Dick Emery

Dick Emery's Comedy Gold (Channel 5) is a long-overdue tribute to a forgotten funster. I expected his humour to be clunky and outdated now but find myself still laughing at it, and still waiting for the trip. So do plenty of contemporary comics. Catherine Tate, Harry Enfield and the Little Britain guys all owe him a debt, their own gargoyle galleries being nothing if not Emery-esque, and The Fast Show's Charlie Higson turns up in the profile to admit as much.

A few years ago on a visit with the kids to the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune I was amused to find one of Emery's biplanes among the exhibits. I wait for the programme to mention his flying exploits and it does. Emery owned many small aircraft and many cars, his son Nick speculating that he changed wheels every time the ashtrays got full.

And he had many wives. Five in all, I think, although it's easy to lose count. One would turn up at his dressing-room to find him "entertaining" a chorus-girl; another would receive his proposal of marriage while he was still wedded to someone else. This Mrs Emery says: "He loved being in love, loved the chase and was usually irresistible to those being chased." He was chased himself - by the RAF for desertion and later by the taxman.

A hectic life, then, and his exit was pretty busy too, with three of the wives jostling for position round the deathbed. His children saw little of him but daughter Eliza sums him up thus: "Always neat hair, really funny, terrible wind, gorgeous."

Archive: Dick Emery's driving instructor days, 1973

Tales of the road before the comedian became famous.

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The son of comedy legend Dick Emery has said he was targeted by a conman exposed by the BBC. Carl Mould, 52, has been contacting actors and offering voiceover training and opportunities in exchange for a fee.

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RT marks Dick Emery's centenary with rare photos

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Dick Emery's daughter on how his womanising scarred her

"I couldn't call him Daddy because it didn't feel right," she says. "He wasn't around enough. I was desperate to get to know him. I remember when I was about eight, my brother, Michael, and I were staying with him in Southsea, in a hotel. After dinner one evening, a young lady arrived so he gave my brother and me some money, went off with this 17-year-old and left us for a couple of nights. We used to take ourselves off to the fair and went mad with room service."

Dick Emery: the neglected superstar of TV comedy

A new BBC documentary pays tribute to Dick Emery who was rated 'one of the comedy greats' by David Walliams. But is he still funny?

What a line-up for a sitcom; three of our most accomplished actors - Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour - star, and the writers are the super-talented playwright Mark Ravenhill and Gary Janetti, who used to work on Will & Grace, one of the classiest comedies on American television in decades. And what do you get? Well, not quite the laugh fest that it might have been (or may yet become), but an opener that had a reasonable hit rate.

Vicious is another back-to-the-future comedy, a one-room sitcom with two of the queeniest gay men to grace our screens since the dear departed Larry Grayson and John Inman. If Dick Emery's Clarence had made an appearance he wouldn't have looked out of place and, with De la Tour's presence, it could be called Rising Camp (sadly not my line - I nicked it).

Freddie (McKellen) and Stuart (Jacobi) are a bickering, gossipy gay couple who live in crepuscular gloom in their Covent Garden flat. Freddie is a never-has-been actor ("You may have seen me in a scene in Doctor Who") who has long since lost his Wigan accent; Stuart is a one-time barman who is still not out to his mother. He's waiting for the right time - "It's been 48 years!" cries Freddie.

Into the flat upstairs moves the attractive youngster Ash (Iwan Rheon), who attracts appreciative looks both from the men and their faghag friend Violet (De la Tour); most of last night's episode concerned their convoluted attempts to find out if he was gay or straight. Don't people just ask if they're interested to know?

The cast are clearly having fun with the bitchy lines, but Jacobi is overdoing the flounce and Ash is as yet underwritten. Too much of Vicious relies on tired comedy tropes; older people are gagging to have sex with people young enough to be their grandchildren, they don't know anything about youth culture ("Is Zac Efron a person or a place?" Violet asks); or they're deaf, dotty and fall asleep easily. Oh please. As for the double rape "joke" everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves, including director Ed Bye.

On the evidence of last night's first episode Ravenhill and Janetti can't decide if Vicious is lazy retro fun for all the family, or an edgy post-watershed show that's taking us to places never previously negotiated on British TV. Let's hope it's the latter over its seven-week run.

Comedian Dick Emery gets the once over as this snappy biographical series profiles another great British entertainer. Emery, who died in 1983, is best remembered for his self-titled sketch show - the catchphrases, vaudeville humour and grotesque British caricatures which will seem strikingly familiar to fans of Little Britain. Interviews with Emery's ex-wife (one of five) and last girlfriend underline the comic's voracious womanising, while rare home footage offers something new for devotees.

Who could forget Mandy, the peroxide blonde bombshell with the catchphrase "Ooh, you are awful but I like you"? During the sixties and seventies, it must have been quoted at parties, pageants and playgrounds up and down the land as often as Vicky Pollard's "Yeah but, no but" or Victor Meldrew's "I don't believe it" decades later.

Yet Mandy's creator, Dick Emery, seems to have been largely erased from the nation's comedy memory bank. Unlike Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies, whose work is deservedly kept alive by repeats on Gold as well as the terrestrial channels, the brilliant Emery has been curiously absent from our screens since his death 30 years ago.

None of the contributors to Dick Emery - A Comedy of Errors could account for this glaring oversight, including presenter David Walliams, clearly a big fan in his youth. The best they could come up with was that Emery's success predated the marketing boom of the eighties when artists like Cooper and Morecambe and Wise were immortalised on T-shirts, mugs, greetings cards and the like.

While the documentary was a fitting tribute to an outstanding comedy talent, it also revealed the troubled man behind the many funny faces. Nervous, insecure and incapable of fidelity, Emery's early childhood had been spent on tour with his parents, a variety double act, not the most stable of upbringings.

His love life - five failed marriages, umpteen love affairs - reflected a restlessness and terror of being alone. One of his children, Eliza, now a singer-songwriter, said he sought constant reassurance that she loved him, even though it was probably his kids who needed assuring the most.

Walliams concluded in characteristic Emery style, "What we need is more Dick on our screens," followed rather predictably by a rousing "Ooh, you are awful but I like you".