Bob Monkhouse

Robert Alan Monkhouse was born on 1 June 1928 in Beckenham, Kent, and grew up with two passions: drawing cartoons and collecting jokes. He was a published cartoonist while still in his teens, and his first ambition was to draw comic strips for a living. Instead, he found that his neatly typed one-liners were more saleable than his sketches. Before he had finished his national service in the Royal Air Force, he was already selling gags to professional comedians and thinking of himself as a writer rather than a performer.

After the war, Monkhouse formed a double act with Denis Goodwin, a fellow RAF serviceman, and together they became Monkhouse and Goodwin, a slick song-and-gag partnership on radio and early television. They wrote for Bob Hope, Arthur Askey and the radio variety shows of the 1950s, but by the early 1960s Monkhouse had moved on to a solo career. He was never just a performer; behind every smooth introduction lay a writer's mind, constantly filing, polishing and updating material.

From the late 1960s onwards, Monkhouse became the defining face of British light-entertainment television. He hosted The Golden Shot live on ITV, a chaotic crossbow quiz that demanded nerves of steel and a bottomless supply of ad-libs. Then came Bob's Full House, Celebrity Squares, Family Fortunes, Blankety Blank, The $64,000 Question, Wipeout and, in his final years, the live National Lottery draws. He fronted more formats than almost any other British presenter and made each one look effortless.

Beneath the polished surface was a man who had catalogued an estimated 25,000 jokes, and who could produce a perfect gag on any subject from a filing system in his head. Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001, he spoke openly about the illness and campaigned for awareness. He died on 29 December 2003, aged 75, leaving a reputation as the smoothest, most professional, and most underestimated gag writer in the history of British entertainment.