Carry On creator Peter Rogers, 1914-2009

Peter Rogers, who has died aged 95, was the creator and producer of "the most successful and long-lasting comedy series in the history of British films", said the Times. For 21 years, the Carry On films provided a feast of groan-inducing puns (Kenneth Williams, as Caesar, crying, "Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!"), lavatory humour, and saucy slapstick, such as the sight of Barbara Windsor's bra flying off and landing on a fitness instructor's face.

For his own part, Rogers tended to be dismissive of his achievement. He quite enjoyed the series, he said, but preferred vintage Punch cartoons. When the Barbican ran a retrospective of all 30 Carry On films in 1995, by which time they were regarded as cult classics, Rogers was asked if he was planning to sit through them. "What a punishment," he replied with a smile. "Even the Marquis de Sade couldn't have devised a worse torture."

Peter Rogers was born into a middle-class family in Kent in 1914. Educated at King's School in Rochester, he went on to work as a reporter, before moving into radio and then film. His career as a writer and producer was unremarkable until 1957, when he received a serious script about a pair of ballet dancers in the army. Rogers had the idea of turning it into an innuendo-laden farce and renamed it Carry On Sergeant. It made No 3 at the British box office in 1958, its success all the more surprising as it was made on a shoestring.

Throughout the slew of sequels, which differed little except in setting, Rogers was "famously tight" with his cast, said the Daily Telegraph. Even stars such as Williams and Sid James got a flat fee of £5,000, while Rogers himself took home £15,000 and a share of the profits.

He refused to cough up for expensive locations ("A tree is a tree anywhere," he once remarked, "and it's only funny if someone falls out of it"). Carry On Cowboy (1966) was shot on Chobham Common. When it began to snow during the filming of Carry On Camping (1969), Rogers suggested they pass it off as blossom. As mores became more permissive in the Seventies, the series necessarily became more risque - and less funny.

After the "lamentable" Carry On Emmannuelle (1978), it was brought to an end. Rogers' later years were darkened by personal bankruptcy in 1994, after he invested in a TV company that failed to win a franchise. He was predeceased by his wife, Betty, in 1999. ·