Denis Norden

Eric Sykes, Spike Milligan and the house with comedy value

The birthplace of Doctor Who's Daleks, The Goon Show and Hancock's Half Hour is on the market for £6.5 million.

BBC releases some historic comedy moments

The BBC is making hundreds of clips from its archive available to watch on a new website. Comics featured include Spike Milligan, Pete and Dud, Kenny Everett and Billy Connolly.

Those we have lost in comedy, 2018

It had already been a bad year for comedy industry deaths even before the late-breaking news that legend Dame June Whitfield had died.

Denis Norden: elder statesman of gentle comedy

Denis Norden, who died recently aged 96, epitomised a peculiarly British brand of comedy that emerged from a specific time and place. For some years after the end of World War II, while many young people were still being called up for National Service, a generation of talented actors, musicians and comics who had cut their teeth entertaining the troops, were finding their way onto the stage and the airwaves.

11 Denis Norden anecdotes

'It's hard to make a word processor laugh'

Denis Norden recalls comedy pioneer early years

It is a decade since Denis Norden retired after a long career as a writer and broadcaster. To younger audiences, he's known as the host of It'll Be Alright on the Night, ITV's long-running series of compilations of TV cock-ups. But at 94, he's also perhaps the last survivor of the writers and performers who in the late 1940s reinvented radio comedy.

Every Home Should Have One: DVD review

The humour is adolescent throughout. A movie that ought to have given the increasingly tired-looking Carry On series a run for its money is a curious period piece that captures the ad game well it has it has its brighter moments like the take-offs of Ken Russell, Benny Hill, a Swedish nudist picture and a hell-for-leather Buster Keaton-like fight sequence in the BBC props room. It was ad guru David Ogilvy who said that advertising was 'the best fun you can have with your clothes on'. Every Home Should Have One proves him wrong.

How Denis Norden stumbled upon concentration camp

TV presenter and comedy writer Denis Norden has spoken for the first time about his "accidental" visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Norden, who was serving in the RAF during World War Two, went to the liberated camp in northern Germany to find lighting for a show he was putting on.

He went with fellow performers the late Eric Sykes and Ron Rich and none of them had any idea what the camp had been used for.

Chuckle muscles at the ready, I prepared to be simultaneously tickled and enlightened by David Mitchell's History of British Comedy.

Sadly, however, it turned out to be an all-too-familiar trawl through the early days of music hall, variety and radio, with precious little of the Mitchell magic we know and love from his prolific radio and TV output.

A catch-all documentary series such as this is only really as good as its clips and contributors, so it was disappointing to find Mitchell, or his producer, rounding up the usual suspects - Michael Grade, Barry Cryer, Ken Dodd and token academic CP Lee, all of whose reflections on comedy have been documented to death over the years.

The country must be crawling with people with a different take on early British comedy and its connection to the comedy of today, as well as people in their 70s, 80s and 90s who saw the likes of Max Miller, Sid Field, Robb Wilton and Jimmy James in their heydays. Where were they?

By far the most vivid and original recollections of early comedy came from 91-year-old Denis Norden, a living encyclopedia of British comedy and variety who merits a documentary series to himself.