Bob Monkhouse(1928-2003)

One of British TV's most popular performers with a career that spanned over four decades, funny-man Bob Monkhouse started off as a radio broadcaster (1947) and stand-up comic. He earned success early on as a gag writer, partnering with Denis Goodwin.

In 1953, the duo won their own TV show called Fast and Loose (1954), which was sketch-comedy based. A nightclub comedian to boot, he also pursued films on occasion appearing in such slapstick dillies as Carry on Sergeant (1958), Dentist in the Chair (1960), Dentist on the Job (1961) and A Weekend with Lulu (1961). But TV would be his prime venue, and he moved quite easily into various parlor game and variety show hosting duties.

For Love or Money (1959) was his first, a Brit version of "Candid Camera". Along the way, he found emceeing chores with The London Palladium Show (1966), The Golden Shot (1967) (which made him a household name), Celebrity Squares (1975) (based on The Hollywood Squares (Daytime) (1965)), Family Fortunes (1980), "The $64,000 Question", Opportunity Knocks (1956), The National Lottery (1994), and many others. Monkhouse died in 2003 of prostate cancer.

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TV Series

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Alternative name
- Bob Monkhouse OBE
Height
- 5′ 10″ (1.78 m)
Born
- June 1, 1928
- Beckenham, Kent, England, UK
Died
- December 29, 2003
- Eggington, Bedfordshire, England, UK(prostate cancer)
Spouses
Other works
Stage: Sauce Piquante (Cambridge Theatre, London), 1950. One of his co-stars was a pre-stardom Audrey Hepburn.
Publicity listings

Trivia
He owned a Sony CV-2000, one of the first video recorders, which was introduced in 1965 and he used it to capture many of his own television performances which would otherwise not exist today. Over the period from the late 1960s until his death, his collection grew to a vast library of over 150,000 hours of material. As television companies routinely wiped their own copies in those days, many shows in the Monkhouse collection are unique. Upon his death all this material, in addition to hundred of hours of personal audio copies of radio shows commencing in the 1940s, were passed to an archivist for transfer to a permanent digital record.