Geoffrey Perkins

Geoffrey Howard Perkins (22 February 1953 – 29 August 2008) was a British comedy producer, writer and performer. 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. He took an early interest in drama in 1970, and he worked with Clive Anderson to write a charity revue called Happy Poison. 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.

Radio career 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.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

quote="The intellectuals compared it to Swift, and the 14-year-olds enjoyed hearing depressed robots clanking around." — — Geoffrey Perkins, on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 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". 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.

Later radio work 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. 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.

Television career Hat Trick

Perkins left the BBC in 1988, to become a director of Hat Trick Productions which is an independent television and radio production company. In this role, he was able to pursue a more hands-on role in the "creative side of programme-making." He also hosted the panel game Don't Quote Me, made by Open Media for Channel 4 in 1990.

In 2006, Harry Enfield was told by Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC One that he was too old to make another comedy sketch series. Enfield approached Geoffrey Perkins with his ideas, which Perkins helped Enfield develop into the first series of Harry and Paul, starring Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. The series, Ruddy Hell! It's Harry & Paul, was broadcast in April 2007.

Death and tributes Perkins died on 29 August 2008. however, a coroner's inquest in April 2009 determined that Perkins had suffered from an undiagnosed case of channelopathies, which caused his heart to stop suddenly. The jury decided that Perkins had probably already died when he fell under the wheels of the lorry and as such the coroner recorded that he died from "natural causes".

On 5 September 2008 the second series of the re-titled Harry and Paul was broadcast, a week after his death. The first episode was dedicated to his memory and instead of the usual closing credits, featured a short tribute to him and concluded with an out-take of Perkins forgetting his lines in a sketch absent from the transmitted series. The recipients of both of the BAFTAs awarded on 27 April 2009 to Harry and Paul for Best Comedy Programme and to The IT Crowd for Best Situation Comedy dedicated their awards to Perkins.