My friend Bob – the enigma behind the masterful gags

Bob Monkhouse used to say "In show business, if you can fake sincerity you've got it made". Throughout his life he honed and polished that ability, until in the latter years of his life he finally earned the love that he craved from a general public that had always respected his work but never afforded him affection. He would have allowed himself a quiet smile of satisfaction at the saturation media coverage following his passing, on December 29 2003, aged 75 years.

His peers of course had always revered him. One innate quality comedians possess is the ability to recognise talent in other comedians, albeit mostly silently, and I can recall very few who regarded Bob in less than the highest of esteem.

The term "The Guvnor" is not lightly bestowed on anyone, especially from the paranoid and fragile egos that frequent the world of comedy, but it fitted snugly, some might say smugly, on the scrupulously tailored talents of Robert Alan Monkhouse.

Whereas so many funny performers struggle to adapt to an ever-changing playground, his longevity was due in no small part to his ability to become the comedic chameleon, absorbing the new genres and slipping seamlessly into subtle changes of style and delivery.

This would readily explain his constant excursions into our living rooms through the small screen over more than four decades, but the mention of his name has always polarised opinion. In the 70s a daily newspaper conducted a poll in which he emerged as the third most popular performer on television. The following week the same paper had another poll to determine which performer viewers loathed the most and Bob came top of the list.

Sometimes his humour was labelled a little sinister, which was hardly surprising considering his upbringing.

His mother, who turned up at his first wedding dressed in black, only hugged him once and that was in an air raid shelter under the falling threat of a flying bomb. He was not a naturally funny man, but he applied tremendous industry and invention in becoming a top comedian and more importantly, staying there.

His bedrock was meticulous preparation and if one gag failed to hit the required spot then he had another in reserve. He relied on his own phenomenal memory, trained to throw up libraries of fact and knowledge. I vividly recollect him wandering over to look at a painting I had been admiring in a Vienna art gallery by an artist I told him I had never heard of. He smiled, concentrated and retrieved a precise thumb-nail sketch of the life and times of that hitherto anonymous Dutch impressionist.

He was the consummate game show host and as I watched his techniques and methods over the years, I never ceased to marvel at his never diminishing ambition. Don't forget he was also an able cartoonist, an accomplished actor and a talented writer. He also had an unerring eye for the ladies and they for him. His abundant charm and chat could melt the most cynical and jaundiced of hearts.

I was also acutely aware that he was a true enigma. I don't believe anyone – and that includes wives, family and friends – really understood or explained him. The machinations of a quicksilver brain behind a smiling faade were known only to him and never fully disclosed to anyone. Bob Monkhouse – Unpublished! is not just my personal anecdotes and tributes from a selection of admirers. It also comprises personal letters and faxes we exchanged over many years, plus some of the last material he ever wrote.

The world of entertainment will miss him as much

as I do.

A MONKHOUSE MASTERCLASS

They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.

I want to die like my father, peacefully in his sleep, not screaming and terrified, like his passengers.

My mother tried to kill me when I was a baby. She denied it.

She said she thought the plastic bag would keep me fresh.

My wife said: "Can my mother come down for the weekend?"

So I said: "Why?" and she said: "Well, she's been up on the roof two weeks already".

I'd never be unfaithful

to my wife for the reason that I love my house very much.

Bob Monkhouse-Unpublished, by Dave Ismay, is published by JR Books, priced 16.