In the 1970s, a daily newspaper conducted a poll in which the stand-up comic and game-show host Bob Monkhouse, who has died from cancer aged 75, emerged as the third most popular performer on television. A week later, the same paper held another poll to discover which TV performers readers most hated. Bob Monkhouse headed the list.
There was always a discrepancy between the mass appeal of Monkhouse, who could draw audiences of up to 20 million, and the unease, bordering sometimes on aversion, which his enigmatic personality could produce. George Melly, on the face of it an unlikely fan, always argued that the fascination was there not only because Monkhouse had brilliance in making up a joke about anything, but more importantly because there was something hidden in him that was quite unlike the toothily grinning exterior mask.
Monkhouse himself was always edgy, even when time had made him a grand old man of British comedy, because of the number of times the word "smarmy" was used about him. Half a dozen times in one 400-word tabloid story, he would say, with the blankly empty expression that was the nearest the public ever came to glimpsing his inner pain. He had to endure far more nasty descriptions than most performers. One young woman interviewer wrote, perhaps with perception as chilling as his own, that he had "the eyes of a 1950s starlet". This was apparently at odds with his obsessively heterosexual encounters that helped end his first marriage; though his obsessive willingness to discuss at length these encounters in speech and print was thought curious by some women, who regarded him as misogynistic.
Perhaps the man who hosted some 30 different game-show formats, always smiling and only latterly doing anything as apparently human as crying on air, needed to have a certain flat amorality, an ability to be an instant avuncular chum to contestants and to forget the whole thing the next day. Some of his detractors saw something almost sinister in his humour, and he agreed that it could be the humour of the concentration camp: "I'd like to die like my old dad, peacefully in his sleep, not screaming like his passengers." If sinister undercurrents were there, his family background prepared them.
Before the word was coined, the Monkhouses were - according to his own memories - a repulsively dysfunctional family, even if a well-off one. His father, a company head accountant, catching sight of the boy naked in the bath, hit him so hard that he had to be taken to a doctor. His mother embraced him only once, and that was when they were both in a wartime Morrison air-raid shelter and heard a flying bomb land nearby. Even then, her concern was for her own feelings - she thought her own mother might have been hit - rather than a need to comfort her son. Most of the slender comfort in his childhood came from his grandfather, who headed the Glass Custard Powder factories at Birmingham and Glasgow, a sort of Mr Pickwick figure.
From the age of seven, Monkhouse pursued comforting fantasy by writing his own stories, with the systematic diligence of an accountant. At Dulwich College he wrote for the comics Beano and Dandy, then at 14 began drawing cartoons for Hotspur, Wizard and Adventure. He did the Peptalk Polonius serial and became the author of more than 100 60-page Harlem Hotspots porn novelettes. He linked up with Denis Goodwin to form a writing duo; years later Goodwin fell by the wayside and in 1975 committed suicide; Monkhouse typically survived.
Altogether at Dulwich, which was near his home at Beckenham, he wrote a million words under 10 aliases and saved £125. He wrote Sexton Blake novellas as Boris Ashton, eight Hank Jansen novels, and claimed to have dictated on to wire tape a 40,000-word novel between dusk and dawn. He did his first stand-up routine in a Beckenham park when he was 17, and then with Goodwin wrote in a cellar, where they also photographed their secretary as a nude model and sold the prints in Oxford Street.
If there was something unattractively cold and morally tone-deaf about all this energetic enterprise, Monkhouse certainly paid a price. His mother told him she would not have him in the house if he stuck to show business or married. He went on writing gags for a growing clientele - including the American Bob Hope, as well as the British Ted Ray and Jimmy Edwards - and at 20 married his first wife Elizabeth, who he had met when both were in the RAF. His mother did not speak to him for 17 years, and his father slavishly followed suit.
Monkhouse was an odd-job writer and spearhead and cabaret performer of his own gags for some years (he remained very much in demand in cabaret all his life). Television quizzes started to boost him in 1952 with Why? from Alexandra Palace. Critics made clever remarks based on the title, but Monkhouse soon showed that his skills as a manipulator of contestants and audiences were an unusual and lucrative blend in the (ex-American) The Golden Shot in 1967. The game-show featured members of the audience who guided, via the telephone, a blindfolded marksman called "Bernie the Bolt" to fire a crossbow arrow into a target to win prizes.
Bob's Full House, Celebrity Squares (another US import), Bob's Your Uncle, The 65,000 Dollar Question and Bob Says Opportunity Knocks followed. Audience figures were often between 15 and 20 million.
By 1992 he was earning £250,000 a year from his skills, which he himself bleakly described as those of a third-rate entertainer without real talent but with real facility. He still did not know why so many people felt so hostile to him; though he remarried (to his long-time secretary Jackie) shortly after his first marriage broke up after 15 years, it still bothered him. His 1993 autobiography Crying With Laughter was self-lacerating, but perhaps had a positive effect in making him seem more human.
Lorna Dickinson, who produced An Audience With Bob Monkhouse (1994), the hour-long programme of his own routines credited with kick-starting his further career with newcomers like Jonathan Ross on Gag Tag, came to the conclusion that Monkhouse had an overwhelming compulsion to be loved and, as he did not look like a comedian or have an endearing northern working-class background, had to work a computer-like brain hard to achieve that love and admiration.
His life held much tragedy. His eldest son Gary, who suffered from cerebral palsy, died in 1992, and in April 2001, his 46-year-old son Simon died of a heroin overdose in Thailand. Father and son had not spoken for 13 years.
Despite the tragedies, which saw him publicly rounded on by his ex-wife, the mother of his three children, Monkhouse was still regarded as a truly great British institution. There was something humanly off-putting about his unstoppability. But it made him a survivor. He survived even the theft in 1995 of his two battered red ring-binder books in which he had worked over the years on future jokes and routines and which he always kept at night in a briefcase at his bedside, in case of fire. After offering a reward he was reunited with them the following year.
He appeared in 12 films, including the very first Carry On film, Carry On Sergeant, in 1958. He also acted in dramas, most recently in 1993, when he starred with comedian Hugh Laurie in All Or Nothing At All. He was also awarded the OBE that year.
At the age of 70, he produced a further volume of memoirs, Over The Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993-98. He continued to appear frequently on television, fronting the National Lottery Draw and the quiz show Wipeout.
He is survived by his wife and daughter Abigail.
· Bob Monkhouse, comedian, born June 1 1928; died December 29 2003