Bob Monkhouse was a fixture on TV as I was growing up. He'd always been there - hell, given his age and success he must have always seemed to have been there for my parents too. And he was bloody good at what he did, having the common touch to host game shows and having a joke for each occasion. Of course, being so good for so long meant he was rarely appreciated, instead being the butt of jibes about his permanent tan, his insurance salesman smile and his greasy slickness as a host. We didn't know about his stand-up career, nor the early sitcoms and serious acting. Arguably his gameshow omnipresence undersold a man who worked hard to make himself a fine comedian and gifted teller of jokes. And then, at the end of his career, he managed to remind everyone how god he'd made himself with shows such as Bob Monkhouse On The Spot, where he came up with jokes on topics randomly suggested by audience members. And, rightly, he spent the last eight years of his life reassessed as one of the finest comedians in Britain for over fifty years. A friend of mine witnessed his stand-up show and, having seen a fair number of those considered our best and brightest comedians, still thought it was the finest one he'd seen.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Documentaries called 'The Secret Life Of...' always ring alarm bells, similarly titled documentaries on Channel 4 being hatchet job on beloved comedians. This never fell into the trap of prurience though. Instead it presented a balanced overview of a long career, never shying away from more awkward or controversial moments. It covered the bright but doomed partnership with Dennis Goodwin, a career crisis where he all but abandoned comedy for serious acting and his controversial dismissal from The Golden Shot (and the footage of Norman Vaughan and Charlie Williams revealed what a poor decision that was and how easy Monkhouse made a ridiculously difficult job look). It even showed footage of the last of his Golden Shots before Vaughan took over, which showed a bitter edge to the comedy. It was a clear eyed run through one of the great light entertainment careers, and revealing to those of us who only knew him in his later years.
The real meat of the documentary though were the insights into the man behind the smarm. Without being overly intrusive, it covered the twin tragedies of his children (one having cerebral palsy, leading to a near heartbreaker of a moment where Monkhouse almost cracked talking about it on a chatshow, another dying of a heroin overdose in Thailand) and covering his last days. But what it revealed was the OCD collector behind the front, a man who not only collected comics (the walls of his house were covered in them) but who was absolutely obsessive about comedy. Obsessive to the point of recording everything possible (he had one of the first VCRs in the UK apparently had eight VCRs). He had to build a 'shed' in the garden to accommodate his video collection, which included a massive number of otherwise lost material. And he even obsessively annotated the Radio and TV Times to the times when programmes actually started. To someone who thinks they've still got too many videos like myself, the sheer number of tapes was jaw dropping and according to archivists the range of material recovered was even more so. To prosecute him for having the collection, on the basis of a note from Terry Wogan's son recovered from his dustbin was far more criminal than anything a quiet English obsessive was up to in preserving history that would otherwise have been lost.
What we got wasn't anything like a hatchet job. Instead it was a fitting tribute which recognised what an achievement his career was whilst prising off his mask enough to expose what the man behind it was really like. Behind that smooth mask was one of the great obsessive eccentrics that England seem to produce so many of. If anything, the documentary deepened the appreciation of the man by delving into his private life. There was no obvious agenda, just the story of one of the great entertainers and what drove him. Quite simply the textbook example of what a career spanning documentary should be.
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