Keith Spencer Waterhouse CBE (6 February 1929 – 4 September 2009[1]) was a British novelist and newspaper columnist and the writer of many television series.
His credits, many with lifelong friend and collaborator Willis Hall, include satires such as That Was The Week That Was, BBC-3 and The Frost Report during the 1960s; the book for the 1975 musical The Card; Budgie; Worzel Gummidge; and Andy Capp (an adaptation of the comic strip).
[2] Without receiving screen credit, Waterhouse and Hall claimed to have extensively rewritten the script for Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966).
[5] Subsequently, he returned as a columnist, initially in the Mirror Magazine, moving to the main newspaper on 22 June 1970,[6] on Mondays, and extending to Thursdays from 16 July 1970.
He fought long crusades to highlight what he perceived to be a decline in the standards of modern English; for example, he founded the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe, whose members attempt to stem the tide of such solecisms as "potatoe's" and "pound's of apple's and orange's" in greengrocers' shops.