Originally Posted by
79blue
You are judging Bob Monkhouse on his game show period, which was a smarmy persona, but it was the role he played. Don’t judge a book by the cover.
He spent the first 20 years as a performer and scriptwriter, writing for all the big names at the time. He used to write for Bob Hope on his British tours.
Throughout his career he wrote down every single joke he wrote or came across in an indexed archive. That enabled him to find a joke for any occasion when scriptwriting.
He also had one of the biggest archives of film TV and radio shows in the country which was handed over to the BFI. It contained many shows on TV and radio that had been thought lost. It was from this archive that Lenny Henry’s first appearance from Opportunity Knocks, was found after being considered lost for ever.
Not long before his death he did a stand-up show in 2003 for which he invited all the top comedy talent in this county to attend, with many wondering why they invited. By the end of the show everyone who attended were dumbstruck by the quality of his comedy, his career and the all the gods of comedy he worked with during it. It takes real guts to do that.
I felt like you about him until a watched a documentary about him 10 years after his death, which covered what I had written above and much more.
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