Dick Emery: Comedy Gold

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 I expected his humour to be clunky and outdated now but find myself still laughing at it, and still waiting for the trip.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."