HARRY THOMPSON produced some of the most popular television comedy shows of recent years.

He was the founding producer and co-writer of Have I Got News For You, and he produced and wrote for shows such as Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, They Think It’s All Over, Harry Enfield and Chums, The 11 O’Clock Show, Da Ali G Show, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Monkey Dust.

He was, acccording to the BBC One controller, Peter Fincham, “that rarity in television – the talented, single-minded, subversive, unassimilated maverick . . . He had no time for companies, corporations or executives. His natural urge was always to satirise and debunk.”

Lung cancer, diagnosed in April, cut short a fount of creativity that had just produced a novel, The Thing of Darkness, which was included in the longlist for the 2005 Booker Prize.

The book relates the journey to Patagonia of Charles Darwin and Captain Fitzroy. When asked by a journalist how, as a non-smoking, sports-playing 45-year-old he managed to contract lung cancer, Thompson quoted the great naturalist. This is, after all “a merciless world of random cruelty”.

Thompson grew up in Islington, North London, where one of his early memories was editing the class newspaper for Canonbury Primary School. “I rejected every submission by every contributor who wasn’t me,” he recalled. At 10 he went to Highgate School, “a prep school exactly like the Bunter books, terrifying: scary masters in black gowns and pupils who spoke in Latin slang.” Here, too, he took to publishing. Ratz, a schoolboy’s Private Eye, was banned by his headmaster for its thirst for school scandal.

Its successor, Ripping Fun, grew into the Ripping Fun Review. Many of the sketch ideas of the show appeared, to Thompson’s chagrin, a year later in Terry Jones’s and Michael Palin’s television series, Ripping Yarns.

He then went up to Brasenose College, Oxford. He edited Cherwell — “By this time, I was sufficiently mature to reject all contributions which were by me” — and took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe. It attracted audiences of 200, impressive for a student production. Cricket — the Captain Scott XI — took up a lot of his time and limited his academic success. “Before our finals, we played eight games in 11 days,” he recalled.

“Every single person got a third, except for one man sent down before the exams for not paying his bar bill.”

Thompson had ideas, and success, in abundance. He was part of what outsiders termed the “Oxbridge coterie” that produced and starred in much of Britain’s new comedy in the early 1990s. He began modestly enough, producing The News Quiz for Radio Four, a show that translated easily into Have I Got News For You in 1990 — featuring his Oxford peer Ian Hislop, and Paul Merton. In 1994 Thompson wrote the biography of Hislop’s predecessor at Private Eye — Richard Ingrams: Lord of the Gnomes. Thompson also wrote biographies of Hergé, the creator of the Tintin books, and of his comedy hero, Peter Cook.

With HIGNFY, Thompson built a reputation for an irreverant, often merciless treatment of celebrity guests. Paula Yates, appearing in a tiara, was reduced almost to tears, and Roy Hattersley — after cancelling at short notice for the third time — had his spot taken by a tub of lard. Thompson told the press: “We were looking for someone with the same wit, sparkle and political influence as Hattersley. The lard was a natural choice. The other advantage in Roy not turning up is that we could take the windscreen wipers off the cameras.”

Thompson was similarly stern when Paul Gascoigne withdrew from his agreement to appear on They Think It’s All Over three times, banning him from any future appearance.

The HIGNFY format, powered by egotistical one-upmanship and personal point-scoring between its main players, was used for the sports quiz They Think It’s All Over. Thompson left HIGNFY to help to develop the latter show in the mid-1990s. It was based on the Radio 5 panel game by Bill Matthews and Simon Bullivant, and took the ideas established by the BBC’s superannuated A Question of Sport while bending them to absurdity. It had the same bantering approach as Thompson’s earlier work, with many of the jokes at the expense of David Gower and Gary Lineker, and rounds such as “excuses” and “feel the sportsman”.