Geoffrey Perkins

Geoffrey Howard Perkins (22 February 1953 – 29 August 2008) was a British comedy producer, writer and performer.

He took an early interest in drama in 1970, and he worked with Clive Anderson to write a charity revue called Happy Poison.

Perkins read English literature while at Lincoln College, Oxford and while a student directed and wrote for The Oxford Revues of 1974 and 1975.

After his time at Oxford, Perkins joined the Ocean Transport and Trading Company, where he was put to work studying waste timber in Liverpool.

He did not last long in the field of commercial shipping.

In 1977 drawing upon his work for the Oxford Revue, Perkins joined BBC Radio's light entertainment department alongside Cambridge graduates John Lloyd and Griff Rhys Jones.

Perkins produced the first series of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 1977 for BBC Radio 4, taking over from Simon Brett, the producer of the pilot.

Perkins assisted the notoriously slow writer in finishing the scripts, before John Lloyd was drafted in to write large sections of the later episodes.

Perkins also drew upon the resources of the Radiophonic Workshop to help create the groundbreaking audio effects for the series.

In 1980, Perkins co-wrote and featured in the radio sketch show Radio Active, revised and adapted from the early Oxford Revue shows, and initially based around the comedy parody group The Hee Bee Gee Bees, consisting of Philip Pope, Angus Deayton and Michael Fenton Stevens.

Prior to its leap from the revue to the radio, the production toured and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, after which it was picked up by BBC Radio 4 for a pilot called The Oxford Revue Presents Radio Active.

Radio Active, "which poked fun at the amateurishness of some local radio broadcasting".

It went on to run for seven series and won a Sony Award.

Perkins portrayed a character called Mike Flex, a young cocky disc jockey.

Perkins and Deayton wrote much of the series and later it was transferred to BBC2 television as the Grand Prix and Silver Rose of Montreux-winner KYTV.

In 1986, Perkins married Lisa Braun, who was BBC studio manager on Hitchhiker's Guide.

The couple lost their first child to cot death in 1986.

Department head David Hatch assigned Perkins to help revitalise the comedy panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (launched five years earlier).

It introduced the incomprehensible Mornington Crescent game which would become an enduring success.

Perkins, with Radio Active colleague and co-writer Deayton, later produced The Uncyclopaedia of Rock for Capital Radio, winning the Monaco Radio Award for the show, and penning a 1987 tie-in book with Deayton and Jeremy Pascall.

Perkins left the BBC in 1988, to become a director of Hat Trick Productions which is an independent television and radio production company.

Hat Trick produced comedy programmes for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

The first main production of Perkins was Spitting Image where he met Ben Elton, and Harry Enfield whom he got to develop the character of Douglas Hurd by suggesting he adapt it along the lines of Frank Oz's character Fozzie Bear.

As a result Perkins developed shows for both performers, Saturday Live, which was hosted by Elton, sketch show The Man from Auntie with Elton, and Enfield's Harry Enfield's Television Programme. Perkins also developed Have I Got News For You, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Drop The Dead Donkey, and Father Ted for Hat Trick; the shows won many awards including Baftas.

He was BBC head of comedy between 1995 and 2001, and produced the first two radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

He is one of the people credited with creating the panel game Mornington Crescent for I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

In 1995, he resigned from Hat Trick and returned to the BBC as BBC Television's Head of Comedy, requesting his contract stipulated "his continued role as a programme producer," as well as overseeing the department.

He stayed in this role until 2001, growing increasingly dissatisfied at "official BBC snootiness about comedy".

Perkins meticulously read 30 new scripts every week, but "found himself culturally marginalised at the BBC," saying: "Unfortunately, the term sitcom implies a great disdain. People say it with a curl of their lips."

Under Director-General John Birt, Perkins also felt "hamstrung by the inevitable bureaucracy," which not only hindered programme-making, but saw Perkins spending "more time on budgets" than more creative pursuits.

Perkins felt that the changes in how the BBC was run,

(They) 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.

During Perkins' time as Head of Comedy, the BBC produced such hits including Coupling, The Thin Blue Line, Jonathan Creek, The Fast Show, The Royle Family and My Family.

Perkins also persuaded David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst to star in a new series of Only Fools and Horses, the first of which was screened at Christmas 2001.

In 2005 Perkins had cameos in the fourth radio series of Hitchhiker's (The Quandary Phase), as the producer of the radio show on which Arthur Dent worked.

Perkins essentially played a fictional version of himself from the first series with a fictional version of writer Douglas Adams.

In December 2008 he posthumously received an Outstanding Contribution to Comedy Award.

Perkins attended the Harrow County Grammar School, alongside Nigel Sheinwald, Michael Portillo and Clive Anderson, with whom he ran the debating society.