Old-style vaudevillian who traded in polite campery

Kit Hesketh-Harvey was one of those surprisingly rare performers whose personality was the same on stage as off.

- DAVID LISTER

When I saw him in the many revues he would write and perform, the audience basked in his humour and genuine warmth. He was an old-style vaudevillian. That was allied to a hinterland of knowledge and enthusiasm for the UK's great stage names, be it Noel Coward in Cowardy Custard, Putting it Together celebrating Stephen Sondheim, or Tomfoolery that delighted in the satirical wit of the now somewhat out-of-fashion Tom Lehrer.

But Hesketh-Harvey was much more than a performer with a stage presence that was infectious in its bonhomie. He can boast of launching Hugh Grant's career, with his script for the film Maurice, an adaptation of the EM Forster novel, perhaps the most sensitive and thought-provoking of all the Merchant-Ivory films. And he was something of an unsung hero in his work on the scripts of The Vicar of Dibley. He also wrote Full Throttle for Rowan Atkinson.

Hesketh-Harvey was nothing if not eclectic. After scripting Maurice in 1987, he won the Vivian Ellis award for musical theatre writers the following year and went on to study under Sondheim. Probably, most people who saw him on stage will have seen him as one half of Kit and the Widow, his musical-comedy cabaret act. But he also translated and helped develop productions for leading opera companies.