Bob Monkhouse, 75; U.K. Comic, Game Show Host

Bob Monkhouse, a veteran British comedian and game show host whose talent for rapid-fire jokes made him hugely popular even as his unctuous charm invited many to disdain him, has died. He was 75.

Monkhouse died Dec. 29 at his home in the Bedfordshire town of Eggington, northwest of London. He had suffered from prostate cancer for several years.

Though not well known in the United States, he was a household name in England. During a career that spanned nearly 50 years, he was host of a series of television game shows, including “The Golden Shot,” “Celebrity Squares” (a spinoff of the U.S. show “Hollywood Squares”), “Candid Camera” and “Bob’s Full House.”

He also appeared in a dozen movies, including “Carry On Sergeant,” “Dentist in the Chair” and “The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom.” And almost until his death, he performed comedy routines in cabarets and gave speeches.

But, despite his success and the admiration of many of his peers, many of his countrymen considered Monkhouse himself a joke, laughing at his oily personality and celebrity tan -- the latter the result both of time spent at his vacation home in Barbados and of makeup he used to disguise a skin pigmentation disorder.

“He looks like a ready-roasted supermarket chicken coated with glucose,” the Guardian of London wrote of Monkhouse in 1998.

Even the comedian, asked what people thought of him, would sadly say: “smarmy.”

“I knew I wasn’t endearing,” he once said. He told Corinna Honan of the Daily Telegraph of London, “One of the most irritating things about someone seeking approval is that their desperation is apparent.”

The roots of his desperation were in his childhood. His father, an accountant, was remote at best, and his mother believed that showing emotion was a weakness -- Monkhouse said she had hugged him only once, when a bomb exploded near their air-raid shelter during World War II. When his beloved grandfather died, Monkhouse stopped speaking for three months.

An overweight, lonely child, he began writing stories at age 7, and by his teens he was writing for comic books and drawing cartoons.

He began working with Denis Goodwin, a fellow student at Dulwich College, with whom he wrote radio scripts and, occasionally, material for Bob Hope or Dean Martin.

Monkhouse went on to become game show host extraordinaire. His first game show, in 1967, was “The Golden Shot,” in which an audience member would call in instructions to a blindfolded marksman (“Bernie the Bolt”) who would fire a crossbow arrow into a target. The better Bernie did, the more prizes the audience member would win.

Many other shows followed.

Monkhouse’s career was on the downslide when, in 1992, during an interview on Anthony Clare’s radio program, “In the Psychiatrist’s Chair,” the comedian broke down in tears after it was suggested that his mother’s possessiveness had been a way of showing her son her love.

Within a year of the interview, however, Monkhouse was the subject of an hourlong television special of his comedy routines, which renewed his reputation as one of the country’s funniest funnymen.

In addition, his revealing and self-lacerating autobiography “Crying With Laughter,” had been published, which softened public opinion about him.

“People who hadn’t noticed me or who had written me off as a game show host started to reassess me,” he told the Mirror of London. “Suddenly I was in fashion again and reaching new people.”

Among the many jokes for which he was known:

“I’m a hard man to ignore, but well worth the effort.”

“Personally, I don’t think there’s intelligent life on other planets. Why should other planets be different from this one?”

But perhaps his most quoted joke is: “They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.”

In 1999, Monkhouse published a second autobiography, “Over the Limit.”

The comedian had three children by his first marriage. His son Gary, who had cerebral palsy, died in 1992, and his son Simon, from whom he was long estranged, died of a drug overdose in Thailand in 2001. His daughter, Abigail, and his second wife survive him.