BOB MONKHOUSE OBE 1928 - 2003

Robert Ross remembers the great comedian, writer and actor Bob Monkhouse OBE, also a famed TV game show host who was never off our screens back in the day!

Bob with Kenneth Connor in Carry on Sergeant (1958)

Never has a comedian been more trapped by his own success and brilliance as Bob Monkhouse. The consummate professional and almost every television producer’s first choice for host of the latest attempt to revive an old game show format or launch a brand new one, Bob’s effortless panache and unfailing cheerfulness was, he knew, not to everybody’s taste. For one man’s seamless delivery was another man’s smarmy conceit; one woman’s winning grin was another woman’s cheesy grimace.

There was The Golden Shot - twice - from 1967; and again for the 1974 season - in which Bob would channel telephone callers from the general public in instructions for a blindfolded cameraman firing arrows at a target. ‘Bernie the Bolt’ loaded the weapon and, presumably, took care of health and safety!

There was Celebrity Squares - twice again - in the late seventies, and mid-nineties, with nine personalities locked in a living game of noughts and crosses. There were the games that only Monkhouse could present -Bob’s Full House, and Bob’s Your Uncle; then, finally, he took over from Paul Daniels for Wipeout, a game so fiendish that schedulers buried it in the daytime schedules. The first and only time Bob was off prime time in the game show stakes.