Keith Waterhouse RIP

[Windthrop]

The writer, screenwriter and playwrite has died



BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Billy Liar author Waterhouse dies



RIP Keith, you were a wordsmith

[CaptainWaggett]

Sad news - he wrote some fabulous novels and the first volume of his autobiography is superb.

[Freddy]

Very sad news, his writing was funny and wonderful. A man who wrote early in the morning and had a good lunch.



Freddy

[Mr Sloane]

RIP - A great writer. He wrote one of my favourite novels Thinks which seems sadly forgotten.

[Steve Crook]

Not unexpected, he had been ill for some time. But he was one of the greats.



He used to write a great column in the Daily Mirror - before they sold out and then he sold out.



But he did also write some great novels. Not just Billy Liar but also some like Jubb and Office Life which helped me develop into the old cynic that I've become



Thanks Keith



Steve

[didi-5]

I remember that column in the Mirror. One of the old school journalists and writers - RIP.

[Freddy]

name='didi-5']I remember that column in the Mirror. One of the old school journalists and writers - RIP.

Also a column in the Daily Mail

[batman]

RIP Mr Waterhouse.

[smudge]

Terrible news!



We have lost a great writer and a real character; the world will be much poorer for his passing.



Respect.



Smudge

[Windthrop]

The Telegraph Obit



Keith Waterhouse



Keith Waterhouse, who died on September 4 aged 80, was a novelist and newspaper columnist, but above all a playwright whose collaboration with Willis Hall was one of the most enduring and distinctive dramatic partnerships in the history of theatre, films and television.



Born into working-class families in Leeds within a few weeks of one another, they did not begin to work together until each man had won acclaim on his own. In 1958 Hall wrote a taut and punchy stage drama about war in the Malayan jungle, The Long and the Short and the Tall, for the Royal Court Theatre.



A year later Waterhouse published Billy Liar, one of the great comic novels of the 20th century. He had left 10,000 words of the manuscript in a taxi, forcing him to start again: "the best thing that happened to me – it was pretentious twaddle", he once remarked. The book caught the public's imagination with its portrait of a cheeky north country lad trying to bring some fun into his drab life as an undertaker's assistant by engaging in fantasies that embarrassed and dismayed his family.



When Hall got in touch, he assured Waterhouse that Billy Liar contained a play that was "screaming to be let out". The resulting stage version (Cambridge, 1960) had Albert Finney as the gleefully mendacious backyard fantasist disrupting his dull family life to enliven his own. Finney was followed by Tom Courtenay, who also was in John Schlesinger's film version.



Their class-conscious satire established Waterhouse and Hall for the next 25 years as popular yet sensitive purveyors of regional comedy rich in northern speech patterns and working-class customs.



Waterhouse was also well known to the public as a newspaper columnist, where he proved a relentless scourge of the politically correct. His columns appeared first in the Daily Mirror (from 1960 until he fell out with the proprietor, Robert Maxwell, in 1986) and then for the Daily Mail.



Keith Spencer Waterhouse was born on February 6 1929, two months before Willis Hall. The youngest son of a cleaner and an alcoholic door-to-door vegetable salesman, Keith remembered being taken, at the age of four, to a wholesale market which could have been described by Dickens.



After Osmondthorpe Council School, where a master inspired him to read PG Wodehouse, Jerome K Jerome and Mark Twain, Keith took a course in typing and shorthand. He then found a job with an undertaker, using his lunch hours to bash out on the office typewriter articles describing his perambulations through Leeds. These were usually rejected.



After two years' National Service in the RAF, he was hired by the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds. One Easter, for a story, he was required to walk from Leeds to London down the Great North Road. This led to an unwelcome appointment as Pennines walking reporter before he joined the Mirror, for which he was a correspondent in the United States and the Soviet Union. He was also invited to write speeches for the Labour leaders Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.



Meanwhile, he embarked on a career as an author which would see him produce some 60 books during his career. In 1956 he produced a history of the Café Royal, and the following year he published There Is A Happy Land, which some regard as an even better novel than Billy Liar.



Waterhouse was given his own column by the Mirror in 1960, and colleagues observed that he often had to be sick before he could produce his copy. But once he had started to work from home, he managed to develop a congenial routine. He began with a long perusal of the national papers before setting to work on an old Adler typewriter to the accompaniment of Radio 3. He would then enjoy an expensive champagne lunch (an event of such importance that he wrote a book on the subject).



In his newspaper columns Waterhouse held forth on topics such as his affection for suburbia; his contempt for computers; disbelief in statistics; and his obsession with the smallest, most ordinary things, such as the change in his pockets. To these subjects he added pen portraits of two mythical shop assistants, Sharon and Tracey, and a bureaucratic monster, Clogthorpe District Council.



In 1994 one of his secretaries, referred to in his columns as his "flame-haired factotum", gave an interview in which she claimed: "At 1pm he would expect smoked salmon sandwiches and a bottle of champagne, and I had to put on my black basque, suspenders and strippergram gear." Her claim for unfair dismissal was settled out of court.



Waterhouse's collaboration with Willis produced a rich seam of material. Celebration (Nottingham Playhouse and Duchess, 1961) evoked the manners of a proletarian northern family, first at a wedding reception and then at a funeral. England Our England (Prince's), with music by Dudley Moore, was a satirical revue in the spirit of the mocking television programme That Was the Week That Was, to which the duo also contributed.



They followed up with a wryly amusing double bill, Squat Betty and The Sponge Room (Royal Court 1962), and then All Things Bright and Beautiful (Bristol Old Vic), which extracted slightly indignant fun from a family being moved from a condemned house to a block of flats.



After another northern family comedy about an unmarried daughter becoming pregnant, Come Laughing Home (Wimbledon Theatre), Waterhouse and Hall turned to sophisticated West End humour with Say Who You Are (Her Majesty, 1965), which rang the changes on adultery arranged by telephone in Knightsbridge.



A musical of Arnold Bennett's The Card, with the comedian Jim Dale in the title role (1973), was much less successful than their musical Billy (Drury Lane, 1974) and their reworkings of the family comedies by the Neapolitan playwright Eduardo de Filippo.



They also collaborated in the theatre on Joey, Joey (1966) and Whoops-a-Daisy (Nottingham Playhouse, 1968), Children's Day (Mermaid, 1969) and Who's Who (Fortune, 1973).



Together Waterhouse and Willis wrote the film scripts of Whistle Down The Wind (1961); A Kind of Loving, West Eleven and Man In The Middle (all 1963); Pretty Polly (1967); and Lock Up Your Daughters (1969), which was judged to be no improvement on Fielding's original.



On his own Waterhouse produced Mr and Mrs Nobody (Garrick 1986), an engaging take on The Diary of A Nobody for Judi Dench and her husband Michael Williams, and Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell (Lyric, 1989), which enabled Peter O'Toole to give one of his most brilliant performances as the bibulous Spectator columnist.



The television plays Waterhouse wrote on his own included The Warmonger (1970) as well as such series as The Upchat Line (1977); Charlie Muffin (from the novels of Brian Freemantle, (1979); West End Tales (1981); The Happy Apple (1983); Slip Up (1987); and Andy Capp (1988), based on the Daily Mirror strip cartoon.



Although none of his subsequent novels attracted the same attention as Billy Liar, Waterhouse continued to turn out wry, vigorous fiction, including Maggie Muggins (1982), about a woman touring old flats to collect her post when disappointment was setting in for the children of the "Swinging Sixties".



As a defiantly successful northern writer, Waterhouse had no time for literary London or for jamborees such as the Booker Prize. He was suspicious of charm, viewing it as an "absurd" quality.



He was a fierce upholder of the proper use of the English language, writing a style book for the Mirror and announcing that he had started the Association for the Annihilation of the Abberant Apostrophe.



His novel, Bimbo, which features a bejeaned schoolmistress called Roz who tells her pupils that grammar is elitist "crap", was inspired by the teachers he met while serving on the Kingman inquiry into teaching the English language.



On reaching the age of 80 earlier this year, he wrote his last column for the Mail ("It's English as she is spoke, innit?"), concerning an official inquiry into teaching for seven-year-olds. He insisted, however, that he would continue writing for Saga magazine. He was hoping to see his play The Last Page produced by the end of this year.



In 1991 he was appointed CBE. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.



Keith Waterhouse married first, in 1950, Joan Foster, with whom he had a son and two daughters, one of whom predeceased him. He married, secondly, in 1984, Stella Bingham, a journalist. Both unions ended in divorce.

[Windthrop]

The Guardian Obit



Keith Waterhouse



Stalwart of Fleet Street, novelist and playwright renowned for Billy Liar and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell

Obituary: Keith Waterhouse



Mike Molloy

guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 September 2009 19.00 BST Article history

Keith Waterhouse claimed that God had blessed him with the gift of the delayed hangover.



Keith Waterhouse, who has died aged 80, always described himself as a lazy man, even though he produced a body of work that reduced his Fleet Street rivals to envious dismay. Apart from the novels, plays, film scripts, sitcoms and magazine articles that flowed unceasingly from his vintage Adler typewriter (he hated new technology), he also wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column, beginning in the Daily Mirror in 1970, and from 1988 for the Daily Mail, until the paper announced his retirement last May.



Waterhouse would roam through the news stories of the day for material to comment upon, but he would often return to the prehistoric Ug family to demonstrate the unchanging folly of human beings. He campaigned mightily to preserve the correct usage of the apostrophe, and the good councillors of Clogthorpe would be lampooned regularly as they ponderously set about desecrating their Victorian town in the cause of modernity. He was parsimonious with his real anger, preferring to "grow the tolerant, ironic eye", but when he was moved to rage, he could use words like artillery.



His background was unauspicious. Born in Hunslet, Leeds, the youngest child of a costermonger who died while Waterhouse was an infant, he grew up in poverty on a council estate on the outskirts of the city. But he loved books, and fiddled extra tickets at various public libraries so he could exceed the weekly borrowing quota. He left Osmondthorpe secondary modern at 14 and worked as a cobbler's assistant and then as a clerk for an undertaker before, in 1950, getting a job as a junior reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post.



In his youth, Leeds was a city of picture palaces, dance halls, sooty factories, grand Victorian offices, markets, elegant shops, side-street enterprises and rock-solid, Yorkshire confidence. All that has gone with the wind now, but the old Leeds continued to live in Waterhouse's memory, and he returned to it again and again, writing with aching, bittersweet nostalgia.



After two years as a rookie reporter, he was interviewed in London by the news editor of the Daily Mirror, who turned him down for a job, but while in the building, he wangled a further audience with the features editor, who offered him freelance shifts. Almost immediately, he was sent out with instructions to find a talking dog.



Waterhouse called the office a few days later, announcing airily that he had fulfilled his brief. "Where's the dog?" snarled the features editor. "Cardiff," answered Waterhouse. "That's no bloody good," came the reply. "The circulation drive is in the north-west. Find me a talking dog in Liverpool!"



Within months, Waterhouse came to the attention of Hugh Cudlipp, who, as editorial director, was at the zenith of his powers and about to take the Mirror's circulation to more than 5m. Cudlipp recognised his new recruit's potential instantly, and gleefully sent him ricochetting about the world. America, Europe, the Soviet Union: this was heady stuff for a lad who had once been banned from playing with the children of his more respectable neighbours because he was the dirtiest boy in the street.



Waterhouse would always stay with newspapers, but now an additional career kicked in. During his spare time he had written his first novel, There Is a Happy Land (1957). With the publication in 1959 of his second, Billy Liar, he enjoyed that most elusive of literary achievements – a bestseller that is also a critical and artistic triumph. Quickly, the book was turned into a play, with Albert Finney as the eponymous hero.



Then he got a call from an old friend from Leeds, Willis Hall, now a successful playwright. Together they wrote the screenplay of Billy Liar, filmed in 1963 with Tom Courtenay as Billy and making a star of Julie Christie. The story takes place in the course of a single Saturday in a northern city and is about a young clerk, Billy Fisher, whose daydreaming and hilarious lies have brought his work and love life to a point of crisis.



The collaboration with Hall marked the beginning of a lifelong partnership that touched just about every category of show business: television scripts, including Worzel Gummidge (1979-81), West End plays, highly acclaimed translations of the farces of Eduardo de Filippo, screenplays, including Whistle Down the Wind (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962) and Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966). The diversity of their output was astonishing, their means of communication verging on the telepathic.





As well as the scripts there was a growing list of novels, along with every conceivable award for his newspaper columns and his regular contributions to Punch. Although much of his work was comedy, like many professional humorists, Waterhouse hated people telling him jokes. He loved pubs and Soho drinking clubs, Gerry's in particular, but he dreaded bores, whom he savaged with a grumpy impatience.



His chosen companions were newspaper hacks, theatrical folk of the less self-obsessed variety, barkeepers and fellow writers – as long as they bought their round. It was in such company that Waterhouse and Jeffrey Bernard first became friends. The relationship led to Waterhouse immortalising Bernard in the wildly successful play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell (1989), starring Peter O'Toole and based on Bernard's Spectator column.



In it he introduced the audience to the "egg trick", a piece of business Waterhouse had been performing for years in clubs, bars and the residents' lounge of many hotels. It involved borrowing from the management a biscuit tin lid, a pint pot of water, the sleeve from a box of matches and a raw egg. When he had the full attention of the right gathering of like-minded drinkers, the tin lid would be placed on top of the glass of water, the matchbox sleeve on top of the lid and the egg in the open end of the matchbox. The trick was to strike the edge of the tin lid with a shoe. The lid would then fly away, having caught the matchbox on its edge, the matchbox would topple over and deposit the intact egg in the pint of water – sometimes. Other times, the premises would be coated with raw egg.



Waterhouse and I were once in the lounge of a Birmingham hotel, having earlier been in a Greek restaurant, where we had been co-opted onto the judging panel of a belly dancing contest. Waterhouse liked the belly dancers. He bought them a great deal of champagne, insisting that he pour it into their slippers. The ladies did not mind, even though their shoes were all open-toed.



Later, at the hotel, we encountered a group of senior police officers and the junior snooker champion of Wales and his manager. Waterhouse announced he would perforn the egg trick. It worked perfectly. Dazzled, the junior snooker champion leaped forward, his eyes blazing with competition. "Give me a go," he demanded.



The trick was set up again and the youth slammed his shoe onto the biscuit tin lid. Raw egg covered the policemen. "How do you do the trick?" demanded the frustrated youth. "You have to be over 50," Waterhouse replied airily.



His personal humour often whirled into the surreal, as his fellow journalist Peter Tory learned to his cost. One night, in a Blackpool restaurant during a Conservative party conference, Waterhouse inveigled Tory into a bet which resulted in Tory losing his trousers. Waterhouse made off into the night with the item of clothing and Tory had to borrow a pair of the chef's pants.



Back at the bar of the Imperial hotel, he made himself busy introducing Tory's trousers to various Conservative party grandees, insisting they shake a proffered leg by way of greeting. In later weeks, Tory would receive sinister, late-night calls, claiming to be from his trousers, relating, in a falsetto, northern accent, the various risque adventures he was enjoying with his new master.



All his life, Waterhouse was a heavy drinker (which is not the same as being an alcoholic). No matter how riotous the night before had been, each morning he was at the typewriter. He often claimed that God had blessed him with the gift of the delayed hangover, one that kicked in only when he had done his day's work. Once a heavy smoker, he quit, but loathed non-smoking fanatics.



Waterhouse never talked about his private life and rarely gave interviews. Despite his considerable income, he lived in modest circumstances, shunning a Mayfair address for Earls Court. His homes were always elegantly furnished, but on the small side, and he bought his clothes at Marks & Spencer.





In the 1960s, after the appearance of Billy Liar, he was often classified as an "angry young man". This was not so. He had more in common with JB Priestley than John Braine. Like George Orwell, he had a deep love of England and the English, believing that our green and pleasant land was being traduced by a petty-minded army of bureaucrats. Politically, he was a romantic liberal. He was appointed CBE in 1991.



Waterhouse married Joan Foster, the daughter of the undertaker he had worked for, in 1950, but they divorced in the mid-1960s. His son and one of his daughters survive him. His daughter Jo died in 2001 of a rare heart condition. His second wife was the journalist Stella Bingham, whom he married in 1984 and divorced in 1989, although she continued to look after him.



Had he been asked to choose his own epitaph, I believe that he would have used the words of a writer he revered, Arnold Bennett. At the end of The Card, a character asks of the hero: "What great cause is he identified with? The reply was: "He's identified with the great cause of cheering us all up."



And that's exactly what Waterhouse did – he cheered us up.





• Keith Spencer Waterhouse, writer, born 6 February 1929; died 4 September 2009

[Steve Crook]

name='Freddy']Also a column in the Daily Mail

That's what I meant by "selling out" in my message above

He had a great line as the voice of the people in his column in the Mirror. But then he suddenly changed his politics when he joined the Mail



Steve

[Bendigo]

'Billy Liar' is one of my favourite books and one of the first books (and characters) I discovered that I could truly relate to (though that probably doesn't show me in a flattering light!). I also remember reading 'There is a Happy Land' in one sitting as I was so engrossed in it and found it overwhelmingly evocative and also rather disturbing. RIP Mr Waterhouse - these two books make up for scarring my childhood with Worzel Gummidge...

[wadsy]

A true great! R.I.P Mr Waterhouse.

[Rowdon]

Damn.



I thought he was immortal.

[John Llewellyn Moxey]

A good friend gone. No doubt Willis will be there to greet him.



John

[woody123]

Very sad.I was highly influenced by his excellent Mirror column when I did the main essay for my Enlish Lang.O Level and came away with an A grade,so thanks for the inspiration sir.

[David Brent]

I also remember his excellent column in the Mirror.



Cannot say I have read any of his books but I'll try and check them out.



Yet another sad passing.



Dave.

[julian_craster]

From The Times

September 5, 2009

Keith Waterhouse: journalist, novelist, playwright and grammarian | Times Online Obituary



Keith Waterhouse: journalist, novelist, playwright and grammarian

Waterhouse failed to get into grammar school and left full-time education at 14, but was nevertheless determined to become a writer. His second book, Billy Liar, emancipated him from poverty

Keith Waterhouse was one of the most versatile writers of his day. He was also among the most prolific. He was equally at home whether he was writing for newspapers and magazines, producing his numerous books or contributing to the stage, the cinema and television.



He produced 16 novels, including the spectacularly successful Billy Liar (1959), which was to reappear as play, film and musical and redeem him from the impecunious condition of his early years. He also wrote such screenplays (with Willis Hall) as Whistle Down the Wind, A Kind of Loving and Lock Up Your Daughters; numerous plays including the long-running Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell and (again with Hall) the children’s classic Worzel Gummidge from the novels by Barbara Euphan Todd. He wrote several television films and scripts, including the hugely popular satirical show That Was the Week That Was and its successor The Frost Report in the 1960s, and amid all that activity he found time to produce a host of general books.



He used to say that if he fell on hard times he would go into partnership with Hall, his fellow Yorkshireman and frequent collaborator. They would buy a van, paint on it “Waterhouse and Hall: Words Supplied”, and tour the streets looking for customers. He knew the two of them could turn their hands to almost anything in the writing way.



Waterhouse feared hard times because he had experienced them. His father sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow in Leeds — Waterhouse, with his obsession for words, always insisted on describing him correctly as a costermonger — and there was little money to spare for a large family.



This meant that Waterhouse did not progress meaningfully beyond elementary education, though his brief and largely barren years at a secondary modern school, after he had failed to get into the local grammar, were redeemed in some measure by a teacher who saw something in him and encouraged him to read.



Some members of his generation remained bitter, he said, because they failed to get to university. One of the few things he was bitter about was that with his background he failed even to achieve grammar school.



Memories of his childhood — and of his early days as a journalist in London, when he knew actual hunger — were the reason why he never seemed to feel secure, even when his vast output and considerable royalties should have assured him that he would never lack money again. They almost certainly prompted his compulsive writing and his frequently expressed dread of writer’s block.



Keith Spencer Waterhouse was born the son of Ernest and Elsie Waterhouse in 1929, one of a family of four children living in a humble back-to-back in south Leeds. While his father sold produce door to door, his mother worked as a cleaning lady. Yet, especially after his father’s death when he was still a child, she encouraged her youngest son to stick to his books, hoping that he would win a scholarship to the local Cockburn High School. But he failed the 11-plus exam and had to be content with the vastly inferior Osmondthorpe secondary modern.



Nevertheless, he decided at an early stage that he wanted to become a professional writer, having been introduced by one inspirational teacher to the works of such humorists as Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. But this ambition had to be deferred when he left school at 14. He had various jobs, as unsatisfying to him as he was unsatisfactory to his employers. He helped to collect rents and at one point was doing something vaguely clerical for an undertaker. These experiences provided much of the background for Billy Liar, his second and most popular novel. (His first, There is a Happy Land, 1957, had been well received, and its success encouraged him to keep writing fiction.) Billy Liar also proved to be his most productive, thoroughly emancipating him from the poverty that had always been his dread. He turned it first into a play and then into a film with Willis Hall and eventually, with typical industry, converted it into a musical. It subsequently became a television series.



Journalism provided a way out from the undertaker. After doing his National Service with the RAF he became a reporter for the Yorkshire Post but was soon on his way to London. His first success there came in 1952 when he was hired as a feature writer on the Daily Mirror, the paper with which he was to be associated for much of his working life. He always regarded Hugh Cudlipp’s Daily Mirror as his ideal paper — populist, irreverent, politically to the left, socially conscious, and as literate as it is possible for any mass-circulation tabloid newspaper to be.



He progressed to becoming a leader writer, left the paper to concentrate on writing books, and returned in 1970 to what he regarded as his journalistic home. He remained with the Mirror for another 16 years, writing two columns every week and contributing to some of its most successful shock issues. Then, with the Mirror acquiring a new publisher, Robert Maxwell, and what he felt was a new atmosphere, he left in 1986 to join the Daily Mail. The editor of the Mirror at the time said he thought the paper would not miss Waterhouse. He was wrong. The Mirror missed Waterhouse, and Waterhouse missed the Mirror. But to the Mail he was now committed and his twice-weekly column for the paper was tapped out on his ageing typewriter for the next 23 years, latterly onehanded after he broke his right arm in a tumble, until his final retirement from the paper this year.



By that time the tone and content of his columns had moved a long way from those of his early days on the Mirror. The socialist convictions nurtured by his upbringing in the industrial North had been sorely tried by the direction he felt the modern Labour Party was taking, and he came to see its years in Government from the famous electoral victory of 1997 as being rudderless and without conviction.





Always, whether he was on the Mirror or the Mail, the words kept tumbling out. They were good words too. He was Granada’s Columnist of the Year in 1970, the year in which he was also Descriptive Writer of the Year in the IPC Press Awards (now the British Press Awards). He was Columnist of the Year again in 1973 and 1978, and Granada gave him a special Quarter Century Year Award in 1982. In 1996 he won the London Press Club’s coveted Edgar Wallace Trophy and in 2000 television’s What the Papers Say gave him a lifetime achievement award. When, four years later, the quarterly British Journalism Review organised a poll of journalists to establish who wrote the best column in British national newspapers Waterhouse was, at the age of 75, the winner by a street.



In his newspaper articles, as in his more permanent writing, he was scrupulous about syntax. A style book written originally by him for the Daily Mirror in 1980 was developed later into a more general work on written English, Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, and became of use to many outside journalism. It was said that the Cabinet Office recommended it to civil servants to keep alongside their copies of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. His public and long-running campaign against the incorrect use of the apostrophe was as dedicated as it was unsuccessful. He was a hard-working member of the 1987-88 Kingman Committee on the teaching of English language. He once had a discussion about whether you could say that something was “almost unique”. He argued in favour and gave this example: two little green men from Mars.



But it was his versatility for which he will be remembered. He could turn from adapting a play by Eduardo de Filippo to writing another based on the Daily Mirror cartoon character Andy Capp. Few would have seen the possibilities in Worzel Gummidge. Waterhouse not only spotted them but used the old scarecrow for successful productions on both cinema and television screens. Jeffrey Bernard, an old Soho acquaintance known chiefly for his idiosyncratic columns in The Spectator, was another example of how Waterhouse could seize an opportunity. When the column did not appear the magazine would print a brief explanation: “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell.” Waterhouse converted the phrase into a full-length play, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, based on Bernard’s life and character, which had long runs in the West End. It won the Evening Standard Awards Comedy of the Year in 1990. He completed his last play, The Last Page, an elegy on the demise of the Fleet Street village in which he had spent so many convivial hours, this year.



For much of the week Waterhouse had a strict routine, keeping office hours and rewarding himself with the first drink of the day only when all his work had been corrected. Trollope, one of his favourite authors, used to time himself to write 250 words every quarter of an hour. Waterhouse could not quite match this but he was in the Trollope league. Neither believed in waiting for inspiration.



Outside his working hours he was a sociable and engaging companion. He wrote for Punch for many years but in private life he was even funnier than his articles. Lunch seemed to bring out the best of him. When he had a luncheon engagement he often regarded the rest of the day as his own. His book, The Theory and Practice of Lunch, reflected one of his enduring interests, indeed he listed it in Who’s Who as his sole recreation. Frequently the meal would stretch for hour after hour, sometimes ending in the clubs. Although he was a member of the Garrick and the Savile, he enjoyed life more in the clubs of Soho.



He also enjoyed late-night parties at seaside conference hotels. He was serious about politics — he rarely missed a party conference in Britain or a political convention in the United States — but he saw no reason why he should not enjoy politics as much as he enjoyed the other processes of life.



Waterhouse was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed CBE in 1991.



His marriage, in 1984, to Stella Bingham, was dissolved in 1989. He is survived by a son and a daughter from a previous marriage to Joan Foster, which was also dissolved. A daughter predeceased him.



Keith Waterhouse, CBE, journalist, novelist, playwright and grammarian, was born on February 6, 1929. He died on September 4, 2009, aged 80