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