This is taken from the Guardian:

Geoffrey Perkins
Producer of radio and television comedy, he created countless iconic popular shows
by Bob Chaundy
Monday September 1 2008

As a writer, performer and, above all, a producer of comedy on radio and television, Geoffrey Perkins, who has died in a road accident aged 55, was responsible for a seemingly countless number of popular programmes. As BBC TV's head of comedy, he introduced a new generation of edgier, more irreverent series to the corporation's output. Yet his work spanned the broadcast networks: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Drop the Dead Donkey, Spitting Image, the Harry Enfield programmes, The Fast Show, The Catherine Tate Show, The Thin Blue Line, My Family, Father Ted and Have I Got News for You were just a few of the titles he brought to the air and screen.

He was born in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and first revealed his talents in the sixth form at Harrow county school for boys. In his year at this grammar school were Michael Portillo, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, currently British ambassador to the US, theatre director Francis Matthews and Clive Anderson, with whom Perkins produced the school's Christmas revue. While reading English at Lincoln College, Oxford, Perkins joined the Oxford Theatre Group Revue, and a performance at the Edinburgh Festival was singled out for high praise from the Sunday Times critic, Harold Hobson.

On leaving Oxford, Perkins' career took a diversion when he and Portillo, on the advice of the university careers service, took jobs at a Liverpool commercial shipping company, Ocean Transport and Trading. So disruptive were Perkins' anarchic comic interjections that a corner of the open-plan office in Liverpool was boxed off to contain him.

A year later, in 1976, he went to London to join BBC Radio Light Entertainment. During the next six years, he produced more than 20 different programmes and 200 individual shows. He managed to cajole the famously procrastinating Douglas Adams into completing the scripts for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, turning it into a cult classic, and it was there that he met his wife Lisa.

Perkins is also credited with devising the Mornington Crescent game on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. His popular Radio Active series, co-written with Angus Deayton, was later turned into television, as KYTV, for once putting him in front of the camera.

After a brief stint with Thames TV, Perkins became a director of Hat Trick Productions, whose successes included Drop the Dead Donkey, Father Ted and Have I Got News for You.

In 1995, he was appointed head of comedy at BBC Television to bolster a department criticised for its stale sitcoms. Describing it at the time as "the best job in the world", he was now able to work with performers and writers previously unavailable to him. By now, he had acquired a reputation as a brilliant script editor with a meticulous line-by-line approach, and an acute sense of what was funny or what could be made funny. As one former colleague put it, "He knew where the jokes were buried."

Perkins described himself as a "nurturer" of comedies. He was well aware that past classics like Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses and One Foot in the Grave took time to be accepted, so he was prepared to stay loyal to shows that did not make an immediate impact.

He nurtured performers too, particularly emerging talent such as Catherine Tate and Harry Enfield. Traditionalists were kept happy when he retained such stalwarts as Last of the Summer Wine, while ensuring that the scripts remained fresh.

One colleague recalled how Perkins was appalled when the then BBC director general John Birt announced that all departments in the BBC were to be in competition not only with other channels and independent companies, but also with each other. He chose to ignore the policy, believing that the only way to make comedy was to engender an atmosphere of good humour. "To create good comedy," he once said, "was to get the funniest people on television." For his outstanding contribution to the industry, he was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Television Society in 1999.

In 2001, he left the BBC to become an executive producer with Tiger Aspect Productions. His Midas touch continued with such series as The Catherine Tate Show and Gimme Gimme Gimme. His most recent projects have been Benidorm for ITV and a new series of Harry & Paul, with old friends Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, which returns to the screen this week.

He is survived by Lisa and their children Charlotte and Arthur.

Graham Linehan writes:

Geoffrey was the man who found our early Father Ted script, at that time written as a mock-documentary, and suggested we turn it into a sitcom. He was the man who chose the house that became our iconic central location, poring over a pile of location photographs, stabbing it with his finger and saying: "That's the one." He also persuaded us to use Neil Hannon's Songs of Love as our theme music.

This last one was a sticking point for a while. Arthur Matthews and I preferred a song by Neil that would later become A Woman of the World, from the Casanova album. That song was jaunty and silly and to us perfect in that it seemed to be subtly making fun of the form we were working in. "Why do you want to make fun of your show?" said Geoffrey, finally, looking wounded and worried. "People will love these characters."

I later realised that it was a fork in the road, that discussion, and if we had not travelled the way Geoffrey suggested, we'd have ended up lost - we might never have made it to series three. He gave the show a heart, and gave me, still young, and unsure as to what type of person I should try to become, someone to model myself on. I wish we'd worked together more.

· Geoffrey Perkins, TV producer and writer, born February 22 1953; died August 29 2008