Billy Liar creator Keith dies in sleep.

AUTHOR, journalist and playwright Keith Waterhouse died "quietly in his sleep" at the age of 80 yesterday.

The prolific writer, whose most famous work was Billy Liar, which was made into a film starring Tom Courtenay, died at his home in London.

A brief statement issued on his family's behalf said simply: "Keith Waterhouse, aged 80, died quietly in his sleep this morning."

Waterhouse also wrote screenplays including Whistle Down the Wind and plays such as Jeffrey Barnard is Unwell.

He was also a journalist who helped to create the satirical 1960s TV series That Was the Week That Was . Waterhouse frequently railed against declining standards of English.

He founded the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe, which attacked poor punctuation on shopkeepers' signs and in public places.

Waterhouse was writing lively newspaper columns at least twice a week well into his 70s, often grumbling about modern life and in particular political correctness, and hankering after the days of his youth on a Leeds council estate.

Keith Spencer Waterhouse was born in a back-to-back house in Hunslet, Leeds, on February 6 1929.

His father, a heavy-drinking costermonger, died when he was three, leaving a total estate of a brown suit ... and a halfpenny in the pocket.

But Waterhouse went on to hit the heights in Fleet Street and to see his name in lights outside theatres across the world.

And the twice-divorced writer made the headlines himself in a less welcome manner in 1994.

One of his secretaries, referred to in his columns as his "flamehaired factotum", gave an interview about his view of a suitable lunch.

She claimed: "At 1pm he would expect smoked salmon sandwiches and a bottle of champagne, and I had to put on my black basque, suspenders and strippogram gear."

Her claim for unfair dismissal was settled out of court.

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STAR: Courtenay PROLIFIC: Waterhouse