The Unforgettable...

He [Jeremy Beadle] spent decades branded as serviceably absurd, but entertaining nevertheless. He was the original prankster, the master of the practical joke that brought 15 minutes of fame to nobodies. With his eternal quiff, stupid beard, rubber features and instinctive jocularity, his place in the national consciousness, harnessed over four decades, was owed to his being a peerless figure of fun. Angela Carter said comedy is tragedy that happens to other people, and by making himself the centre of attention - by inviting people to laugh at him and not simply with him - Beadle took the jokes, and the tragedy, upon himself.

What was marvellous about The Unforgettable... Jeremy Beadle was that it sensitively conveyed the rather sad point that this man was, of his own volition, completely misunderstood. There is a form of television comedy, whose vanguard he was in, where the comic plays the buffoon and invites his audience to come down to a level where all is absurd and frivolous. Beadle, especially the Beadle of You've Been Framed in later years, seemed just this, a kind of merry mountebank with limited intelligence. In fact, he was just the opposite.

Did you know that he raised over £100m for charity - more, as his friend Chris Tarrant put it, than probably every other television entertainer of his generation? Or that he was born in the post-war East End to a single mother, his father having abandoned her upon mention of pregnancy? Or that he was born with Poland Syndrome, which caused webbing on his right hand, and that he dropped out of school despite being ferociously intelligent? Or even that in his long-haired twenties he was better looking than most rock stars?

He was part of the brilliant brigade that ran Time Out in its early days and, when launching its edition in Manchester, organised rock concerts on the hoof, whereupon he'd ring up friends and nonchalantly declare that the Grateful Dead were headlining. Stints on LBC radio followed before his television breakthrough. By the time he peaked with Beadle's About, he owed his career chiefly to his extraordinary ability to play dumb - which, in retrospect, required a hell of a brain. And yet, as this show proved, it was convincing, so that the last laugh was his, and the real joke on us.

I was never a fan of the practical jokes of The Unforgettable Jeremy Beadle - in fact, I think I had forgotten him until this tribute - but it certainly did its job in changing my opinion of the man himself. Frankly, it's almost impossible for me to dislike someone who loved books so much that he had an extension built onto his house to hold his library of 30,000 - that's living the dream! He was even buried under a gravestone representing books, with the epitaph "Ask my friends" and that's what this show did, eliciting what seemed to be genuinely heartfelt memories of a decent chap.

As well as being an apparently good father, stepfather, husband and friend, he relentlessly raised money for charity through marathon quiz sessions and auctions - around £100 million. "Oh, that's just showing off," said his former Game For A Laugh co-star Matthew Kelly, in awe.

But he still became something of a hate figure, once coming second to Saddam Hussein in an unpopularity poll, and a by-word for a type of trashy telly which, nevertheless, flourished even after he was dumped from his prime time slots. His family said he was hurt by the reversal of fortunes and, as fellow quasi-hate figure Chris Tarrant pointed out, it was strange how he went from being over-exposed to being a TV pariah for years, only able to appear in panto villain roles like Ant & Dec's Banged up with Beadle slot.

Ironically, he'd have probably fared better in today's celeb-crazy television environment; he could have made a good guest on Who Do You Think You Are, fronted a documentary on disability or just gone round the country on a spacehopper or something. And yet, there's a lesson there: Jeremy Beadle's fall wasn't due to his own failings or a sudden turn against cheesy pranks (still going strong on John Barrowman's excruciating Tonight's The Night). People just got sick of the sight of him - and today's actors, presenters and rent-a-guests should probably take note.

When TV prankster Jeremy Beadle died in 2008, at the age of just 59, the obituary in this newspaper observed that he had the "paradoxical double distinction of being voted the second most hated man in Britain (after Saddam Hussein) and of being the most avidly watched presenter on television." This biographical compilation is affectionate in tone, but the Beadle Quandary endures: was he able to redeem his cruelty - he had a vicious tongue in an argument - with the kindness that saw him raise £13million for charity?