Bob Monkhouse

The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse review

The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse not only shows Bob as a comic genius; but as an intelligent archivist who had the foresight to preserve comedy material that would be of historical interest to future generations.

Throughout his career Bob Monkhouse was routinely dismissed as a slick, shallow, egregious TV game-show host. But he was also an educated, highly intelligent man with an almost frighteningly technical approach to comedy, who throughout his life kept notebooks in which he deconstructed other people's gags to find out what made them work. After he died in 2003, the existence of his enormous video archive of 50,000 VHS tapes and 400 film prints became public knowledge. Monkhouse was an obsessive taper of TV and radio shows for decades; he had video recorders at home years and years before they were commonplace. His treasure trove, examined in detail in this fascinating biography, is a TV and film historian's dream. The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse also paints a vivid picture of a complicated man who, whether you liked him or not, was a consummate performer dogged by the fear of failure.

Bob Monkhouse, comedian and quiz show host, once confided to the comic writer Barry Cryer that he thought of himself as the "Marmite man... you either like me or can't stand me". With the help of archive footage and contributions from friends and family, this profile tells the story of the private face of this outwardly slick operator, one that shows him to be an obsessive collector and a performer with a fear of failure. He collected comedy videos, records, whisky glasses and matchboxes, and also kept everything related to his own career, which may be linked to the suggestion that he never felt accepted by his peers. Perhaps he was trying to prove something, but his public image can't have helped: in 1977 he was voted both the most loved and the most hated in a poll of TV stars.

The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse

The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse was timely reminder of a much-missed star.

The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse review

This excellent documentary shed light on his whole career, and gave a few more clues to understanding his complex personality.

The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse

We saw interview footage of him stressing that his public performing persona was a deliberate construct that bore no relation to the inner Monkhouse.

ITV has been raiding the archives this summer more often than Katie Price is raiding the Fake Bake.

You can't switch on the channel without a celebration of the good old days. Not that we mind - a genial trip down memory lane is often preferable to a cop show repeat or yet another telly cooking competition.

And there's no one we'd rather remember from times gone by than Bob Monkhouse, one of our best-loved showmen, who kept us entertained for half a century right up until his death in 2003. It means that there's no shortage of clips from his old shows like The Golden Shot and Opportunity Knocks, and from his stand-up routines. Here, his showbiz friends and family members look back at Bob's great contribution to the British showbiz scene.

The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse Review

Bob Monkhouse, as we're repeatedly told at the beginning of this unlikely homage, is "one of the most prolific entertainers", "a master of all trades", "the quintessential quiz show presenter"...and so it goes on. A more accurate assessment is provided by Barry Cryer who compares the permatanned presenter to Marmite.

This brilliant documentary, part of a new series from ITV, is dedicated to whip smart comedian Bob Monkhouse, a legendary entertainer and one of the nation's favourite personalities. With a mixture of archive footage alongside fond interviews with friends and family it's a fitting tribute that looks back at both the man and his glittering career.

Modern comedy's unlikely hero: Bob Monkhouse

Ahead of an ITV tribute, we look at how today's comics owe much to a master joke-teller.