The Stage

Pat Keysell

Published Monday 18 January 2010 at 16:00 by Michael Quinn

As one half of the popular children’s programme Vision On, with the artist Tony Hart, Pat Keysell was a familiar figure on British television during the sixties and seventies.

A mime graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama, her television career began in 1958 as assistant to Ursula Eason, BBC deputy head of children’s television. In 1960, she formed the Mime Group to perform in the long-established monthly programme, For Deaf Children, relaunched four years later as Vision On. A second revamp in 1966 saw Hart appear for the first time alongside Keysell, the pair’s fresh, youthful and colourful approach quickly winning a sizeable audience of hearing children to bolster its target deaf constituency, picking up the Prix Jeunesse and a BAFTA Award.

Keysell used the success of the programme to campaign on hearing-impaired issues, helping to create the National Deaf Children’s Society, establish the British Theatre of the Deaf and work as a mime teacher for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf.

When Vision On was dropped in 1976, she produced two series of plays for children with Yorkshire TV and wrote the first of three books on mime. She regularly toured her Compass Storytelling show, worked widely with disadvantaged groups and had a long association with the Brewery Theatre in Kendall. In 1996, she created Compass Community Arts, remaining its artistic director until 2006, and its Round Robin Theatre Company affiliate in Eastbourne.

Born in Tooting, south London, on June 7, 1926, she spent her retirement in Italy, where she died, aged 83, on October 31. She is survived by her son.