The funny thing about Benny

As Mark Lewisohn admits in his introduction, several people he interviewed for this book doubted whether a biography of Benny Hill could run to more than two dozen pages. The difficulty wasn't that Hill led an uneventful life, just that no one seems to have had a clue who he really was. He had few, if any, friends; he never married; never had one remotely fulfilling romantic relationship, and when he died of a heart attack in 1992 his body lay undiscovered in his flat for two days.

Yet the public Benny Hill became - and remains - one of the world's most popular comedians. Turn on a television anywhere from Idaho to Irkutsk and there he'll be, still leering away and chasing squealing nymphets across drab stretches of suburban parkland. In one respect, though, the private Benny Hill did mirror his public self - neither of them ever got what they desperately craved.

With extraordinary aptness, Hill's father sold condoms for a living - having been thwarted in his initial ambition to become a steward on the Titanic. He owned a shop in Southampton which also sold bedpans and surgical appliances. Benny - or Alfred, as he was christened - was a cheerful child, a natural mimic who became adept at impersonating the shiftiness of his father's clients as they sidled into his shop to buy their condoms.

But Hill was not without sexual embarrassment of his own. By the time he was in his early teens, a pattern was emerging which came to dog his life: he would fall hopelessly in love with a girl, usually without her even knowing it, would declare his feelings and then slope off, deeply wounded, when he was rejected.

At 20, he changed his name to Benny, in tribute to the American comedian, Jack Benny. A straightman at first, he slogged around the variety theatre circuit where he proved to have little talent for live work. His stage presence was virtually non-existent, he suffered badly from nerves and tended to underplay his material.

Television, of course, proved his great salvation. In the studio, his nerves disappeared and the underplaying became an attribute. But as his career took off, the personal disasters continued to mount. He had, so it seems, "a firm distaste for sexual intercourse". Bob Monkhouse recalls Hill telling him in an unusually candid moment that he liked "factory girls" because they saw him as their knight in shining armour. "'I get a thrill when they're kneeling there, between my knees, and they're looking up at me. And I want them to call me Mr Hill, not Benny.' I asked him why and he said, 'Well, it's respectful.'"

He made his television debut in 1949, was voted Television Personality of the Year in 1954 and remained at the top for the next three decades.

Throughout his career Hill continued to write his own scripts, although he had no qualms about stealing gags from other comedians, as well as claiming sole credit for jokes he'd written with someone else.

Stardom made scarcely any difference to the way he lived. He constantly forgot to bank cheques, he bought cut-price tinned food that the labels had fallen off, and the few visitors who were entertained in his flat usually found themselves eating fish fingers off paper plates.

Mainly because his shows had little dialogue and still less sophistication, they enjoyed widespread international success. But the bubble burst in a big way in 1989 when he was sacked by Thames Television. It wasn't just that he fell victim to political correctness; audiences had been shrinking for some time and the format was horribly clapped-out. Publicly, Hill took it on the chin. Privately, he was devastated and turned increasingly to booze.