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| British Television Discussion of British television past and present. |
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01-09-2008, 08:31 AM
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julian_craster
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Geoffrey Perkins R.I.P.
Obituary: Geoffrey Perkins
Producer of radio and television comedy, he created countless iconic popular shows Bob Chaundy The Guardian, 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 Last edited by julian_craster; 01-09-2008 at 08:39 AM.. |
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01-09-2008, 08:34 AM
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julian_craster
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 Perkins on the Channel 4 game Don’t Quote Me (1990); later that decade he produced Father Ted and The Fast Show From The Times September 1, 2008 Geoffrey Perkins: writer, producer and former head of BBC comedy As writer, producer, occasional actor and, for a time, BBC executive, Geoffrey Perkins was one of the most important figures in radio and television comedy over two decades with credits ranging from Spitting Image in the 1980s to The Catherine Tate Show. Weaned on radio classics such as Round the Horne, he attended Harrow County School for Boys, where he was a contemporary of Michael Portillo and Clive Anderson. The three of them ran the debating society, while Perkins and Anderson also wrote and performed in school revues. He developed his comedy skills as a student at Oxford. On graduating he asked the careers office about about joining the BBC but was advised to take a job in commercial shipping. He joined the Ocean Transport and Trading Company, in the same intake as Portillo, and was given the job of studying waste timber in Liverpool. Luckily for radio and television he soon gave up on shipping and joined the BBC as he had always intended. He started in radio light entertainment, getting his first important job on a comedy show, Injury Time, which starred Emma Thompson and Griff Rhys Jones. He went to to produce Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where he met his wife, Lisa Braun, a studio manager on the production. During the 1980s he was one of prime movers in Radio Active, a spoof local radio station. He and Angus Deayton did most of the writing, while also appearing as the resident characters, along with Helen Atkinson-Wood, Michael Fenton-Stevens and Philip Pope. The team moved en bloc to television in 1990 with KYTV, in which they were the leading lights in a mock satellite station. By then Perkins had begun to establish himself on television, as a producer on three series of the satirical puppet show Spitting Image and on Saturday Live, a Channel 4 sketch series whose regular performers included Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and Harry Enfield. In a sequel, Friday Night Live, Enfield launched the character of Loadsamoney, a gobby beneficiary of Thatcherite greed culture. In the late 1980s, with Denise O’Donoghue, Jimmy Mulville and Mary Bell, Perkins helped to found Hat Trick Productions, which became Britain’s leading independent producer of comedy. An early Hat Trick show he produced was a special starring Robbie Coltrane and another was Norbert Smith — A Life, a spoof documentary in which Harry Enfield portrayed an old actor. It won the Silver Rose award at Montreux. As a writer and producer Perkins helped further to establish Harry Enfield as one of television’s most talented young performers. Harry Enfield’s Television Programme, in which Enfield was joined by Paul Whitehouse and Kathy Burke, introduced such characters as the disc jockeys Smashie and Nicey, Wayne and Waynetta Slob and the Old Gits. Ben Elton, who had also appeared on Saturday Live, was another comic talent helped along the way by Perkins, who produced two series of Ben Elton — The Man from Auntie, in which Elton revealed himself, not without controversy, as a purveyor of savage left-wing comedy delivered in a ferocious rant. In 1990 Perkins presented a Channel 4 game, Don’t Quote Me. In the mid-1990s he was producer of, in quick succession, such hit shows as Father Ted, the clerical comedy set off the coast of Ireland, The Fast Show, the sketch series featuring Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson and others, and The Thin Blue Line, the police sitcom written by Elton and starring Rowan Atkinson. In 1995 Perkins became Head of Comedy at the BBC. He kept his 25 per cent stake in Hat Trick, though he resigned as a director, and dismissed suggestions that there would be any conflict of interest. He insisted that no programme proposals from Hat Trick would come directly through him and that the recommissioning of existing shows, such as Have I Got News for You, would be down to others. He approached the job with an open mind, insisting there were no rules for successful comedy shows, except that they should be the best of their kind. He had little time for market research, recalling a focus group on Spitting Image that hated the show. Perkins’s record at the BBC was, predictably, mixed. Shows he was directly associated with, such as Keeping Mum, with Stephanie Cole, or Bloomin’ Marvellous, a comedy about late birth, did not survive a first series, though Operation Good Guys, a spoof police documentary, in which Perkins played the head of Interpol, was inventive enough to have deserved a longer stay. My Family, starring Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker was more conventional fare but found an audience and enjoyed a long run. Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, charting the doings of five twentysomethings, was another survivor despite being shown mainly on the BBC’s digital channels but My Hero, in which Ardal O’Hanlon from Father Ted played a superman character, caused few ripples. Away from sitcom one of his biggest successes was the comedy whodunit Jonathan Creek. Perkins stayed as BBC Head of Comedy until 2001, when he joined the independent production company Tiger Aspect as creative director. He took the opportunity to attack his erstwhile employer, accusing the BBC of being obsessed with budgets and setting the people who produce programmes in direct opposition to those paying for and broadcasting them. He said the BBC’s finance people gave particular scrutiny to sitcoms because they regarded them as “lowbrow fodder”. Back as an independent producer working for Tiger Aspect, Perkins was largely responsible for launching Catherine Tate as a comic actor after seeing her doing stand-up at the Edinburgh Festival. He was the producer on her BBC Two shows. In 2007 he produced Benidorm, a Tiger Aspect sitcom for ITV about British holidaymakers at the Spanish resort, which soon went into a second series. He married Lisa Braun in 1986. They had two children. Geoffrey Perkins, comedy writer, actor and producer, was born on February 22, 1953. He died after being hit by a lorry on August 29, 2008, aged 55 |
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01-09-2008, 08:37 AM
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julian_craster
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Geoffrey Perkins
Producer of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy who invented Mornington Crescent. DAILY TELEGRAPH 31 Aug 2008  Perkins: frustrated by BBC bureaucracy and by its lack of regard for comedy Geoffrey Perkins, who died on Friday aged 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 survives him with a daughter and a son. Their first child suffered a cot death in the 1980s. |
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01-09-2008, 01:58 PM
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PS68060
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I recognised him straight away but didn't realise he was also the man behind the scenes on so many great comedy shows.
My thoughts are with his family and friends. |
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06-09-2008, 11:16 AM
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David Brent
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What a tragic loss of a great talent.
I first remember seeing him in the excellent KYTV comedy series. The list of his comedy work as an actor and then producer is really impressive. 'Benidorm' was one of his more recent works. A very sad loss to British comedy. Dave. |
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