Campaigner for deaf people was best known for her role as a presenter of "Vision On".


Pat Keysell, who has died aged 83, took her passion for mime and promoted it as a therapeutic and enabling vehicle for disadvantaged people. Her cause's most prominent outlet was the award-winning television programme for deaf and hard of hearing children, Vision On, which she presented in the 1960s and 70s.
Born in Tooting, south London, Keysell grew up in Petts Wood, Kent, and went to school in Orpington. Her father was an accountant. She studied mime at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the 1940s, before leaving England to live abroad. Returning to Britain in 1958, with her marriage having ended and with a young son, she found an administrative post at the BBC.
Keysell became personal assistant to Ursula Eason, deputy head of children's programmes. One of Eason's innovations was the prosaically titled monthly miscellany For Deaf Children, which she created in 1952, a programme on the public service fringes made with input from the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID). Keysell suggested that mime was the perfect expressive art form for a predominantly visual programme and so, in 1960, she formed a repertory company of deaf actors, The Mime Group. Keysell was also part of this troupe, and they performed many playlets over four years.
Despite Keysell's efforts, For Deaf Children remained marginalised and its presentation laborious, with slow sections given over to displaying written captions. The programme was duly revamped as Vision On, taking a new, predominantly speech-free approach. Keysell resigned as a production assistant in the drama department in order to present the new programme as a freelance, for which she would use sign language as well as speech. She mixed her presenting duties with time spent teaching mime in London schools for the RNID.
First aired on 6 March 1964, Vision On was initially fortnightly, but by 1965 was being shown only monthly, a worthy programme, intended mainly – but not exclusively – for deaf children. It was questionable whether it was making significant strides towards integrating deafness and attendant issues into mainstream arenas.
The programme was revamped in 1966, now shown weekly, with the graphic artist Tony Hart presenting alongside Keysell. Hart's art, rendered at lightning speed, gave the show great pace, and also added were innovative, animated inserts and characters, comedy films and wacky music.
While Vision On grew in popularity, Keysell continued other work with, and for, deaf people. In 1968 a Winston Churchill fellowship enabled her to study with the National Theatre of the Deaf in the US, inspiring in her ideas for a similar professional theatre group working in the UK.
At the end of the 1960s, the producer Patrick Dowling and the director Clive Doig made Vision On a free-for-all of madcap comedy, psychedelic art and innovative video effects, inspired by the zany US comedy series Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Keysell made a sensible anchor to the madness but always joined in with the anarchic fun.
The programme's Gallery feature, presenting children's paintings, was inundated with 10,000 submissions a week, and Keysell unwittingly created a classic catchphrase with her weekly reminder to entrants: "We're sorry we can't return any of your pictures, but there is a prize for those that are shown." Significantly, her sign language appeared merely to be another aspect of Vision On's eclectic style, finally succeeding in promoting deaf awareness and integration in the way that For Deaf Children had hoped to achieve.
In 1972 Vision On won the Prix Jeunesse and then a Bafta for best specialised series. But to the dismay of young viewers, it failed to return after its 1976 series. Fearing that it was running out of ideas, Dowling replaced it with the Tony Hart vehicle Take Hart in 1977. The deafness element – and Keysell herself – were absent from the new programme.
Keysell decamped to ITV and Yorkshire Television to adapt and produce two series of plays for children based on folk stories from around the world, Under the Same Sun (1978-79). Away from the cameras, she pursued her passion for mime, writing three books on the subject, Motives for Mime (1975), Mime Themes and Motifs (1980) and Mime Over Matter (1990). Despite her considerable knowledge, she still struggled to sum up the discipline, saying in 1993: "It is still very difficult to say what mime is."
Keysell had helped to establish the National Deaf Children's Society's annual drama festival and been the driving force in setting up the British Theatre of the Deaf in the early 1970s. By 1974, the theatre was a professional touring company, supported by Equity and the Arts Council, with many of its ranks drawn from Keysell's mime group of the 1960s. Keysell left in 1977 to pursue other community projects involving mime and its capacity for enabling disadvantaged people.
She toured her own Compass Storytelling shows, mixing speech and signing, studied storytelling as a healing art at Emerson college and MindFields college, both in East Sussex, and taught in institutions working variously with deaf, blind and elderly people, and those with other disabilities.
Keysell ended her career at Compass Community Arts in Eastbourne, promoting arts for disadvantaged people from 1996, before standing down from its day-to-day running in 2006 and finally retiring in May 2009. Then she moved to Italy, where she died. She is survived by her son, Michael.
• Patricia Keysell, broadcaster, actor and campaigner, born 7 June 1926; died 31 October 2009


By:- Alistair McGown.
Source:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/dec/18/pat-keysell-obituary