Bob Monkhouse

(June 1, 1928 – December 29, 2003)

Robert Alan Monkhouse, OBE was best known as a British comedian who hosted a number of television game shows. He was also a serious collector of science fiction.

Monkhouse was a schoolfriend of Denis Gifford and Bryan Berry and started contributing to comics while still a teenager, notably Tornado (1948). There are persistent rumours that he contributed to fanzines and attended conventions, but no hard evidence for either – and that absence may be more significant as if he had attended conventions then surely somebody would have mentioned it in a contemporary report.

He did attend the presentation dinner for the International Fantasy Awards at the White Horse on September 1, 1953, along with prominent authors and fans such as Arthur C. Clarke, C. S. Youd and Ted Carnell. The widely available photograph of the dinner likely contributed to the convention rumours.

He was certainly a major collector of books and comics, and a long-term customer of genre bookshops such as Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in London and Rog Peyton's Andromeda Bookshop in Birmingham. Authors conducting signings reported being asked to inscribe a copy for him. In Ansible #199 (February 2004) Brian Aldiss said that his mother had received a letter from Monkhouse in the 1960s saying how much he'd enjoyed Aldiss's work leading to an ongoing correspondence.

• Obituary by Dennis Barker, The Guardian, December 29, 2003.
• The IFA Awards Dinner, 1953 with Monkhouse pictured at fiawol.org.uk.

See also: Celebrity Fen.

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Person

1928—2003

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