Bob Monkhouse.
Comedian,
writer,
father.
The king of the quiz shows.
But this is only half the story.
Bob Monkhouse spent a lifetime
obsessively collecting films and video tapes,
recordings of radio and television programmes
which, until now,
had been thought lost for ever.
He recorded everything.
He seemed to have taped audiovisually...
He had everything!
Shelves up to here, all surrounded,
all with tapes, and all letters, and... Oh, God!
Reams and reams and reams and reams and reams of stuff.
He's like a magpie. He's got so much stuff.
Films, books, records...
And it's sort of almost compulsive behaviour, really.
It was verging on obsession.
Here, for the first time,
we can see the material that so obsessed Bob Monkhouse.
It opens a door into the mind of one of Britain's most complex
and funniest comedians.
Bob Monkhouse had been collecting all kinds of things
since he was a child.
It included thousands of tapes and films.
But he also collected comics and records, matchboxes,
and even tinned food.
He kept everything related to his own career
and threw away nothing.
It was all good fun, until 1977,
when Bob's serious collecting habit
landed him in serious trouble.
One evening I got a phone call,
and he said, "Can't believe what's happened." I said, "Well, tell me."
So he said, "Well, the house is full of policemen.
"They've got a warrant to search the house,
"and they're going to arrest me!"
Mr Monkhouse had been accused of
conspiracy to defraud film distributors of hiring fees.
Two stressful years later,
the case was heard at the Old Bailey.
After the trial, and for the rest of his life,
a traumatised Monkhouse became very secretive about
the thousands of items he had at home.
Even after his death in 2003, the secrecy continued.
His vast collection of recordings, documents and objects
lay undisturbed at the house for six years
because Bob had left no instructions in his will
about what to do with them.
It was only when his wife, Jackie, died
and the Monkhouse mansion was sold in 2009
that the true extent of Bob's collecting habit became clear.
In all, there were 3,000 audiotapes,
2,000 photographs,
ten filing cabinets full of scripts,
50,000 VHS tapes,
400 film prints,
one million jokes.
PETER COOK: I was reading the Bible the other day, you know.
LAUGHTER
It's very good, innit?
Amongst the thousands of tapes which filled several rooms of the house
were lost episodes of classic comedies
like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Not Only But Also.
Do you believe in God, actually?
DUDLEY MOORE: When I'm in a tight spot, you know.
"If you do help me out, I'll believe in you. And, er...
"Thank you very much.
LAUGHTER
"I know you're there for future reference."
LAUGHTER
There were hundreds of performances from comedy legends
that the BBC had thrown away,
amongst them Kenneth Horne,
the Crazy Gang,
and Frankie Howerd.
I went to this pet shop, and there was the owner, a little old man,
polishing a monkey.
I said, erm... LAUGHTER
I said, "Good morning."
Come along, now, please. LAUGHTER
Thank you, don't doze off.
There were also 15 unique recordings of Tony Hancock.
LAUGHTER
And so it is with a song in my heart
that I declare these Empire Games open,
and bless all who jump in 'em.
LAUGHTER
It was an amazing discovery.
An Aladdin's cave of television and comedy
left behind by a man everyone thought they knew.
The Golden Shot, the suntan,
the bow tie and the jokes.
I've had a lot of trouble ever since I arrived here tonight.
There was the usual big crowd outside the stage door,
and a shout went up. "Here's Bob Monkhouse!"
And everyone stared at me. I was so embarrassed.
I wished I hadn't shouted.
LAUGHTER
He was famous for 50 years.
But there always seemed more to Bob Monkhouse
than one-liners.
Who are you? I am Bob Monkhouse!
His collection tells us everything we need to know.
This was every last detail of a career
at the heart of British entertainment.
This was the life of Bob Monkhouse.
The very first sightings of Bob Monkhouse the comedian
left everyone deeply impressed.
He was brilliant! He was so quick.
And he had this wonderful delivery,
beautiful timing. Oh, dear.
So I went up to him afterwards,
and I said, "You don't know me.
"I'm Dabber Davis. I'm an agent.
"I thought you were absolutely brilliant."
And bless his heart, he said, "Did you really? Thank you so much!"
19-year-old Bob Monkhouse scored a big success here last week,
and so let's have a really happy welcome for our young comedy find,
Bob Monkhouse!
APPLAUSE BRASS BAND
At an early age, I fell in love with the girl next door,
and one day, I plucked up my courage
and I asked her if she was doing anything that night,
and she said no.
So I took her for a ride in the country
and found out she wasn't kidding.
LAUGHTER
As a boy,
Bob Monkhouse was entranced by the comedians of wartime radio.
Ladies and gentlemen, Workers' Playtime!
He had a short wave radio,
and he used to listen to all the American broadcasts.
And so he had the jump on all the comics here,
because he knew the kind of things that people were talking about.
To learn the secrets of comedy,
Bob began to write down the jokes he heard on American Forces Network.
He then took them apart, to see how they worked.
Bob never did anything by half. If he recorded something, he would...
type up the script, and it would be committed to paper as well.
Everything had to be on COMPLETE record.
Nothing offhand. It was 100% or nothing with Bob.
And that's where he got a lot of his material from,
cos he had this extra source.
And everybody else had the same opportunity, by the way,
of getting it.
It just meant listening and writing and recording.
But he was industrious.
He was serious.
He learned fast and he learned from the best.
This was the era of the great American stand-up comedians
like Bob's hero, Bob Hope.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the top of the bill,
"the one and only Mr Bob Hope!"
SINGS MUSICAL INTRODUCTION
I'm thrilled to be here. I really have nothing new to report from the States -
that's where Churchill lives.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Well, he doesn't live there.
He goes back once in a while to deliver Mrs Roosevelt's laundry.
LAUGHTER
To write up the Bob Hope Show
or, you know, the George Burns And Gracie Show,
to write that up and to see how the jokes are made,
what they look like on paper,
that's a writer's obsession.
And because he was a writer,
he wanted to know how those jokes and what those jokes did.
How did you make that happen in a joke?
How do you get a turn like that?
How do you get the surprise to work like that?
How do you get away with being rude without being rude overtly?
I know it's strange.
When I was a teenager, I was going to be an athlete. Hard to believe.
Any evening, you could see me striding over the sports fields
with easy grace.
I forget why we called her that.
LAUGHTER
The young Monkhouse was an instant hit.
He then teamed up with the even younger writer and performer,
Denis Goodwin.
Bob and Denis shared a love of American comedy.
They weren't looking back to the music hall for inspiration,
they were looking west, to the wisecracks of New York and LA.
Hello, this is Bob. And this is Denis.
And this is the stage of the newly-decorated Playhouse theatre,
with its classic statues
of Bath Night with Elsie and Doris Waters.
LAUGHTER
Oh, you mean those gold figures there? Ain't the paint quaint?
Pardon? I said ain't the paint quaint? You mustn't say "ain't".
You should say "isn't".
All right, isn't the pisn't quisn't?
LAUGHTER
THEY BOTH CHUCKLE
With Britain struggling to get back on its feet after the war years,
the razor-sharp mid-Atlantic routines of Monkhouse and Goodwin
were like a breath of fresh air.
Funny script, eh? Oh, yeah.
Thought of some good lines? Oh, I'm thinking of some beautiful lines.
Really? Who's the script for?
Diana Dors. Diana Dors?
Can I make some suggestions?
I'm sorry, all the suggestions are coming from me.
I have a date with her to discuss it tonight.
I've heard about your technique with women.
It's nothing, really. That's what I heard.
Every comedy show in town wanted a bit of Bob and Denis magic,
and they were soon writing and performing with their heroes.
For your enjoyment we present The Arthur Askey Show,
written by and including Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin...
Writing for Arthur Askey was a great thrill,
but they were in dreamland when American stars, visiting London,
like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis,
enlisted their help.
It just kept getting better for Monkhouse and Goodwin.
And then Bob Hope flew into their lives.
When the boys were writing Calling All Forces, which was a forces show,
and enormous figures... We had people like Petula Clark
and Alma Cogan as resident singers,
we had Geraldo and this enormous orchestra,
and a lot of people who came from America would come in it.
And Bob Hope came in once,
and he liked the boys' style.
So the next thing I heard from America
was that he was coming to the Palladium
and would they write some material for him?
And it developed from there that he liked their material,
and every time he came here and did anything,
they would write it.
That would be...heaven for Bob. The idea that someone like Bob Hope
could say to Bob, "Could you write me some jokes?",
that would be...
that would be up here.
The Monkhouse and Goodwin office was a scriptwriting factory,
churning out endless comedy routines.
They would often go days without sleep to meet deadlines.
I used to go along,
when they'd finished, and pick the scripts up.
Well, you can imagine, 72 hours working nonstop.
It's a good thing I was a comedian,
because I'd read it and think, "They don't make sense."
By that time, 72 hours, it didn't make sense.
That's the way they worked.
Bob would really overdo it,
particularly writing with Denis,
four or five shows a week, or whatever.
He'd overdo it,
and then he'd just...
go away for two or three days
and be intravenously fed!
It'd be the drip, and he'd be out of it for three days,
charging the batteries, and then... charging back!
Exhausted and overworked,
they embarked on their first television show,
Fast and Loose.
Bob only just about got through the first live episode.
As the credits rolled,
his hectic schedule caught up with him.
He collapsed, Bob.
So we had to cancel the series for about three months
while he got better.
He soon recovered,
and they went on to make two successful series.
The camera loved Bob more than it loved Denis.
It was very clear who had star quality.
Well, people were coming through.
All the big...the BBC, everybody, wanting Bob.
They didn't want Denis.
So we had to try and let him down gently,
but it was very difficult.
Radio was OK, because he's reading a script,
he's got it in front of him, doesn't have to remember the lines.
He wrote it, as well, so this was good.
But with television, I mean...
he couldn't even read an autocue or anything.
My partner gives renditions of popular records.
He will now give you Debbie Reynolds' latest release.
Eddie Fisher. Very good.
LAUGHTER
You see, we work as a team, and teamwork's a wonderful thing.
It's terribly important in show business, ladies and gentlemen,
for teams to stick together, to know each other's work,
and to be the best of friends. Yes, it is.
The next big project they did together
would see Bob Monkhouse pushed to the front,
and Denis, literally,
pushed to one side.
He's my pal Bob,
and if you'll excuse me now,
I have to make way for the credit titles.
POP
Discovered in Bob's attic were the film cans
containing the only surviving copies
of the 1958 situation comedy My Pal Bob,
which shows how the pair were becoming less of a double act
and more of a one-man show.
APPLAUSE Thank you. Thank you so much.
Not too much applause, please. Our producer has a headache.
Bob would be doing the actual thing,
and we'd put this little...
..optic in here with Denis in it,
which was good, because it got us out of any trouble
that he couldn't read the script.
And just supposing that you can stage this phoney divorce,
how can you be sure that she'll want to marry you again?
Please, can you think of anyone who wouldn't want to marry me again?
Yes. Who? Me.
LAUGHTER
So the three unwise monkeys started working on
a plan to make Jill demand a divorce.
He liked doing that, because it was easy.
All he had to do was read the script
with whatever was going on below with Bob.
There's no doubt he supported Denis Goodwin,
who was an unfortunate man.
He developed certain addictions
and things like that.
Sadly, he wasn't too well, shall we say?
He couldn't do it. And once or twice,
we had some terrible times with Bob where the performance was ruined.
Bob Monkhouse was now a star.
He had the entertainment world at his feet,
and the next step was the movies.
I've had a very exciting experience since the last time I saw you.
I've been making a film called Carry On Sergeant.
And I'm an avid moviegoer, so it was very exciting.
I love to go to the pictures. Don't you? I love it.
You know when you go in and you see the adverts first of all,
cos the cinema always advertises its own stuff.
It says something like, "Ice cream!"
"Flavour of the month - the usherette's thumb."
Bob Monkhouse had the lead role in the first ever Carry On film,
Carry On Sergeant.
Oh, Mary! Oh, I'm so relieved to see you.
Is everything all right, darling?
No! No fire extinguishers.
Fire extinguishers?
Everything depends on them.
Oh!
Bob's increasing success as a performer
led to the end of the 15-year partnership with Denis Goodwin,
who left for America to write full-time for Bob Hope.
The next few years without Denis
saw Bob's own tilt at movie stardom fizzle out.
He was searching for a new television job,
when he had the brilliant idea of turning his film-collecting hobby
into a long-running TV show.
He called it Mad Movies.
Mad Movies showed Bob's eye for business.
He was a writer, presenter and producer,
financing the series himself,
and selling it to 38 countries.
It was a labour of love,
and Bob's chance to share his passion
for the greats of silent-film comedy.
Welcome to a wonderful world where comedy is king,
the world of a thousand clowns, each with a magic power.
Movie magic.
They found this glorious new magic in the mechanism of a movie camera.
Just at the time Bob was celebrating his comedy heroes in Mad Movies,
he was having serious doubts
about whether he himself belonged in the world of comedy.
Found in Bob's attic is the only surviving copy of an interview
he gave with Sid Green and Dick Hills,
famous at the time as the writers of The Morecambe and Wise Show.
You basically gave up comedy, did you? Yes.
And now you're taking up straight acting?
Yes.
Why have you given up being a comedy performer full-time
to become a straight actor?
You've seen me in summer show,
you'll realise it's not really a change of technique.
He's too sexy.
You have put your finger on it.
Bob decided he was now a serious actor,
and spent the next few years trying to get as far away as possible
from the slick comedy Bob Monkhouse persona he had so carefully created.
I directed him in one play when I was at Rediffusion.
BELL RINGS
And I was very, very surprised,
cos he wasn't an obvious choice,
he wasn't an established straight actor.
In the drama Bug,
he publicly dismantled the showbiz Bob Monkhouse,
greying out the famous eyebrows,
replacing the sharp suit with a tatty old cardigan
and, more significantly,
losing the gleaming smile.
Yes? Mr QP Jakes? Yes?
I'm Mr RJ Smelley.
I don't think he chose it. I think he accepted it, accepted the role.
I mean, he hadn't done enough television drama to be choosy.
Evidence, Mr Smelley?
You're asking me for evidence?
Cos evidence is one thing I have got.
If you've come here for evidence, that's one thing I supply.
I thought he was quite good in Bug.
He pulled those rather strange faces,
he had that rather strange hunched-up shoulders
and that kind of... those mannerisms.
In fact, this was an unhappy time for Monkhouse,
both on screen and off.
He was a lost soul, professionally,
and at home, his marriage was falling apart.
How are you?
I'm all right, thank you.
The dozens of home movies found at the house,
and broadcast here for the first time,
show the Monkhouse family in happier times.
Beautiful wife, Elizabeth, sons, Gary and Simon,
and daughter, Abigail.
Bob and Elizabeth met when they were both in the RAF,
and married in 1949.
But the marriage seemed jinxed right from the start.
Bob's mother disapproved of the marriage so much
that she didn't speak to him for the next 20 years.
She didn't go to the wedding, and that was it.
He was very upset, obviously.
The first time he'd been married,
and he was upset about it.
She didn't like Elizabeth. That was the basis of it,
that he married beneath what she thought he should have done.
She came in, and I said,
"Hello, Mrs Monkhouse. I'm Dabber Davis."
She said, "Dabber? What a stupid name!"
I'd never met her before in my life!
And she always called him Robert.
Never Bob. If you said, "I was talking to Bob..."
"Robert."
Very strange lady!
Bob and the new Mrs Monkhouse soldiered on,
but their life changed dramatically
with the birth of their first child in 1951.
Gary Monkhouse was diagnosed with cerebral palsy
shortly after he was born.
Becoming a father to the sweet, good-looking,
but physically disabled Gary
was the defining relationship of Bob's life.
Bob was...
He was very sad, very sad about it.
We all were. I mean, my wife,
and Denis Goodwin, and Barbara, his wife, were all very upset.
Bob had...some terrible things happen in his life,
particularly with his children,
and it just shows the mark of him as a professional
that the mask that he put on to the public
was completely different to the person he was at home,
and the things he had to deal with.
Well, yes, there was a lot of sadness in Bob's life,
and typically him, you wouldn't know it most of the time. The mask...
..was kept on.
At home, the man behind the mask
often turned the camera onto his family
with his elaborate home movies.
They have professionally-made titles,
and a film made with his son Simon is more Gothic horror
than light entertainment.
MUSIC: Pictures of You by The Cure
# I've been looking so long at these pictures of you... #
In the early years of the marriage,
the Monkhouses enjoyed a glamorous, showbiz lifestyle,
and Bob took along his camera to events
like this celebrity cricket match,
and came away with unique colour film of comedian friends
like Harry Secombe and Norman Wisdom.
# The pictures are all I can feel... #
The 1950s and early '60s were incredibly busy periods for Bob.
Inevitably, family life suffered
as Bob and Elizabeth drifted further apart.
When you're a professional performer,
it doesn't really chime with family life.
You can either be a successful professional performer
or you can be a family man.
The two don't really mix.
And I suppose I would have to confess,
I probably saw more of Dad on television than in person,
because he was on so much!
Bob admitted later to a string of affairs during the marriage,
including one with Diana Dors.
By 1967, his marriage was over,
and his television career looked like going the same way.
The two years Bob had spent making drama had taught him one thing.
More than anything else, more than money and fame,
and sometimes more vital than family,
was his need to hear laughter.
In January 1967,
his prayers were answered,
when he was asked to host television's biggest variety show,
Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
..And your host, Bob Monkhouse!
Bob Monkhouse had come home.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
Well, so much for the ad-libs.
May I say how welcome you are to the Palladium.
Forgive my being dressed like this.
We were expecting a party of bookmakers
which would have been great for me
cos they haven't stopped laughing since yesterday.
I'm all dressed for the races.
I was up in the northeast, and I went over to see the Grand National.
I was playing some clubs.
They have wonderful names, these clubs up in the north-east,
like La Marimba, La Bamba,
La Dolce Vita,
Tito's. It sounds great. I played a club once in Spain,
called Los Caballeros, for three nights,
before I found out it was the gents'.
LAUGHTER
I liked it!
They gave me a standing ovation. But nevertheless...
LAUGHTER
Bob's three-month stint as compere of the Palladium show
was one of the biggest turning points of his career.
He regained the sparkle he had lost
in the years away from direct contact with his audience.
His growing confidence, good looks
and gift for joke telling came together like never before.
The press described him as astonishing and mesmerising.
Bob Monkhouse was back...
big time.
Sadly, every single one of these shows was thrown away by ATV.
Luckily, Bob Monkhouse was, as usual, one step ahead of the pack.
We're only able to watch these performances
because Bob was one of the few people in Britain at this time
with a video recorder at home.
The Sony CV-2000
was the first video recorder made for home use.
It was more expensive than a car,
but Bob Monkhouse just had to have one.
This is Bob's first video recorder,
and it still works.
He bought it just in time to start
recording some of his finest moments.
The Palladium shows,
and The Golden Shot.
GUNSHOT
APPLAUSE
SQUEALS
BANGS
Hello!
Der Goldene Schuss was a hit on German television.
The game show with telephones and crossbows
was perfect for Bob Monkhouse.
When he saw the format for The Golden Shot,
he could see its potential.
And bear in mind,
all his life he'd loved technology, and suddenly all this new stuff...
Oh, it was a new playground to play in.
RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES PLAYS
Peter, I'm going to do a new series on television.
I've read about it, congratulations. The Golden Shot.
That's right. I'd like you to be my first target.
People used to shoot at apples with a crossbow.
Fire. It's a banger! You win a bonus prize.
And there it is. APPLAUSE
Up a bit, left a bit, right a bit, fire.
In ten seconds...
Can you imagine, with health and safety breathing down your neck,
doing The Golden Shot now?
Live crossbows, bolts flying through the air hitting targets...
Fire! Well sized up!
Fire. Yes, and a banger!
..and inexperienced contestants handling this lethal equipment?
It was quite astonishing.
I'm not too sure where it went, but it didn't go in here.
It's down here. It practically took me toe off!
It rebounded. LAUGHTER
Oh, it's very pretty indeed.
They're trying to tell me it's safe, but I don't think it is.
'No-one got hurt that I can remember...'
..or that I know of.
Bob Monkhouse reworked The Golden Shot to suit himself,
and invented a new type of slick, colourful light entertainment.
You'd have people singing or doing a comedy spot.
It was really sort of a variety show, a game show...
everything.
# Whoa, whoa, jet plane flying high above me. #
It's down here that on the 12th, that's last Monday,
the grouse season started.
Bang-bang-bang, all those grouse shooters,
all banging away at those birds in the...
Are you all right? Sorry.
I must say, standing next to Cathy you very look boring.
Oh, thank you. LAUGHTER
He was so assured. He was so comfortable in that environment.
You knew if the wheels fell off on a live show, Bob could cover it.
And things were always going wrong, because it WAS a live programme.
And this contestant has scored...
Hang on, 135... 135.
..less a penalty of 27,
which is 135...
130. A hundred and...
138?
Yes?
I don't know what it is!
LAUGHTER
She's goofed with her sums, that thing hasn't worked,
the crossbow's misfired, the contestant's not terribly good,
but my God, he's still managing to polish some comedy gold
from this awful situation
where you knew that other performers would struggle and flounder.
And now my golden telephone
will make a noise like Rod...
PHONE RINGS Not yet.
..will make a noise...
I haven't finished the joke yet! LAUGHTER
He was clever enough to actually work through
anything that happened and make jokes about it or make light of it.
She's terrified, crouching in the corner, our Annie is,
cos she's very scared of these fireworks.
This is the only show on TV that has fireworks. Unheard of.
It's no good going like that, George. How can I speed up
when I don't know the score? LAUGHTER
"Oh, dear. Oh, well."
"Quickly, get something done about this!" You know.
It was always like that.
It was chaotic, and people used to watch the show
because they used to hope that things would go wrong.
A search through his filing cabinets revealed that
Bob kept everything related to the show,
every detail of every contestant...
AUDIENCE: Here's Bobby!
..long memos about the running of the studio...
..the set designers' original plans for the targets...
..and a letter from the show's German creator
trying to sell another very similar idea.
Sehr geehrte Herr Monkhouse.
A space spectacular combining a musical game show
with space education.
Space objects like Geminis and spaceships in a studio orbit.
Ich hoffe Ihnen gefaellt diese Idee,
und freue mich um von Ihnen zu hoehren.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen, Hannes Schmidt.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth,
The Golden Shot was a huge hit,
and Bob Monkhouse was at the height of the fame
he had worked so hard to achieve.
But the wheels were about to fall off this golden gravy train.
ATV bosses Lew Grade and Francis Essex
had been told that Monkhouse was taking bribes
to include brand-name products as prizes.
Bob always denied it,
but he was told that the next episode would be his last.
When Francis Essex asked Bob to leave the show, it was devastating.
In fact, he said to me,
he said "I said to Francis, Well, Francis, this is a big deal.
"Actually, it's an awful lot of money that I'm not going to get."
And Francis said, "That's the way it is, old chum. You've got to go."
He was very hurt and he was very bitter about it,
because he thought Francis would have given him
the benefit of the doubt.
But Francis didn't, and that's history.
The recording of that final show
is one of the gems of the Monkhouse archive,
and the only surviving copy.
Today it's a time of mixed feelings for me,
as you can imagine, mixed emotions, for this is my last Golden Shot.
After 220-odd programmes and over four years,
this is the last time on a Sunday afternoon
I shall say any of these words,
and that makes me very sad.
It shows Bob unable to believe the show was over for him.
For once, he's distracted,
making a dozen references to his sacking,
and his ad-libbed jokes have a darker edge than usual,
with even a reference to the killing of his replacement, Norman Vaughan,
all live on a Sunday afternoon.
And Mrs Blamires, erm,
well, I'm not too sure where it is.
Her bolt went somewhere in the back of the studio.
Wouldn't it be awful if it had killed Norman Vaughan?
LAUGHTER
What would happen next week? I can't imagine.
Well, he shot one of the centuries.
He was the first man to shoot a century at Lord's.
To hit a century at Lord's.
LAUGHTER
It's better when you say "hit", isn't it?
Well, well...
This has got a lifetime guarantee, this watch.
When the mainspring breaks, it slashes your wrist. And, erm...
LAUGHTER
Things could be worse. I could be here in person.
LAUGHTER
Last time I'll say that, too.
We wanted targets that associated
with sort of land, erm, milestones.
I was about to say "land mines",
and I'm not too far from the truth.
Step back to that gold line. Don't you dare!
I'm mad with power. Ha-ha! Bernie the Bolt!
What can they do to me... if I mugged you even as you aimed?
So, that's the last little topical routine
that I'll have the pleasure of doing.
He was angry on the show, and it does come out.
The shackles are off, and he's at liberty
and loose enough to say really what he wants,
and at one point he does say, "What are you going to do? Sack me?"
And you work for one of the companies, one of the airlines?
Yes. Which one? You can say.
BEA. Ah, you see? Isn't that grand?
A lovely feeling for me. What can they do, fire me?
LAUGHTER
HE LAUGHS
It's not Bob. It's not the way he was.
It was a very sarky, it was a malcontented Bob, it was...
And he just got on with it, I think,
for the sake of getting on with it and moving on.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's goodbye from us here, and goodbye from me.
But I'd like to wish the very best of luck to Norman Vaughan next week
and ask you all to be as kind to him as you've been to me.
Bobby, we can't let you leave like that.
Before you go, we've got a little presentation.
Are we all right for time? Fine.
Yes, we're OK. You'll find this inscribed on the back there... John!
..from everybody in the studio.
It's a watch.
It's a little watch or a pen. Awful present!
Bob was replaced on air with unseemly haste.
Before the show was even over, he was yesterday's man.
The Golden Shot now belonged to Norman Vaughan.
Ta-ra from Birmingham! APPLAUSE
See you next week, 4.45! Ta-ra!
He rang me after the show, and he was in tears. And...
It was nothing against Norman Vaughan.
He was as upset as I ever knew him in all the time that I did know him,
because all the work that he'd done to build up The Golden Shot
had suddenly, it would appear, evaporated into nothing.
The sudden sacking from The Golden Shot
left Bob with no television show of his own.
To fill the gap, he went back to the thing he loved the most,
live stand-up comedy.
In the end, Bob always had the clubs,
and he knew that would last for ever.
"If you haven't seen Bob Monkhouse in cabaret,
"you've never seen a one-man riot."
That's what the Daily Mirror said about me this year.
I'm at the Talk of the North for two nights only, May 8th and 10th.
Book now for The Bob Monkhouse Show, May 8th and 10th.
I'll make you laugh!
I knew him from the quiz shows and Bernie the Bolt
and all that sort of thing,
and I didn't realise how sharp and what a perfectionist that man was.
They'd seen him on telly
and they'd seen him be all that kind of slick, "Hey",
but I'm not sure at the end, people knew just how...
He was VERY good live.
He got a lot of respect from a lot of the newer comics
who'd never seen a guy work like that. He was excellent.
He was absolutely excellent. I don't think people get how good he was.
I'm going to miss that old Golden Shot. Really going to miss it.
AUDIENCE CHEERS
Y'see, when I'm on television, I try to pretend I'm a nice man.
I'm not a nice man, I'm a nasty man. I do really rotten things.
I send calendars to convicts who are serving life sentences.
LAUGHTER
When he came to doing live gigs, he was a lot more sexual innuendo,
a lot racier, a lot ruder.
He wasn't blue by any stretch of the imagination,
but it wasn't the bloke that you saw doing The Golden Shot.
That I should be required to be any kind of a jester,
to respond gratefully on behalf of the guests here tonight
makes about as much sense...
..as taking your wife to a brothel and paying corkage.
LAUGHTER
I asked him about this. He said, "Well, it's therapy. It's release.
"You can't do all that on television,
"so I just really let 'em have it when I'm working live."
Birds and booze. They killed my brother.
He couldn't get either, so he shot himself.
LAUGHTER
My father was ruined by hard drink.
He sat on an icicle.
LAUGHTER
Thought he'd been attacked by an Eskimo from the rear for a moment.
LAUGHTER
I went out with an Eskimo once. We rubbed noses.
I caught a case of sniff-ilis.
LAUGHTER
I remember seeing him in Birmingham being incredibly rude.
It was almost single-entendre humour.
A lot of the material here seems to be very robust, to say the least...
Mm! ..Very bawdy. Why is this?
I don't think it's bawdy. I think it's adult.
I think this audience is extremely quick-witted.
The club audience, I'm talking about.
I think they've had a load of, shall we say,
disinfected pap from television for a long time,
which they like very well in their own homes,
but when they get together, they want to hear something stronger,
brighter, gayer and a little bit more engaged to the adult taste.
He used to do one about me, and he'd say, "Oh, you know,
"Anne Aston, she can't count up to two
"unless she lifts up her sweater."
And I remember my father going,
"Huh! I'll have a word with him afterwards!"
I'll miss that little girl. She's a sweetheart.
She has to take her sweater off to count to two, but she's a sweetie.
LAUGHTER
This was a different Bob Monkhouse,
up close to the audience,
near the knuckle,
no format to worry about,
and he'd had a drink.
Bob did have a drink before the show, a small glass of whisky,
and I said, "I didn't know you had a drink before the show!"
And he memorably said to me, "I never go on alone."
What a joy to be here,
what a delight to see you here in this elegant khazi, what a thrill...
LAUGHTER
It's an Arabic word. Means "palace".
What a thrill to see you here in the Aquarius, Chesterfield.
Won't it look great when they get it finished? Isn't it beautiful?
LAUGHTER
Bob's ritual was to have quite a big chaser, quite a big slurp of whisky,
and he'd bring it on with him.
Bob, I think, liked to sort of quell his excitement
with a little bit of a softener.
Once again, the evidence of Bob's cabaret whisky routine
was left behind in the house.
Dad worked a lot of nightclubs.
He'd do cabaret, and I think when he would leave,
he would then take a drink with him.
The whisky glass was never returned.
And rather than throw a glass away,
he'd put it in a cupboard.
And over the years, I came out with a lot of glasses.
In fact, at home I've still got a lot of those original glasses.
And so there are cupboards and cupboards of these glasses.
They're very normal, very ordinary.
I've got half-pint glasses, I've got quarter-pint glasses,
I've got jugs, I've got frosted glasses.
It was probably the most extensive whisky-glass collection
in the western hemisphere.
Utterly valueless, cos they were all different.
To the crowd in the nightclub, this was something special.
Bob Monkhouse, the nice man from the telly,
live and dangerous.
Bob said to me, "Last night, I did the most awful thing.
"I had a heckler at one of the tables right in front of the stage.
"And you know me, I can handle hecklers."
I said, "Of course, you've got loads of lines to put them down."
He said, "But for some reason, this guy really got to me,
"and I went over to the table and I kicked him right in the teeth."
But it's interesting, isn't it, that even the greats can snap.
# This is your golden day... #
Meanwhile, back in Birmingham,
The Golden Shot had struggled without Bob.
Norman Vaughan just didn't have it.
Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to the new Golden Shot.
Do you like it? Yes!
I remember working with Norman.
He was very sweet...
but made the show look, erm,
slightly more difficult than Bob ever did!
SHE CHUCKLES
Ah, hang on.
You want to fire again? Take it again, please, Norman.
Take it again? Something went wrong?
Take it again, please. Isn't that unusual? No! No?
Who said that? OK, it's you, Alice. I knew you'd be trouble to me.
We're going to both go again, are we?
It was only when other people did it afterwards
that you realised just how good Bob was.
Norman Vaughan struggled a bit.
He handed it on to Charlie Williams,
who struggled a bit.
Welcome to The Golden Shot.
No, a tibula... A tibia and a fibula.
'Yes, and if you break one, I can bandage it up.'
And if I break one...
There's no need to bother about that, flower. Ooh, no!
When Charlie took over,
it was a body blow for Bob to see a show that he'd worked so hard on
and put so much effort and time and imagination into,
into making it the huge success it was,
to see it go down.
And then good sense prevailed,
pretty much as Bob had anticipated,
and as a result of an awful lot of letters being sent to ATV,
saying, "Please reinstate Bob Monkhouse. He's marvellous."
Thank you very much. APPLAUSE
Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen.
It's like...coming home again. This is just like my home.
Filthy and full of strangers.
LAUGHTER HE LAUGHS
Bob was back in charge of The Golden Shot two years after being sacked.
It was a triumphant return.
But 1975 had a sting in the tail.
Just as everything was going Bob's way,
the life of Denis Goodwin was coming to a tragic end.
You know, those awful words "Have you heard about Denis Goodwin?"
And oh, that was a bolt from the blue. That was awful.
I mean, it's terrible when anybody goes, but Denis, from nowhere.
We knew he was having a hard time professionally and everything,
but to hear he'd gone... A complete shock.
Denis Goodwin killed himself
with an overdose of sleeping tablets in February 1975.
Oh, I was shocked.
Sad. It was a tragedy.
And as I talk about it now,
I feel the tragedy of it.
Very sad. I was very upset.
So was Bob. He was in a terrible state.
For a long time, we just used to phone and talk about it
and didn't know what to do.
But Bob had become so big,
and he did everything he could for Denis.
But...didn't work, unfortunately.
It's very sad.
Denis had gone to Hollywood to write for Bob Hope,
but drink and drug problems eventually caught up with him,
and his career suffered.
He was working in a tough environment,
a very competitive environment.
And Mr Hope had a legion of writers,
and it was dog-eat-dog out there, really tough, tough, tough times.
And I don't think he could...
compete in the way that he wanted to.
Bob's continuing success and Bob's star shining bright
maybe didn't help his disposition,
which, sadly,
led to his demise.
With the death of Denis Goodwin,
the last connection with his early career had gone.
He also had a new wife, Jackie,
and together they embarked on the next chapter of Bob's life.
..and here he is, the star master of Celebrity Squares,
the big square himself, Bob Monkhouse!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Oh!
Celebrity Squares was pure and simple ITV entertainment,
a giant game of noughts and crosses with famous faces.
Hello, celebrities! ALL: Hello, Bob!
Do you remember that old ATV show
that ran for so long called New Faces?
Welcome to the sequel, Re-treads.
LAUGHTER
Nearly every one of its 138 episodes was immediately wiped.
It was throwaway TV,
but not to its compere, Mr Monkhouse.
He saved 40 episodes, containing some great moments.
Ooh, good Gawd, it's snowing!
LAUGHTER
No, that's not...
I've got dandruff.
LAUGHTER
Well, keep it to yourself!
Spike for Tony. According to the old superstition,
what does it mean if a hen runs into your house?
Erm...
there's a cock in the district on fertility drugs.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Thank you! Thank you, folks!
This could mean a bonus for all of you!
Now listen, Mr Monkhouse, if you mean Ali,
let me remind you, I sting like a bee.
So watch what you're saying,
or I'll punch you where,
it really would be painful,
right in the Secret Square.
LAUGHTER
I didn't realise how much work people had put into it.
People had been working on the jokes with the writers.
And I just showed up and messed around, really! I was like this...
It was like I was a big puppy on telly!
Celebrity Squares cemented the image of 1970s Bob Monkhouse,
the slick game-show host dressed in increasingly loud jackets...
..all of them specially made,
and all of them carefully stored,
along with every tie from every show.
It was at this time that Bob's popularity
simultaneously reached its highest and lowest point.
In the same week in 1978,
he was top of the list of most-loved and most-hated people on television.
Bob said to me once that he'd been in lists of
TV performers who are loved and TV performers you can't stand,
and as the great Bruce Forsyth once observed, "I was in both."
And Bob said he found himself in widely different lists,
popular and... He said, "I'm a Marmite man.
"You either like me or you can't stand me."
And he said, "You have to live with that. You can't please everybody."
It's quite an achievement, really.
Being top in both probably kind of amused him in his own way.
The thing that worked against him, I think,
was the fact that he was so slick, you know?
Bob was good at what he did.
No matter what talent a performer may have...
..no matter what dedication, the most important thing you can have
is sincerity. That, I think, is a performer's greatest asset
and the key to a performance.
Ladies and gentlemen, sincerity.
Once you've learnt to fake that, you're made.
LAUGHTER
I've often heard people say about Bob
that he was slick, he was insincere.
Bob wasn't.
That was his performance.
That performance was of a man always in control
and with a joke for every possible situation.
How many wings has a beetle?
The only Beatle I can think of with Wings is Paul McCartney.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
But all this confidence hid a deep fear of failure.
It was a concern to him
that he didn't have the comic, comedic instincts,
the natural comedic instincts of, let us say, a Frankie Howerd
or a Tommy Cooper or an Eric Morecambe.
And Bob did feel he had to have ammunition
to turn him into the funny soul, you know?
Everybody needs ammunition,
but some people need it more than others, you know?
And I think he felt, perhaps wrongly,
that he had to be completely armoured.
The Essex county council have announced
they're spending £2 million a year treating alcoholics.
Isn't that ridiculous? LAUGHTER
It's high time those alcoholics bought their own drinks.
LAUGHTER
Bob's need to find new jokes became a lifelong obsession.
He hunted them down with a vengeance
and catalogued them all in a series of ledgers,
otherwise known as the famous Bob Monkhouse joke books.
They were kind of works of art,
because as well as having lovely handwriting...
He was a very dextrous man. ..he was a great artist.
And so he would sit doodling,
so at the end of the day you'd say, "Show us your book,"
and he'd have lovely pictures of me and other people in the room.
And as someone who can't draw,
I've always admired people who can.
Again, it was something else that made me think,
"This guy's quite a special bloke."
If Bob wanted a joke on a plumber,
if one of his contestants was a plumber,
he would spin down to T for Trades,
open it up,
come to the section marked "trades",
go through carpenter, window cleaner, car mechanic.
Ah, plumber. The joke books went with him everywhere.
They were an extension of his soul, really.
Just in case he came across a situation which required a joke,
and he could refer to them.
In 1995, the joke books were famously stolen
and held for ransom.
But after a long police investigation, they were recovered
and handed back to a grateful Mr Monkhouse.
..and here's your host, Bob Monkhouse!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Throughout the 1980s,
the Monkhouse juggernaut was travelling at full speed.
Next came one of TV's greatest game-show hits,
Family Fortunes.
Great! Oh, marvellous. Thank you very much!
You know, applause like that means only one thing to me.
It means we've fixed the sign.
LAUGHTER
Game shows were a vehicle, they were a means to an end.
They weren't the be-all and end-all. They were...
Get him on TV, give him the chance to do his jokes,
and to make light of various situations,
and joke with contestants,
remind the audience you're a comedian but at the same time,
"Actually, I'm still a comedian, I'm still a stand-up comic,
"and this is my tool just to keep my profile high, in the public eye".
The game-show Monkhouse was Bob's greatest creation.
He would change.
He would walk off that set at Family Fortunes to his dressing room,
and he would change in the walk.
From the set to the dressing room, he would change.
If someone knocked on the door...
..he would be Bob Monkhouse again. "Come in!"
And the door would open, and he would be the game-show host again.
It was quite...
It was fascinating, quite honestly.
To his loyal fans, Monkhouse had become Uncle Bob,
a permanent fixture on television for the last 30 years.
He was part of the furniture.
So who better to turn bingo into peak-time entertainment?
Cue Bob's Full House.
What happens to hamsters at the age of three?
Mark? They die. That's right! You just won the second game!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
As the Monkhouse output became more and more bland and formulaic,
even he began to worry about his reputation.
He was always saying,
"There's a whole generation don't know I'm a comedian.
"You know... Game-show host."
I think he probably did more game shows than anybody.
And that rankled a bit with him.
He said, "I want to remind them I'm a comedian."
He was, in a sense, ruined by his success as a game-show host.
That was where the work was,
that was where the fame lay,
and that was his career.
I've given away too many prizes.
People don't and think, "Here's Bob Monkhouse. He tells jokes."
They see me coming and they go... COCKNEY: "It's Monk'ouse.
"He's got prizes.
"Keep 'im talkin'. I'll look for his van."
LAUGHTER
For all his achievements,
Bob Monkhouse always felt that he wasn't accepted
by the comedy establishment.
Bob did feel an outsider in many ways. He said to me once about...
I think the word he used was the "gang" or "the club",
Eric and Ernie, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd.
"Oh, they don't like me." I said, "That's not true."
"All right, they don't reckon me. I'm not one of them."
And you got a feeling that he'd rather like to have been embraced
into that gang and treated as a peer.
I think deep down he was disappointed
that he didn't have the love and affection
that Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper had.
Bear in mind, he came from a very middle-class,
well-to-do, wealthy background.
Most of the comedians when he started were blue-collar,
working-class guys,
so, from the get-go, he was on the outside.
Bob was smart and posh, and...
He felt he wasn't one of them, and he wanted to be.
Bob Monkhouse had become a light-entertainment brand.
With his name in the title,
audiences knew exactly what they were going to get
from Bob's Full House,
and Bob Says Opportunity Knocks.
He was at the very top of his profession,
but he had also pulled off the unenviable trick
of being disliked by both the old guard and the new wave of comedians.
# 'Ello, John, got a new motor? 'Ello, John, got a new motor? #
When you had Rik and Ade and Alexei Sayle and that group coming on,
it made Bob seem a bit old-fashioned for a bit.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen...
Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!
That whole instinct, that compulsion which came out of punk, really,
which was "Anybody can get up on stage and do something",
meant that the rough-and-ready slightly won over
the slick and professional,
because it was newer.
Bob went through a phase of being considered naff.
"He's a naff, mainstream, derivative comic."
I said, "Every morning I wake up, I go to the bathroom,
I look in the mirror and I want to throw up. What's wrong with me?"
He said, "I don't know, but your eyesight is perfect."
LAUGHTER
To make matters worse, in the eyes of the alternative comedians,
Bob had become an enthusiastic supporter of Margaret Thatcher
and the Conservative party.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Next Thursday at the polls,
it won't just be Bob, it'll be Britain saying opportunity knocks.
CHEERING
And if we put Maggie back in for the third time, we'll all be winners.
CHEERING
It probably didn't help Bob's career at that point
that he was aligned with Mrs Thatcher
because you had all these Comic Strip people
and the new people, everybody's material was based on anti-Thatcher.
So there wasn't a lot of room for him probably on television
aside from the game shows.
I did say to him once, "Why did you do that? Why did you...
"tie yourself to the Conservative party quite so...visibly?"
And he said, "Well, I knew Mrs Thatcher couldn't lose,
"and I wanted to be associated with a winner."
Maybe that was a misjudgement.
Bob Monkhouse continued his collecting habit.
At one stage, he had the third biggest
private film collection in the world.
However, with film industry hysteria about video pirates escalating,
his famous collection led to his arrest.
Part of the evidence was that they found in his dustbin
a card from Terry Wogan's young boy saying,
"Thank you for loaning us..." I think it was a James Bond movie.
He wasn't stealing stuff and exploiting it
in the commercial marketplace.
It was for his own personal use
and he shared it with the odd friend.
I don't think he charged Terry Wogan for renting his...
He wasn't making money out of it in any way, shape or form.
He was just a collector.
At one point, our QC actually said to him,
"Bob, you know, if this case goes against you,
"this could be a prison sentence."
After two long years, the case was dismissed at the Old Bailey.
The judge had decided that lending a film to Terry Wogan was not a crime
and Bob walked free.
I certainly don't feel like a pirate any more.
It's terrible being a film pirate, I believe.
You can't watch films with a patch over one eye
and a parrot on your shoulder.
The hangover from the court case,
because it was very scarring for Bob,
was that he didn't go out of his way
to talk about his collection a lot,
and he kept it as private as he could.
I could imagine that he would have been paranoid, almost,
in a nice way,
about the threat to his collection.
He'd done nothing wrong. He was just a collector.
From this point on, Bob's collection was for his eyes only.
Away from the cameras, and away from the TV studios,
Bob pursued his hobby with renewed vigour.
The late '70s and early '80s were a boom time for home recording,
with all kinds of machines and formats hitting the shops.
I have video recorders in every room of my house.
No, my wife won't let them in the loo
because there's one thing she does in there
she doesn't want freeze-framed
or played back at a more convenient time.
Dad had about...must have had about six machines in the house,
all recording things at different times.
Jackie would call dinner and say, "Dinner's on the table."
You wouldn't see him for five minutes
while he was still sorting out this tape or that tape.
If we were having a chat, a meeting in the house,
going through material,
he'd look at his watch and say, "Excuse me, Carl,"
and he'd disappear out of that room,
go into another room,
and set a VHS.
He'd disappear three or four times during the course of an evening
to record stuff.
It was verging on obsession.
And then he would go away on holiday,
so obviously wasn't there to be able to record things.
And I know he sent off... He would get the Radio or TV Times
and he would go through the listings to see what was on
and mark what was wanted,
and send off a fax to somebody to go and actually record them for him.
Now, this was a daily occurrence, so when he came back,
he was probably recording maybe eight hours of material a day.
And when he came back, there was all this vast mountain of video tapes,
and in those days, video tapes were big, chunky, bulky things.
Even Bob's enormous house wasn't big enough to contain the vast amounts
of Betamax and VHS recordings.
The solution was a new building in the garden.
Bob called it "The Boardroom".
There was so much recorded there weren't enough hours in the day.
There weren't enough days left in his life when he was middle-aged,
to watch all the stuff that he amassed.
About 50,000 VHSs in what he called the boardroom,
which was a shed... Sorry, Bob!
..that he had built in the garden because he ran out of room
to house VHSs in the house.
I am fascinated by what his wife must have thought of his shed...
LAUGHTER
..and his cellar.
It must have been impossible. I really sympathise with her.
Jackie hated it, of course, cos she wanted to throw stuff away,
but she daren't touch anything of his stuff because
"I've got it, it's OK."
Jackie faced a constant battle
to keep Bob's collecting habits under control.
She would maybe say to me,
"Where's this stuff appeared from?" You know.
And I'd say, "Oh...
"it was in the back of the car. I'd been keeping that.
"I forgot to bring it in the night before a gig.
"Oh, I know nothing about it. I don't want it.
"Just take it back home with you. You keep it."
Bob Monkhouse loved the art of comics.
He would buy hundreds every year,
ranging from his childhood favourites
to the very latest titles.
Bob was, himself, a talented illustrator.
As a precocious schoolboy,
he was supplying artwork to the Beano and the Dandy.
He loved that. He would have loved to have been a cartoonist, I think.
It would have made him happy.
Later, he was able to buy large quantities of original comic art
which ended up covering the walls of his house.
The attention to detail that Bob brought to his collection
is, at times, bewildering, but always unique.
His cataloguing of the magazine TV Times is a case in point.
Bob kept the very earliest examples of the TV Times.
Right from issue one, Bob was collecting it.
And what was more, he was collating it into bound volumes
and he was actually writing inside those volumes.
Television was always live in those days
and so it was very common for artists to change
at the last minute, so what was actually in the TV Times
would not actually be accurate.
Bob would go through and very carefully cross out
who didn't appear and write in who did appear.
And he'd go into minute detail.
He'd write in literally every single member of the cast,
and that is something that people would not normally do,
and I think it shows a lot about Bob's personality.
So a programme such as Oh Boy! would go out at 10.50 at night.
Bob would change the time to reflect the true time
it went out at 10.37 and,
at the time, he was the only person keeping that record.
You begin to wonder
whether he had some form of compulsive collecting disorder.
It's fairly...extreme, you know,
annotating copies of the TV Times
with what actually went out on screen and so on.
I can't see that served any useful purpose.
Armed with his TV Times,
Bob was able to record all the television shows he wanted.
He had also, of course, been recording radio shows
from as early as the 1940s.
Probably the most exciting part of the Bob Monkhouse collection
is actually the audio part of it,
because it goes back to 1948,
which is far earlier than many other broadcasters have kept material,
and it's absolutely unique.
There were radio recordings there off air of people like Tony Hancock.
The Tony Hancock Appreciation Society
were jumping up and down in excitement.
They couldn't wait to listen to them again.
In this unique Hancock's Half Hour,
Sid James and Tony get ready for the 1958 Commonwealth Games.
SID: Now, I would have thought you were a hammer throwing man, myself.
You have got the build for it.
You know, you've done some in the past. I can see that.
TONY: No, no, no, no, you've summed me up wrong there.
No. I'm a pole vaulter.
LAUGHTER
I had my best season this year.
3'6" last week.
LAUGHTER
3'6" and went over like a bird.
LAUGHTER
Yes, well, they're clearing 14ft in the Games.
Ah, yes, I know, but I'm handicapped with my weight, you see.
LAUGHTER
I run along and dig the pole in the ground
and I take off and the pole sinks.
LAUGHTER
I might tell you, I have to let go of it a bit sharpish to do 3'6".
LAUGHTER
We also have Bob to thank
for saving several performances by Frankie Howerd.
Here is Frankie in full swing
in the only surviving recording of Light Up Again from 1953.
Today I want you all to be chummy and matey.
Not too matey, mate!
LAUGHTER
No, one seat, one person.
LAUGHTER
I mean, I don't mind you putting your arms round each other
but have a thought for the five people in-between you.
You take your festivities too far.
I went to this pet shop and there was the owner, a little old man,
polishing a monkey. I said...
LAUGHTER
I said, "Good morning." LAUGHTER
Come along now, please.
Thank you. Don't doze off. So I said...
LAUGHTER
I said, "Good morning. I think you're expecting me."
He said, "Yes, I've cleaned your cage out." Cheeky devil!
LAUGHTER
Cheeky devil!
He loved comedy.
It was obsession, almost.
And he just wanted to know why people laughed,
what were the new things that people were laughing at,
or the new people that the audiences were laughing at.
He wanted to understand it to make sure he hadn't missed something.
It was a kind of positive obsessiveness.
It led his mind into all sorts of places
from which he profited,
both intellectually and professionally.
One of the most exciting discoveries was the audio recordings
of four episodes of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Not Only But Also.
These were thought lost completely
but, thanks to Bob, we can at least hear them again.
Here, have a taste of this. Have a guess what it is.
I made it in the cookery class.
Um...I don't really know.
Is it a blancmange or something?
No, it's cauliflower cheese.
LAUGHTER
Good, isn't it? I thought it was Esperanto tonight?
Well, they're combining Esperanto and cookery in a crash course.
They give you the recipe in Esperanto.
Oh, I see. Well, what is Esperanto for cauliflower cheese?
I think this is one of the few cases
where the Esperantos use the same word as we do. Cauliflower cheese.
LAUGHTER
There are no such people as the Esperantos.
Esperanto is a composite language, Dud.
There's no place called Esperanto?!
No. Oh, I wrote off for two weeks there in August.
LAUGHTER
What's all this rubbish you brought back?
What, these books? These are my reference books.
Reference books? Yes. Angelique.
The Voyeur.
The Adventurers.
The Nude Ice Murders.
What sort of rubbish is this you're digesting?
I'm writing a novel.
What kind of novel are you writing?
I thought a bestseller would be a good thing.
LAUGHTER
In some ways it was easy for Bob to acquire comedy memorabilia
because he always worked alongside legendary performers.
ERIC AND ERNIE: # Whether they cheer or boo
# You can see it through
ALL: # When you've somebody there at your side. #
This very rare Morecambe and Wise script
from their 1954 show, Running Wild,
was picked up when Bob himself was recording Fast And Loose
at the same BBC studios.
Likewise, Bob's time at ATV in the 1970s
gave him access to a unique recording
of another ATV show,
New Faces.
# You're a star, you're a star... #
The very first TV appearance by a 16-year-old Lenny Henry
had been thought lost for ever.
I'd been looking for it for 30-something years.
It was a very important document to me
because the very first appearance was where people saw
the promise in me and the potential in me.
And I'd never seen it. I'd never had it.
But the other day, I was sort of on the phone to my PA
and she said, "Oh, somebody wants to get in touch with you
"from Birmingham.
"They've got your first ever New Faces appearance, and they're..."
And I went, "What, what what, what, what?!"
I said "what" that many times.
"What?"
"They said they've got your first-ever New Faces.
"It was in Bob Monkhouse's basement."
LAUGHTER
He's a really new, exciting face to television. Just 16 years old.
Enough from me. Let him express himself in three minutes,
as we bring on Mr Lenny Henry!
APPLAUSE
MUSIC: Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em Theme
AS FRANK: Who saw the Queen on Christmas Day then, my darling?
LAUGHTER
That's my baby, Jessica, that is.
LAUGHTER
Oh!
There's a lot of people out there.
If you're wondering about the slightly permanent suntan...
..it all started when Betty got me a job as a salesman for Ambre Solaire.
LAUGHTER
It's not funny. I only put a teaspoonful on.
I can't get it off now. LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
And I'd been asking people for years, "Have you got that first...?
"No, not the London Palladium one where I did Al Jolson
"and sang Leaning On A Lamp Post..."
Christ knows why. "..but the first one where I was doing stuff
that I'd written that I'd worked in the clubs,
"Club Lafayette in Wolverhampton and the Summerhill in Dudley.
"That material?"
That was definitely more Lenny than that other stuff.
And the fact that Bob recognised that...
..that was a big deal.
APPLAUSE
Suddenly, for...that performance to show up again...
..that meant a lot to me,
and the fact that Bob had it, and Bob always had it...
..it did make me see him in a different light
because there was always a tinge of respect there for him,
but my respect for him went up hugely.
And I was incredibly grateful to him for holding on to it,
cos nobody else had it.
Bob never stopped collecting comedy.
It was his passion and his life.
And in the Bob Monkhouse Show,
which ran from 1983 to 86,
he had the chance to share his admiration for his fellow comedians.
APPLAUSE
This series is completely different. It's all about comedy and comedians.
Comedians are always my heroes
cos they're the performers who walk out on stage
with no excuse for being there, except your laughter.
MUSIC AND APPLAUSE
CHEERING AND LAUGHTER
What is it?
Bend forward. Now, you can look that way.
Now, I want you to breathe in and out.
Me? Yes. No, out with the mouth open.
With the mouth open? HE PANTS
Yeah.
I'm not sure if it's you or not, actually.
LAUGHTER
I've been getting these obscene phone calls all week.
LAUGHTER
The '80s was a turbulent time for comedy.
The new alternative comedians wanted to replace the established stars,
and Bob was written off, along with many others of his generation.
For all the good changes that alternative comedy brought about,
we threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
Bob Monkhouse, unfortunately,
was lumped in with the worst excesses of mainstream comedy.
When alternative comedy came through,
he was linked with the likes of Bernard Manning
and the likes of Jim Davidson,
and that wasn't fair.
However, as the '90s approached,
and pure stand-up comedy came back into fashion,
Bob Monkhouse began to be seen in a whole new light.
Suddenly, Bob's old school panache
and style and facility with a joke became fashionable again.
Do you know Helga?
Some of the guys will know "Helga, your inflatable girlfriend.
LAUGHTER
"She never has a headache".
No, but you do after you've blown the bloody thing up.
LAUGHTER
Suddenly he got on Have I Got News For You. Here's Bob Monkhouse,
and people didn't know him, almost a new generation.
On Ian Hislop's team
is a comedian who recently said that comedy was just like sex.
So we look forward to him being incredibly funny for five minutes
and then falling asleep for the rest of the show.
LAUGHTER Bob Monkhouse. Five! That's a compliment.
The Minister For Silly Walks. Look at him.
It's interesting that if you rearrange the letters
that spell Michael Portillo,
they come out as "I talk bollocks".
LAUGHTER
Obviously, that's give or take a letter.
LAUGHTER
MUSIC: 20th Century Boy by T Rex
By 1995, the comeback was complete,
and Bob embarked on the series that would finally earn him the affection
that have sometimes eluded him at his peak.
On The Spot was one man and his audience.
It was back to where it all began.
APPLAUSE
It was Bob Monkhouse, stand-up comedian.
APPLAUSE
I once had a Yorkshire terrier. I love them.
They're lovely dogs, and so handy for washing the car.
LAUGHTER
They're marvellous cos they're the same size as the bucket. Hold your breath. In you go.
It was called On The Spot and it genuinely was on the spot.
It was Bob doing half an hour each week,
no sketches, no padding,
no interviews, just Bob.
I have a cat. He's old now.
He's going bald, but he combs his tail over the bald spot.
LAUGHTER
Bob Monkhouse had come full circle.
It was just like 1947,
Bob on the BBC in his bow tie,
telling jokes, and getting laughs.
His approach to his final few years was very smart and classy.
He seemed to try and reinvent himself as a comic.
You know, became a kind of...
"I'm the grandaddy of them all, and I know what I'm doing".
I'm a comedian, by the way.
LAUGHTER
I like to get that established fairly early on.
I tell you something, it isn't easy.
If I'm somewhere where they don't know me at all,
and they say at a dinner party, "What do you do?"
and I say, "I'm a comedian,"
they always say the same thing. "You're a comedian? Tell me a joke."
They don't do this to any other profession.
They don't say, "You're a chef? Bake me a pie."
LAUGHTER
They don't say, "You're a politician? Ooh! Tell me a lie."
LAUGHTER
They don't say, "You're a gynaecologist, take a look at the wife." They don't.
LAUGHTER
You know, he still looked great.
He didn't look like a senior citizen or anything.
He'd been around so long, he thought, "I'm being accepted now
"as an elder statesman who's done a lot and been here a long time."
I think that probably relaxed him a bit.
You know, he wasn't straining and pushing at it any more.
He thought, "No, I think they accept me now."
Bob Monkhouse now began to relax about his place in the world.
He published a confessional autobiography,
Crying With Laughter.
And, for the first time in his life,
talked publicly about his deepest feelings.
It was now time to look back,
and make sense of the 50-year career his driving ambition had given him.
A career which he had so meticulously documented.
I used...
..work in order to distance the problems...
..at home, and emotional problems.
I kept them...
..to one side while I got on with my work.
He was relaxed, in a strange way.
He thought, "I will stop wearing this...mask,
and just...come out.
"And I will just talk about things."
Which he'd never done in public before.
And it was quite touching.
I thought, "Bob's letting it all out now."
It was at this time, in 1992,
that Bob's eldest son Gary, suffering with cerebral palsy,
died at just 40 years old.
I think most parents of a grossly handicapped child...
..will see it not as their tragedy, but as their child's tragedy.
And then,
as in the case of my son,
you begin to learn from the child.
And he...
was such a...
..a straight arrow.
He was a source of great inspiration to me. And...
And I think of him every day.
And if I...
..grieve, as I do,
I grieve not for his death, but for his life,
which was a very difficult fight for him.
Sadly, there was more tragedy to come.
A family argument with his youngest son, Simon, had escalated,
and the two hardly spoke for over ten years.
As a child, Simon had been the star of his father's home movies.
But as an adult, he had drifted away from his famous father.
With their differences still unresolved,
the shock news reached Britain in May 2001
that Simon Monkhouse had died of a heroin overdose
in a Bangkok hotel.
Three days later he called to say,
"Do you know, I'm walking around the house like a ghost?
"I can't concentrate on anything."
And I think the effect of Simon's passing...
..lasted the rest of Bob's life. I don't think he ever got over it.
A few months later,
Bob's own life looked to be coming to an end,
when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
He called me, and he said, "Oh, I've got a bit of bad news."
So I said, "Oh, what's up?"
He said, "They've given me two years."
"You're joking?"
When he was diagnosed with the cancer,
his way of dealing with it was to make jokes about it.
He was on Michael Parkinson's show, the year he died,
being very funny about the diagnosis of prostate cancer,
even as the other guests,
Peter Kay's one of them, even as the other guests,
you can hear them kind of going,
"Oh. Oh, dear. Oh."
So here's the joke.
LAUGHTER
I said, "How long have I got to live?" He said, "Ten."
I said, "What, months? Weeks?"
He said, "Nine..."
LAUGHTER
Not bad, is it? Anyway, he said,
"Er... Well, OK, it's treatable. It's incurable, but it's treatable."
I'm not scared of dying anyway.
Are you not? I'm not. Death is a terrible thing.
The trouble is, the next day, you're so bloody stiff.
LAUGHTER
Knowing that time was running out,
Bob went back to his roots for one last night of stand-up comedy.
Most of the audience were young comedy writers and performers,
eager to see the master joke teller in action.
It was never broadcast,
until now.
The one and only Bob Monkhouse.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And someone at the BBC said, "Let's organise a gig, Bob.
"We'll get a load of comics in, and you can go on stage."
Now, most comedians would run a mile from that.
I'd rather get killed now, at my age, than do that gig.
But Bob took that on board and said, "Yes."
I remember being in the audience, with other comics.
David Walliams was there, Kevin Day were there.
I remember, we were all thinking, "Who would do this gig?"
I think sleeping in the nude is a perfectly natural...
Well, maybe you shouldn't do it on those LONG flights.
LAUGHTER
The sense of camaraderie in the room that night
that Bob fostered was remarkable.
It was really a wonderful thing to be part of.
And also very, very funny.
There used to be a sort of a bar on the way through to a dance hall,
where I lived in Beckenham, Kent.
You probably know I come from Kent.
I hear people mention the word, they mutter it as they see me.
LAUGHTER
I had an affair with a lady optician once, who drove me mad in bed.
She kept saying, "Is it better like this, or better like that?"
LAUGHTER
I think it was important for Bob to be able to show people like us
how good he really was as a stand-up,
because he was a fantastic stand-up.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Thank you.
Oh! Ohh! Oh! Can't get better than that!
He said goodbye to an audience for the very last time,
and took his final bow.
It was the end of an extraordinary career,
which spanned the golden era of British entertainment.
The last few days of Bob's life were spent quietly at home.
From here,
Bob Monkhouse said his farewells to his closest friends.
Amongst them, Joe Pasquale.
Jackie phoned me up, and said, "Bob came to last night.
"And he said..."
"He sai...
"He came to, and he said,
"'I know why I can't move any more.'"
And basically, he had all these cancers all over him.
And one of them was on his neck, on his spinal cord,
which stopped him having any type of movement at all.
And he hadn't really been lucid at all for ages.
All of a sudden he came to in the middle of the night.
And he said, "I know why I can't move." So she said, "Why?"
And he said, "Because... I've been visited by aliens,
"and they've given me some sort of anaesthetic, and I can't move."
He said to her, "But don't worry, Joe Pasquale's coming,
"and when Joe gets here, he's got the antidote.
"So make sure you send him in as soon as he gets here."
So Jackie phoned me, and she said that to me.
And I went in, and he was gone completely.
You know, he was just laying there, and his eyes were shut.
All I had with me was a Woolworth receipt for some pick'n'mix,
that I'd bought.
And I said, "Bob, I can't stay, I've got two shows."
He wasn't listening, I don't know what was going on in his head,
if anything was going on at all.
And I said, "Jackie said that you've been waiting for me.
"I've got the antidote."
And all it was was a Woolworth's receipt for pick'n'mix.
And I put it in his hand, and I said, "You can go now, Bob.
"So, just leave it." And then I left.
And the next day he died.
When I said I wanted to become a comedian, everybody laughed at me.
Well, they're not laughing now, are they?
LAUGHTER
Most of the people for whom I worked as a young man, as a writer,
are forgotten now.
Forgotten comedians, they're forgotten fame.
Fame is an addiction,
stronger than most.
And it's very passing...
once its usefulness is ended.
No, I think I'd just as soon be...forgotten.
The life and career of Bob Monkhouse,
and the significance of the collection of recordings he left behind,
was celebrated at London's Bafta in October 2009.
The event was organised by the film and TV company, Kaleidoscope,
who have been entrusted with preserving the entire collection.
Friends, colleagues and fans
gathered to spend a day being entertained by Bob Monkhouse.
After a 30-year wait,
Lenny Henry was able to see his first-ever TV appearance,
as a 16-year-old on New Faces.
It was another day of laughter courtesy of Bob Monkhouse.
It was also the day of reunion for the names Monkhouse and Goodwin.
For Denis Goodwin's daughter, Suki,
and Bob's daughter Abigail.
Look at these letters here.
You expect me to guess their destination? That one...
LAUGHTER
It's very touching to see that he's appreciated.
He was a writer, and funny,
and that's all he wanted to do, was make people laugh.
And today I sort of felt that.
And I felt the chemistry between our two dads. Definitely.
And I'd heard about it, for all those years,
but to actually see and feel it was really good.
I bet they had loads of fun. Don't you think?
Yes, they looked like they had fun.
They looked like they giggled their whole way through their lives
at that point. Definitely. Yeah.
Bob and I used to share books quite a lot, and...
we were apt to...
sort of philosophise about...
the last couple of lines from Fred Allen's autobiography,
which went, if I remember...
"What has a comedian to show for...all the years
"of hard work and aggravation, except...
"the echo of forgotten laughter?"