For most viewers, directors of television comedy are little more than a name flashing past on the end credits. Bob Spiers, however, deserves to be remembered as one of the best in the field, bringing to the job a special creativity that greatly enhanced a string of landmark shows.

His credits ranged from Dad’s Army to Fawlty Towers and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. He had a special rapport with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, two of the most successful comedians of the past twenty years. Spiers worked with them both as a duo, and on their separate projects.

Some of his finest work was on Saunders’s outrageously funny Absolutely Fabulous, starring Saunders, Joanna Lumley and June Whitfield. Spiers directed all the episodes from the beginning in 1992.

Spiers was modest about his contribution, declaring that he worked on instinct and had no idea what made a good comedy script, except that he knew one when he saw one. He also gave most of the credit to the writers: “It’s there in the scripts. I’m in safe hands. I simply have to bring it out.”

It was left to others to pinpoint Spiers’s qualities. The writer Howard Schuman, who worked with Spiers on the Channel 4 comedy drama, Up Line, said: “He’s incredibly visual. His camera moves. The editing, design and pace is impeccable.” Spiers himself conceded that the camera must be more than a passive observer: “It should push, move, participate.”

Jon Plowman, a former BBC head of comedy, said Spiers had a brilliant eye for the look of a show but “perhaps his greatest skill was in allowing artists to give their best and giving them the confidence that no idea was too strange and no angle too tricky”.

Born in Glasgow in 1945, Spiers moved to London as a teenager and attended Southgate College. Here he discovered a talent for acting that he later developed in amateur companies. He joined the BBC in 1970 and became an assistant floor manager, working on the Saturday variety series Seaside Special and with performers such as Cilla Black and Pan’s People.

But his main career would be in comedy. He had been a floor manager on the Home Guard sitcom, Dad’s Army, and moved up to become production assistant to the show’s co-writer and producer, David Croft. In this capacity he worked on Dad’s Army from the sixth series in 1973. By the final series, transmitted in 1977, he had been promoted to director, responsible for all but one of the six episodes.

Spiers directed other Croft sitcoms, such as It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, which starred Windsor Davies as a tough minded sergeant-major among a squad of army entertainers in a Far East setting, and Are You Being Served? — which gave John Inman his “I’m Free” catchphrase. In 1979 he was recruited for the second series of Fawlty Towers, starring John Cleese as the manic hotel proprietor. While most of the public credit went to the meticulous scripts by Cleese and Connie Booth, the pace and timing owed much to Spiers’s skilled input that won him a Bafta award.

In 1980 Spiers left the BBC staff to freelance. He became increasingly associated with more boisterous and anarchic humour of a new generation of comedians, notably those of The Goodies and The Comic Strip Presents, the standard-bearers for so-called alternative comedy, The Comic Strip regulars included French and Saunders and also Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson for whom Spiers directed episodes of their show, Bottom.

He became a regular collaborator on the French and Saunders sketch show, particularly relishing their parodies of pop stars and movies, and worked with French on the comedy-thriller series, Murder Most Horrid, in which she played a different character in each episode. But with Absolutely Fabulous, which derived from a French and Saunders sketch that Spiers had directed, he was at his peak and it brought him a second Bafta.

Joanna Lumley, along with Saunders, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks and June Whitfield, made up the show’s all-female cast. Spiers was revealed as having a particular empathy with women. “He likes women,” Lumley said. “He likes women for what they are. Some directors don’t.”

Spiers was equally at home with shows, such as those featuring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which depended on narrowly worked wit rather than broad humour. He was the principal director and a strong influence on Steven Moffat’s ITV children’s drama, Press Gang, and directed Moffat’s later adult comedy, Joking Apart, which dealt with the painful aftermath of a divorce.

Spiers’s occasional cinema work included Spice World (1997), which was built around one of the biggest acts in pop music at the time, the Spice Girls. The film was derided by the critics but it was a lively and unpretentious piece that successfully tapped into the group’s huge fan base. In Hollywood Spiers made That Darn Cat for Disney but it was a poor remake of a much better 1965 film.

In 1990 he directed Ben Elton’s first stage play, Gasping, a satire on big business and the media, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Spiers’ wife, Annie, who had a distinguished career in her own right as a makeup designer in film and television, died in 2007. He is survived by his two daughters.

Bob Spiers, television comedy director, was born on September 27, 1945. He died after a long illness on December 8, 2008, aged 63