Sir Bruce Forsyth RIP

Andy Collins still does warm up alongside his breakfast show... he does the warm up for big brother, leage of their own, Saturday night takeaway Ninja warrior and other shows

That's a classic, one for how Brucie handled it, getting involved with the coach load of pensioners ( that all were probably older than he was!)

And secondly for showing how low budget some daytime shows are, the audience which was tiny and reliant on a bus load to fill half the space!

Of course, the great thing is that when it came back with Vernon Kay, Andy Collins was still involved, back as the warm-up. Warm-up to presenter is a well-worn path, not such much the other way.

Good grief. That's pretty dire. Many of the gags are just pure unfunny or I just don't get them at all. How on earth did it get a second series?! ITV's sitcoms in this period were all pretty awful.

From when I was younger, I have memories of Bruce narrating the children's show 'The Fiddley Foodle Bird'. This was shown on CBBC well into the late 90's when Bruce migrated back to ITV.

Even into the early 00s in fact! (0.52)

I've never seen this before but it's brilliant!

Although many of you may have already seen Bruce's Palladium show with Norman Wisdom, turns out the pair got together to talk about it.

Some wonderful clips. There really aren't many of his like left, those performers who grew up with Variety, a mixed selection of acts in one show that ended with the Top of the Bill performer (literally the big name star at the top of the bill poster) that kept an audience waiting til the end. Proper variety shows are sadly long gone, not just from television but from the British seaside in summer season (also once a mainstay of U.K. Summer light entertainment tv programmes). The BGT shows demonstrate the uk still has great comedy, acrobatics, magic, singers etc, but there seems to be no appetite to put the shows on any more, in the theatres or on tv. If anyone had the confidence to put a season of variety on maybe it'd still find an audience. You never know.

I've watched a lot of Bruce's stuff since his death and I've been roaring laughing. His first HIGNFY when he wasn't really on the telly at all is pure joy.

Of course, probably the only other person who was still a regular TV face in the 21st century but had links back to the very earliest days of television, in the shape of Bob Monkhouse, also saw his career revived by HIGNFY.

It didn't always work, of course, around the mid-nineties Jimmy Tarbuck appeared on HIGNFY and Room 101 and clearly his agent had seen it work for Bob and wondered if Tarby couldn't reinvent himself like that, but Tarby was just too old school to work in that format, unlike Bob or Brucie who were able to move with the times. In Louis Barfe's biography of Les Dawson, his former producer said if Les had still been alive, he'd have probably gone on to do something similar, which is probably right.

That would have been acting, he did one play/drama and it got very high prise for it

He did a couple, Nona was the serious play set in Argentina where he played a woman, and indeed he got good reviews for it. The last thing he did before he died was appear in the comedy drama Demob, set in World War II, where he was seemingly very good as well.

But as well as that, you can easily imagine him on QI and HIGNFY.

Tarby, Bob Monkhouse, Bruce, all classic 'front of curtain' variety performers, used to filling while the scenery was reset behind the front curtain for the next act. A very special skill and they made it look effortless, and not 'filling' at all. Little and Large, Cannon and Ball, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee all found their feet performing in front of the curtain between acts, all becoming big acts themselves.

And yes, Bruce was on one of the very earliest BBC tv broadcasts pre World War II!