Bob Hope's long road from Eltham

When, early in 1998, the news was broken to Leslie Townes Hope, then aged 94, that he had been made an honorary Knight Bachelor of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, he greeted the news with something like dismay.

"Where," he asked, "are my writers when I need them?"

His inseparable gang of gag writers, one may be sure, would not have been summoned to take a bow with him - simply to provide the words that he dealt out with the high speed and low cunning of a peerless card sharper.

At one time as many as 13 writers turned out his wisecracks.

"If you could make the other gagmen - whose jobs often depended on keeping a straight face - laugh, then Bob let your joke into the show," said Mel Shavelson, who wrote the screenplays of such Hope hits as The Princess And The Pirate, Where There's Life and Sorrowful Jones and directed his boss in The Seven Little Foys and Beau James.

He also punched Hope jokes into other people's scripts.

"Our group created him," Shavelson claimed.

They based the character of Bob Hope on - Hope himself. The bestkept secret was that Bob didn't at first realise the penny-pinching, chicken-hearted, woman-chasing, wardrobe-flaunting figure was drawn from life. By the time he did, he was too rich to care.

Hope belonged to the second generation of great American comics who followed the first wave of silent stars like Chaplin, Keaton and Harry Langdon with something those mimes never had had much use for - speech.

He was born to vaudeville - almost "in" it, since he went to America from Eltham in south London at the age of four and was on the stage not much later, winning a Chaplin look-alike contest aged 10.

But it was his radio successes and the subsequent film, The Big Broadcast Of 1938, that began America's love affair with the rapid-fire quips and topical cracks.

The main reason Bob wore well, said someone, was because there wasn't anything to wear out: his character didn't change in 60 years.

Sometimes those who created the laughs didn't see the joke. When pay day came round weekly, Hope would gather his writers at the bottom of the grand staircase in his Beverly Hills mansion and launch paper darts at them.

Each dart was a cheque, paying a different amount. Generally, there was a scramble. "It kept them on their toes," said Hope.

Movies were a sideline to his stand-up comedy in radio shows, or celebrity appearances at golf tournaments.

He hated TV because it required him to commit a script to memory. Bob always preferred to hold the gags in his hand.

"Television will never catch on," he said after one early attempt when he threw the script away, then couldn't remember a line. "What actor will give ever give up his golf to learn a script?"

He was intensely proud of founding the Bob Hope Classic, an annual charity golf tournament, and making US presidents angle for an invitation-Hope struck it rich with The Road To Singapore (and its six subsequent "Road" sequels) and became, along with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, the world's best-loved screen comedian.

Bing and Bob pretended to be onscreen rivals, but when Crosby died in 1977, Hope retired to his home and didn't speak in public for a week.

He was the richest private owner of real estate in southern California. His house in Palm Springs was designed like a flying saucer; the one in Hollywood, over the road from the TV studio he part-owned, had its own one-hole golf course. Until recently, he played a daily nine holes at a nearby club, where no one bothered him for his autograph - but then his partners were movie stars and ex-presidents.

Ed Sullivan, the TV host, put Hope's personal wealth at $500 million. Bob said he disliked setting such a figure on his fortune. "Because it's too much, Bob - or too little?" Sullivan cracked back. He was a tireless entertainer, although his jokes aged as he did. "George Burns" - a fellow centenarian - "and I hold hands at night and try to contact the living," he said.

Cannily, he still made himself the target of self-disparagement, but now his quips had an ageist, not a monetarist bias.

When his "death" was announced in May, 1998, due to a confusing news agency report, Hope's only regret was losing not his life prematurely, but a day's golf due to the resulting media hoo-ha.

Long after he had made their dads and mums laugh as kids, he was to be found cheering the GIs in the wars America fought in Europe, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf.

When the war was a popular one, then Bob was a popular frontline personality, too. When it was an unpopular cause, like Vietnam, he was denounced as a hawkish lackey of White House imperialism.

These barbs hurt a man insulated from reality by his own talents.

He never won an Oscar for a film that made people laugh. But he won a legion of awards for his humanitarian work.

In 1974, when Prince Charles visited him in his Hollywood home, the heir to the throne had a wisecrack of his own: "It's not a good idea for a monarch to retire."

But Bob Hope, king of comedy, didn't need a royal prompt.