Bob Monkhouse

This perception changed late in Monkhouse's career, when his brilliance as a stand-up comedian - he had instant recall of hundreds of thousands of one-liners - led to a reappraisal of his talents. Offstage, as interviewers discovered, Monkhouse possessed a warm intelligence and self-awareness that eluded many of his peers. "By the age of 28," he once said, "it was clear to me that I had no talent. What I had was a certain facility, that was all." It was a perceptive, if overly harsh, judgment.

Just as the tan, though regularly topped up in Barbados, was mostly make-up needed to disguise a severe pigmentation disorder - he suffered from vitiligo, which made him, beneath his underpants, "a riot of polka dots and moonbeams" - Monkhouse's smug fluency masked considerable technical skill and dedicated preparation; he was devastated when two books containing years of material were stolen in 1995. (They were recovered 18 months later.)

In fact, he was a remarkably brilliant gag writer. One of his best lines -"They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian . . . they're not laughing now" - demonstrated genuine wit; he was equally adept at wife and mother-in-law jokes, the stock-in-trade of the stand-up: "I'd never be unfaithful to my wife - I love my house too much." He thought nothing of polishing a joke for two years in order to get it right and, having perfected it, never tired of its delivery: "If the gag is such a nifty piece of work, you can't wait to do it every night, you know."

As he grew older he felt able self-consciously to parody the remorselessly smarmy public persona he had cultivated. Submerged beneath the over-polished quips were genuine invention and the gifts of a raconteur, unexpectedly realised in a superb and unsparing autobiography, Crying With Laughter (1994). Although his air of glib self-satisfaction denied him the public affection reserved for the likes of Les Dawson or Frankie Howerd (whose unwelcome advances he recalled in his memoirs) his advice was keenly sought by a generation of younger performers.

Robert Alan Monkhouse was born at Beckenham, Kent, on June 1 1928. His grandfather was a custard powder tycoon whose death the nine-year-old Bob took so hard that he was unable to speak for three months. His subsequent volubility concealed a resultant and lifelong nervous stammer. The family firm, Monk and Glass, held little appeal for the young boy. "I was brought up in an atmosphere of 'Some day son, all this custard will be yours'," he said. "But I didn't like the feeling of so much security and the prospect of so much cornflour."

He was a lonely, fat child who felt unloved by his parents and consoled himself by writing jokes. At Dulwich College, where he covered the blackboards with cartoons and was known as "The Oil", because of his predilection for hair cream, he began selling gags to children's comics, including The Beano and The Dandy, and comedians such as Max Miller. Soon he was knocking out racy pulp novels for the troops under names such as Ramon Le Croix.

On leaving school at 17 he briefly joined Gaumont-British Films as an animator, and worked briefly with the cartoonist David Low, before concentrating on his own stage patter. He opened an office in Penge, commissioning other writers and artists and paying them by postal order. In order to entertain the local Young Communists he had to join the Party - though he gave his name as Colney Hatch, after the lunatic asylum. When he was called up for National Service in the RAF in 1946 his enterprises had already made him more than £20,000.

By 1948 he had conned his way into an audition for the BBC, getting an RAF neurologist, for whom he acted as secretary, to sign, unread, a letter that attested to Corporal Monkhouse's need for therapy in the form of a studio test. Within a few weeks he was, with Terry Scott, the BBC's first contracted comedian. Graduating rapidly to top billing, Monkhouse maintained a ferocious rate of work throughout the next two decades.

He and his writing partner Denis Goodwin wrote up to seven radio scripts a week, as well as material for Bob Hope and Dean Martin. On radio Monkhouse appeared in Calling All Forces with Diana Dors and on television as the host of, amongst others, Candid Camera; Mad Movies and For Love or Money.

He continued to be a mainstay of radio comedy for decades, and starred in several, mostly forgettable, films, including the first of the Carry On series and Dentist in the Chair. He also appeared on stage in Cole Porter's Aladdin, Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn and The Boys From Syracuse by Rodgers and Hart. New routines were relentlessly polished on the cabaret circuit.

Yet by 1967 his career had stalled as he fell out of favour with the BBC. Then, on safari in South Africa, he received a cable asking him to compere the next Sunday Night at the London Palladium for ITV. Booked for one edition only, Monkhouse's vigorous invention revived the ailing show and saw his contract extended weekly 13 times. It led in 1967 to perhaps his best-known role, as host of The Golden Shot, a hugely popular if ludicrous show in which contestants directed by telephone a blindfolded crossbowman to score a bullseye. In 1972, Monkhouse was quietly replaced after too blatantly endorsing a new razor on the programme.

The genially bland persona he had cultivated made him the obvious choice for a welter of subsequent game shows, among them Family Fortunes, Celebrity Squares, Bob's Full House, Bob's Your Uncle and a revival of Opportunity Knocks. He presented the first National Lottery shows, and continued as the frontman of Wipeout, a pedestrian daytime quiz which nonetheless received good audience figures because of his skill as a host, until not long before his death.

Each made little demand of his talents while offering him easy scope for well-rehearsed quips. He remained amongst the highest paid television entertainers into the mid-1990s, betraying a slight self-loathing with a favourite remark: "I'm a hard man to ignore, but well worth the effort."

Yet beneath the outward success ran a broad seam of pain and potential disaster. A comedy club he opened in Newcastle in 1969 (after, he later claimed, being hypnotised by the conman Ron Markham) nearly bankrupted him when Markham absconded with its funds. His collection of early films, probably the finest in private hands in the country, saw him tried but acquitted in 1979 of conspiracy to defraud film distributors.

Monkhouse had other collections: matchbooks, early comic strips and, bizarrely, an entire room devoted to tinned goods. The last was abandoned when the tins began to explode. Interviewers, notably Anthony Clare in a 1992 episode of his radio programme In the Psychiatrist's Chair, during which Monkhouse broke down at the suggestion that his mother's possessiveness indicated her love for him, often drew upon such eccentricities in attempting to explain his character.

Monkhouse himself had a fairly straightforward explanation. "The fact is that I've made light of serious things because I can't do anything else," he admitted last year. After being rehabilitated as a "Grand Old Man" of British comedy, he gave a number of confessional television and newspaper interviews, in order, he claimed, to say: "Here I am. This is actually me. If you're going to go on disliking me, I'm giving you the right reason for it."

A particular sadness was his first marriage in 1949, to a Belfast WRAF, Elizabeth. Disapproving of his career, his mother threatened to cut him off without a penny and advised Elizabeth to turn her attentions instead to his older brother, an accountant. She attended the wedding in black. Despite four premature births and his first son being born with cerebral palsy, Monkhouse and his mother did not speak again for 20 years, though they were reconciled shortly before her death.

Mild tabloid hysteria accompanied the revelation in Crying With Laughter that he had also been a serial philanderer. The many he was briefly entangled with included a transvestite named Mona and Diana Dors, whose husband, the book alleged, put out a contract on Monkhouse's life and tried to blind him with a razor. "I used to chase women, but I had to work at it," he said. "I never had anyone throwing themselves at me." But, Monkhouse maintained, not all the chasing was on his side. As well as Howerd, he also found himself repelling advances from Tyrone Power.

A second book of memoirs, Over the Limit, appeared in 1999, and during Monkhouse's last years he received recognition from younger comedians such as Frank Skinner and Stephen Fry. He was appointed OBE in 1993, presented The Big Breakfast for a week, hijacked an episode of Have I Got News For You? and said "f***" on Danny Baker's chat show. LWT's An Audience With Bob Monkhouse contained more than the usual quota of celebrities in the stalls. Even so, he never abandoned the round of after-dinner speeches, company conventions and club evenings on which his career had been founded.

Monkhouse was a devotee of alternative medicine, taking about 30 vitamin and herbal tablets a day. He also maintained heroic levels of alcohol consumption, usually packing away two bottles of wine and half a bottle of malt whisky a day.

He dealt bravely with the inoperable prostate cancer with which he was diagnosed in 2001, and never abandoned the opportunity to crack jokes. "I still enjoy sex at 74," he said last year. "I live at 75, so it's not far to go."

His first marriage was dissolved in 1971. Their eldest son, Gary, died in 1993; another son, Simon, became estranged from his father and died in 2001 from a heroin overdose.

Monkhouse married his former secretary, Jackie Harding, in 1973. She survives him, with his adopted daughter, Abigail, from his first marriage. His response to the news of her first pregnancy was to make the diary entry: "Our first grandchild is on the way. I tell them that this means more than the joy of grandparenthood to me - it means a whole new subject for comedy material. No one laughs."

Published December 30 2003