The Secret Life Of Bob Monkhouse

When the comedian and television presenter Bob Monkhouse died in 2003, his family became the custodians of a 50,000-strong collection of videotapes and film reels that he'd amassed with what can only be described as fanatical zeal since the late 1950s. This fascinating documentary, which went out on BBC Four last month, uses clips from the archive to profile Monkhouse's life and career, from early home-movie footage right through to his final stand-up performance.

Bob Monkhouse never inspired universal public affection the way Morecambe & Wise did. Indeed, he once simultaneously topped opinion polls as Britain's most and least popular performer. The one thing everyone did agree on was Monkhouse's professionalism.

The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse told the comic's fascinating story, with help from the vast archive of films, albums, cuttings, clips and journals he obsessively collected throughout his life.

Included amongst them was a compelling recording of Monkhouse presenting The Golden Shot, having been unfairly sacked, when anger, bitterness and disappointment very nearly got the better of his professionalism on live TV. Rare footage indeed.

The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse review

The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse not only shows Bob as a comic genius; but as an intelligent archivist who had the foresight to preserve comedy material that would be of historical interest to future generations.

Throughout his career Bob Monkhouse was routinely dismissed as a slick, shallow, egregious TV game-show host. But he was also an educated, highly intelligent man with an almost frighteningly technical approach to comedy, who throughout his life kept notebooks in which he deconstructed other people's gags to find out what made them work. After he died in 2003, the existence of his enormous video archive of 50,000 VHS tapes and 400 film prints became public knowledge. Monkhouse was an obsessive taper of TV and radio shows for decades; he had video recorders at home years and years before they were commonplace. His treasure trove, examined in detail in this fascinating biography, is a TV and film historian's dream. The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse also paints a vivid picture of a complicated man who, whether you liked him or not, was a consummate performer dogged by the fear of failure.

Bob Monkhouse, comedian and quiz show host, once confided to the comic writer Barry Cryer that he thought of himself as the "Marmite man... you either like me or can't stand me". With the help of archive footage and contributions from friends and family, this profile tells the story of the private face of this outwardly slick operator, one that shows him to be an obsessive collector and a performer with a fear of failure. He collected comedy videos, records, whisky glasses and matchboxes, and also kept everything related to his own career, which may be linked to the suggestion that he never felt accepted by his peers. Perhaps he was trying to prove something, but his public image can't have helped: in 1977 he was voted both the most loved and the most hated in a poll of TV stars.