Didn't Brucie do well?

The turning point was the card trick. It was an old clip of Bruce Forsyth and Tommy Cooper in immaculate black and white. As usual when Cooper was on stage, the other performer had to adjust accordingly, and twinkle-toed Brucie was just the man to dance around Cooper's enormous feet and stay out of range of his lumbering attempts at magic. As the punch line approached - "What's the card?" "The 217 of clubs!" - I became mesmerised by the interplay of two gigantic chins.

These two giants of popular entertainment were like a pair of magnificent dinosaurs engaged in play fighting. Manic laughter erupted from both periodically. What was going down here was some good, old-fashioned stage business, the like of which we will never see again. I adjusted the rose-tinted spectacles and reclined among the soft furnishings of nostalgia.

Which was not at all the way I was feeling at the beginning of My Holiday With Brucie (BBC2). The premise was distinctly unpromising. Forsyth's wife, Wilnelia, who won the Miss World title in 1975 representing Puerto Rico, had evidently maintained her connections with this bizarrely pointless event and was contracted to design the swimwear for this year's contestants.

The event was taking place on an island off China, and Bruce was along for the ride, having been apprised of the fact that the place was virtually one gigantic golf course. Now, the idea of eavesdropping on a golfing freebie is not my idea of riveting television.

Soon after the camera gained admittance to the Forsyth mansion, I began to have severe doubts about the whole enterprise, as Brucie demonstrated his technique for folding shirts prior to packing them. By the time he coyly admitted that noone else was allowed to do his packingand even confessed that his socks were also given the special folding treatment, it occurred to me that dear Brucie was in the grip of some form of anal retention. If it carried on like this, we were going to be stuck inside the mansion with Brucie for eternity, watching him fold and refold, because victims of this disorder never actually get to leave the house.

Fortunately, Will Yapp's film finally resolved itself as an affectionate tribute to this durable entertainer. Which is not to say that there were not some more tricky moments. "Bruce is 75," yipped the voice of Yapp, "but you'd never know it to see him in his pants." In a flash, the camera had darted in to perform its master's command.

My desperate lunge for the remote control was in vain, as the screen was filled with Brucie doing his morning exercise in a rather unnecessarily lively pair of underpants. There is such a thing as too much information, and this was it. Even on New Year's Day, when the critical faculties are at subsistence level only, this was strong stuff.

Much more enlightening were the forays into the past. Bruce Forsyth, I was reminded, had a unique place among television personalities, owing to a talent in creating an irresistible broth of mayhem and innuendo using ordinary members of the public. These people would step into the world of, say, The Generation Game, take one look at Brucie mugging furiously and surrender all inhibitions.

The scene where one fellow was incited by the host to jump into a paddling pool and try to kick an inflatable crocodile to death, while wearing a leopardskin loincloth and a ginger chest wig, which might almost have been a refugee from Brucie's head, was incomprehensibly hilarious. This is the kind of TV we do not see any more in these Jackass days.

Perhaps the greatest tribute one can pay to Bruce Forsyth is that he has consistently managed to combine comedy and music on stage, a gift not given to many. Roy Castle gradually manoeuvring his trumpet into a position of dominance over Bruce's vocal, Les Dawson changing keys arbitrarily at the piano, leaving Bruce riding a bucking bronco of melody - these were other moments to treasure.