Allan McKeown: Television and theatre producer behind such enduring hits as 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' and 'Shine on Harvey Moon'

McKeown and his wife Tracey Ullman in 2009: they made a formidable team in American television (Getty Images)

Tony Garnett once commented that "theatre is a writer's medium, film is a director's medium, and television is a producer's medium."

But however frustrated one can be at the retarding role of the writer in television, the career of the unswerving Allan McKeown is a reminder that even today a producer with enough good taste and energy and the wit to allow writers to be the prime creative forces on a project can on occasion still make the small screen, in Dennis Potter's words, "the only medium that counts." McKeown co-created one of the first independent production companies in Britain, Witzend Productions, truly a fun factory of 1980s entertainment, but more importantly, he was a pioneer of what was then still a rare form in television, "comedy-drama".

His two finest productions, Shine on Harvey Moon and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, remain high watermarks of '80s drama. They were both sagas of working-class struggle in tough times, respectively postwar London and Thatcher's Britain, their laughs, though liberally garnished with fiendish one-liners, coming chiefly from beautifully crafted characters that were astutely cast. Underneath the uproarious squabbles and bitter misfortunes both series were stories of the Blitz spirit, very English sagas of camaraderie and of making the best of the hand life deals us.

John Allan McKeown was a shrewd operator from the start, being born in London in 1946 and therefore coming of age at exactly the right time to hit the ground running in the 1960s and exemplify Twiggy's description of the era as "a time when ordinary people can do extraordinary things." The son of a bricklayer, after attending Beal Grammar School in Ilford he joined Vidal Sassoon as an apprentice ladies' hairdresser at the fabled Bond Street salon at a time when such an occupation was becoming as cool as that of a pop singer or a fashion photographer. (It was Vidal who first called him by his middle name, as he already had another John on his staff.) By 1966 Mckeown was running his own salon, and handling the hair of Burton and Taylor, the Beatles and even Jean Shrimpton. He then worked as a stylist on a great run of movies beginning with Lindsay Anderson's anarchic If... (1968).

By the time he styled Michael Caine's hair for Get Carter (1971) he was also making television commercials as a member of the James Garrett agency, of which he became managing director a year later. He was inexhaustible, and at the end of the 1970s he was ready to move into drama, with characteristic confidence forming Witzend with writers Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement.

Witzend was one of the first independent television production companies in Britain and one of the best. A film version of the two writers' sitcom Porridge (1980) wasn't a touch on the series, but was a nursery slope to better things, starting with Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran's Shine on Harvey Moon (1982-85).

The postwar saga of a demobbed RAF clerk and failed footballer back in Blighty to find his flighty wife has been "the toast of the allied forces – done both sides", kicked off as a half-hour series before relaxing into hour-long episodes that fused comedy and drama gorgeously and allowed room to tell stories beyond the vocabulary of the traditional sitcom. It handled challenging subjects such as homosexuality and Holocaust survivors with commendable compassion and not a trace of sentimentality; its trademark quickfire duologues are inconceivable now that television drama is barely afforded rehearsal time. In Philip Purser's words, Shine on Harvey Moon "captured the austerity and optimism of postwar Britain far better than many a more pretentious exercise".

Realising they were on to something with the format, their next project saw La Frenais and Clement in the writing chairs again, developing an idea about English bricklayers on the lump in Germany. Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983), which inherited Harvey Moon's Friday night slot, captured exactly a mood of desperation and defiance in early '80s Britain, but as well as some splendid culture clash comedy (between Geordie and Cockney as much as between English and German), had room for tender depictions of marital collapse, homesickness and heartbreak. None of the subsequent rather self-aware sequels ever came close to the magical original.

McKeown's Midas touch was unfailing for the next few years. In two very different keys came the bucolic whimsy of Lovejoy (1986) and the raucous Birds of a Feather (1989), which when put together had their home county of Essex pretty sewn up. In 1986 Witzend bought Selec TV, which McKeown sold his stake in to Pearson in 1996 for £51 million. The hits kept coming, with the nostalgic Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-99) and gastronomic gumshoe romp Pie in the Sky (1994-96), until McKeown moved to the US with his wife, the comedienne Tracey Ullman. There he produced numerous shows for her including the eight-time Emmy winning Tracey Takes On (1996-99) for HBO.

The pair went from strength to strength in the US, but McKeown still found time to smash boldly into theatre production with Jerry Springer: The Opera for the National Theatre in 2003 and Lennon at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York in 2005.

It was a commendably industrious and creative career that despite being populated by so many deserving hits, was cut short way too soon by cancer.

SIMON FARQUHAR

John Allan McKeown, television and theatre producer: born London 21 May 1946; married 1983 Tracey Ullman (one son, one daughter); died Los Angeles 24 December 2013.