Tommy Cooper

Jimeoin on his comedy heroes

Mitch Hedberg, Stewart Francis and Tommy Cooper are among the Irish comic's favourites

I first noticed Tim Key on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe TV series on BBC Four, where he did readings of his "topical poetry" to camera. These were short, pointedly unpoetic monologues about the issues of the day, delivered with a comic poise that brought to mind the late Tommy Cooper. He now has his own radio show, Tim Key's Late Night Poetry Programme (Radio 4, Wednesday), in which he reads more of his poems and argues with his long-suffering assistant, Lord. By rights, it shouldn't be very funny; but it is.

Wednesday's programme was themed around chance, which had prompted Key to write six numbered poems. His plan was to roll a die and perform the poems in the order thus dictated, but the number four kept appearing. "Have you touched the dice with a magnet?" he asked Lord, who protested that Key had totally failed to understand the nature of probability. Key decided to read poem number three instead, provocatively titled The Wrong Number That Led to a Marriage ("He had woken her up/ but she had been charmed by his blustering apologies and his flattery/ after an hour or so, the pauses became longer, and more comfortable"). By this time I was spluttering into my tea and resolving to tune into this Wednesday's instalment, which tackles the theme of superstition.

National treasure, adored by the public, comic genius - it's become almost a cliche now for those qualities to go hand-in-hand with a troubled private life.

This one-off documentary explores the side of Tommy Cooper that audiences never got to see and suggests that in order to achieve all the success, fame and ­popularity that his career gave him, he made a deal with the devil to get it.

Not literally, although you won't find many people here with a good word to say about his life-long manager Miff Ferrie, who died in 1994. "He was the most unpleasant agent I've ever known. Nobody liked him," offers one interviewee in tonight's programme.

As well as having absolutely no sense of humour - a serious drawback when your clients include Tommy Cooper and Sir Bruce Forsyth, who also appears here - one of Ferrie's other eccentricities was to keep obsessively detailed records of every one of his phone ­conversations.

Perhaps he knew what a gift these would one day be to biographers and documentary makers because these never-before-seen documents form the backbone of this film, revealing new details about Cooper's drinking, his ­volatile marriage, and his equally rocky relationship with Ferrie himself.

But if you'd prefer to remember Cooper as the funny man with the fez on his head, there are plenty of classic clips of his stage act here, too.

TV review: The Untold Tommy Cooper

You didn't need to be a Tommy Cooper fan to find this take on his life compelling.

The nostalgic can wallow in plenty of retro-fare this Christmas, from old Morecambe and Wise specials, by way of Tommy Cooper repeats and this splendid profile of the poker-faced comedian who was still selling vacuum cleaners at the age of 38 when, in 1967, he had one last throw of the dice and entered Opportunity Knocks. Dawson's deadpan humour is appreciated here by John Cleese, Robert Webb ("it's quite easy to play the piano badly and not be funny") and Russell Kane ("some of us younger people did muddle him up with John Prescott"). Touchingly, Dawson stopped cracking mother-in-law jokes when his wife's mother died.

Comedian Tommy Cooper was regularly credited with the ability to be funny without actually having to do anything. At 6'4!, with messy hair and a red fez on his head, he certainly looked the part. Using previously unseen footage, plus details from the diaries of Cooper's manager Miff Ferrie, this documentary provides a portrait of the troubled comedy giant, who died in 1984. Contributions come from Johnny Vegas and Damien Hirst.

Russ Abbot interview: toasting the magic Tommy Cooper

Russ Abbot tells Michael Deacon about playing the irrepressible comic Tommy Cooper for new Radio 3 drama, Glass Chair Chair Glass.

Coming up: Glass Chair Chair Glass

This Sunday on Radio 3, Russ Abbot stars in a play that imagines a day when Tommy Cooper met absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco.

Glass Chair Chair Glass

This Sunday on Radio 3, Russ Abbot stars in a play that imagines a day when Tommy Cooper met absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco. Writer Annie Caulfield tells us how this came about...