enjoyed hearing depressed robots clanking around." With Angus Deayton, Perkins co-wrote and starred (as Mike Flex) in the sketch show Radio Active, which poked fun at the amateurishness of some local radio broadcasting, and which transferred to television as KYTV. In 1988 Perkins left the BBC to become a director of Hat Trick Productions, one of the leading independendent companies, whose comedy hits included Have I Got News For You, Spitting Image, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Drop The Dead Donkey, The Harry Enfield Television Programme and the Bafta award-winning Father Ted. He returned in 1995 to become head of comedy for BBC Television. Unusually, he insisted that his continued role as a programme producer was written into his contract. But Perkins came to despair of official BBC snootiness about comedy (one annual report dismissed it with the phrase "all the way from high-value costume drama right the way down to sitcom"). With some 30 new scripts crossing his desk every week (he was a meticulous script editor, carefully ticking every line he thought would raise a laugh), he not only found himself culturally marginalised at the BBC - "Unfortunately, the term sitcom implies a great disdain. People say it with a curl of their lips" - but also hamstrung by the inevitable bureaucracy which, he complained, hindered programme making. As the constraints of the John Birt era multiplied, Perkins spent more time on budgets rather than on creativity. What he called "seismic changes" in the way Birt ran the BBC had "set the people that produce programmes in direct opposition to the people responsible for actually paying for and broadcasting them. "There have been occasions when you say, 'Let's just make a deal', knowing everyone is unhappy; where no one gets the budget they want to make their programme. There are people who are inspired by that, but I'm not one of them." From 2001, after leaving his BBC management post, Perkins returned to the creative side of programme-making with Tiger Aspect, the independent production company behind such shows as Mr Bean and The Vicar of Dibley. He produced The Catherine Tate Show, The Fast Show and Father Ted for Channel 4, and Benidorm for ITV. His latest BBC production for Tiger Aspect, Harry and Paul, starring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, starts next week. Perkins received many awards in the course of his career, including a Sony award for Radio Active in the 1980s, and a grand prix and silver rose of Montreux in 1992 for its television spin-off KYTV. Geoffrey Perkins married, in 1986, Lisa Braun, a BBC studio manager on The Hitch-Hiker's Guide. She survived him with a daughter and a son. Their first child suffered a cot death in the 1980s.