Bruce Forsyth

If Bruce Forsyth is not the world's most famous Bruce, he is certainly the most impersonated and the Bruce who has been on our screens the most since the dawn of TV.

His lengthy career is long overdue for a tribute and The Bruce Forsyth Story: From The Palladium To The Palace (Sunday, Channel 5) was a worthy fit.

There aren't too many celebrity biopics three generations of a family can sit down and enjoy, but the length of Bruce's cv is a by-product, really, of his personality.

What drives him is a constant restlessness. When things got too comfortable, he took a dive into something risky.

After years presenting Sunday Night At The London Palladium, he suddenly quit to play seven different parts in a West End musical.

He left the boards for the glories of The Generation Game, then quit that for Bruce Forsyth's Big Night. The critical hammering that show got drove Bruce to an unprecedented piece-to-camera in the final episode.

"We were trying out something new," he said.

"It was a new format, with new ideas."

You could see, as the wider story unfolded, how important this was to his outlook. You win some, you lose some, but you keep trying out something new. That's how you stay on the screen for 60 years.

"Contact is everything," Brucie states, during this run through the Forsyth saga via his talk show appearances. As evinced here, it's that ability to connect with a popular audience, from the Generation Game to Strictly, that's ensured a 70-year career. If his persona's that of a twittering old lady, it clearly hides the skin of a rhino, abetted by a smart self-deprecation and lightning-fast wit. "My real name's Bruce Joseph Forsyth-Johnson," he tells Michael Aspel. "What happened to Johnson?" "Same thing that happened to Joseph."

Pictures: Harry Hill's new beard

Still sporting his signature black frames, Harry Hill appears to have opted for a more rugged style as he grinned for photos alongside Bruce Forsyth at his book launch in London on Thursday.

Miranda Hart's Generation Game 'still up in the air'

BBC bosses have yet to give the nod for the 'modern version' of the 1970s hit show previously hosted by Bruce Forsyth and Jim Davidson.

Jason Manford interview

Jason Manford has revealed he wants a Sir Bruce Forsyth style career path after landing a job hosting Sunday Night At The Palladium.

The Russell Grant extended interview

Russell Grant's career as an entertainer is long as successful. From panto, to sitcoms, to musicals, to serious drama, to Strictly Come Dancing. Sir Bruce Forsyth famously said that Russell 'put's the show into show business.' Martin Walker asked him about his autobiographical Edinburgh Festival Fringe show.

Occasionally you see a sitcom you love so much you want to hug it, slap it on the back and buy it a round of drinks. For people who warmed to last year's pilot for Toast of London, it's that kind of comedy. Now Matt Berry's brilliant creation, a conceited old-school actor called Steven Toast, has been given a series where Berry and co-writer Arthur Mathews can let their disturbing mix of theatreland spoof and surreal bedroom farce run rampant.

From the very first exchange ("I thought you said you were a bee-keeper?" Toast asks a conquest: "No," she replies sweetly, "A beak-keeper - I keep beaks"), the inventive oddities tumble out, notably in the form of Kikini Bamalaam, daughter of the Nigerian ambassador and latest partner of Toast's friend Ed. A botched cosmetic procedure has left her looking (very disturbingly) like a Generation Game Bruce Forsyth.

Toast of London was picked up from Channel 4's comedy pilot season last year. It's a mildly surreal sitcom about a pretentious actor played by Matt Berry (doing that same "cinema advert voiceover" voice he did in The IT Crowd and the much-missed Garth Marenghi's Dark Place - can it be his actual voice?) Berry also co-wrote it with Arthur Mathews, who co-wrote Father Ted and the late 1990s sketch show, Big Train, which launched half of Britain's current comedy actors.

Toast shares that off-kilter sensibility within a more conventional format: its hero goes through the usual sitcom set-ups, but with a disturbed edge.

For instance, when he meets a potential love interest, she's played by Emma Fryer with a manic laugh and demented body language, as if miming a crane. And she's called Susan Random, one of many deliberately odd character names (Clem Fandango, Jemima Gina, Kikini Bamalam). There's also a sudden, brief musical number which flares up intriguingly and a really unsettling Bruce Forsyth lookalike.

But there are two big flaws: Toast himself isn't that interesting a character and there aren't enough actual laughs. This could develop into something weird and wonderful but for now it's just the former.

We've always assumed that, since entering the kingdom of heaven, Les Dawson and Tupac Shakur have become firm friends. But now they have even more in common than they already did. Tupac famously performed, in hologram form, at the 2012 Coachella Festival.

We suspect that a hologrammatic representation of Les Dawson will never be asked to headline a major music festival. But that doesn't mean that the technology can't be applied to the nation's foremost purveyor of mother-in-law jokes. Les was booked to appear on An Audience With... back in 1993. Sadly, he passed away just weeks before recording.

But that hasn't stopped the wilder creative brains at ITV from coming up with this utterly barmy scheme which will see a Dawson hologram bantering with stars including Bruce Forsyth, Cilla Black and Terry Wogan. We are not making this up. To our intense disappointment, no previews were available. But this surely has every chance of being 2013's strangest hour of television.

Les Dawson: An Audience with That Never Was (ITV) was a not-terribly-snappily titled tribute, timed to mark the 20th anniversary of the much-loved comic's death. It told the story of the TV special Dawson was a fortnight away from recording when he died and attempted to recreate it using a 3D projection. The hologram was billed as "staggeringly realistic" and perhaps it was if you were in the same room. On TV, it merely looked like a cut-out image of Dawson wearing an unnaturally bright blue jacket and a low hairline, standing strangely still and occasionally moving jerkily.

Instead this was a glorified clip show. Venerable figures like Bruce Forsyth, Cilla Black and Ken Dodd sat in beige hotel suites, going misty-eyed over their memories. The celebrity audience watching the hologram's performance were noticeably one notch below - more the level of Debbie McGee and Lionel Blair. And those were two of the more familiar faces. Despite the presence of Dawson's widow and daughter, who were visibly moved, this still felt like a macabre cash-in. A tribute to Dawson would have been fine without a shoddy attempt to "bring him back to life".

The show was rescued by Dawson himself, whose wit rang down the decades. He rattled out mother-in-law gags and gurned with that rubbery bulldog face. We heard how he was an accomplished musician and frustrated poet, hence his artfully off-key piano-playing and relish for florid language. Best of all, there were copious clips of his "Cissie Braithwaite and Ada Shufflebotham" routines with Roy Barraclough, the cross-dressed pair gossiping like fishwives and silently mouthing more "delicate" words, before hitching up their ample bosoms. Cissie and Ada really were three-dimensional.