Facts and fantasy

The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse (ITV1) might be thought a slightly coat-trailing title, though not perhaps as much as its follow-up, The Unforgettable Jeremy Beadle. Still, I don’t suppose we’ll ever be treated to the unforgettable Jim Davidson. Or the all-too-forgettable Freddie Starr, or Whoever Remembers Bobby Davro?

Monkhouse had this highly veneered gloss, and symbolised for a lot of people all that was wrong with commercial television. Smooth, unfazed, just condescending enough to the public to make your teeth feel furry. If you can fake insincerity, you can fake anything. Privately, he had a pretty miserable time, losing one son to cystic fibrosis, another — already estranged — to drugs. Even his writing partner, Denis Goodwin, committed suicide. Monkhouse was diffident to an almost embarrassing degree, though he attracted great loyalty. The late Alan Coren, who was a good hater when the occasion demanded, liked him a lot, though felt he had to apologise for the fact.

With Coren, there was no gap between the public and private face. He was the same over lunch as he was on television. The opposite was true of Monkhouse. For example, his public persona demanded that he wrote all his own jokes, and logged them in neatly multicoloured entries in his bound joke books. But when he appeared on Have I Got News For You, when his gags, poise and charm won him many younger fans, he turned up with a team of joke-writers. My brother Paul reported this in the Times and received a courteous letter denying it — all his jokes were his own, Monkhouse said. Paul made further inquiries and confirmed that the story was true. So why had he bothered to pretend the opposite? Were his powers failing, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit it?

That show came not long after Monkhouse’s joke books were stolen, in slightly strange circumstances but a storm of publicity.