Jeremy Beadle: The quiz master

Jeremy Beadle gets up from the shabby sofa in his dressing-room to fetch something. His hairline still glows orange with stage make-up after his performance as Wishee Washee in a Bournemouth panto. He has just been lamenting the fact that Humphrey, the pantomime camel, didn't urinate in the stalls on cue.

Jeremy Beadle gets up from the shabby sofa in his dressing-room to fetch something. His hairline still glows orange with stage make-up after his performance as Wishee Washee in a Bournemouth panto. He has just been lamenting the fact that Humphrey, the pantomime camel, didn't urinate in the stalls on cue.

Beadle, who is 52, sits back down clutching a letter from a stranger. The blue handwriting spans several white pages. "I got this today," he says, as he begins to read it out loud. "'Dear Mr Beadle, I hope you don't mind me writing to you, but I once heard that you helped a friend to die because he was in so much pain and suffering...'" The author goes on to beg Beadle to help her to commit suicide.

Beadle says briskly that he will decline the woman's request; instead, he will pass her details on to her local social services. It was a different matter, however, when a close friend with motor-neurone disease asked him for the same favour in 1989. Then, the 60-year-old went on to kill himself with a cocktail of drugs.

"When a friend needs help, I wouldn't turn my back," says Beadle gravely, as he casts his mind back. "I found out the information he wanted. I didn't physically give him anything or do anything. He took himself off and he was about to die. There were very good reasons, his own reasons, why he needed and wanted the release when he did. He went into it very calmly, he was dying by inches. Motor-neurone disease is a terrible death."

At which point, it's probably fair to say: hold on a minute. Is this really the Jeremy Beadle talking? Can this be the merry prankster who gripped us with such hilarious hidden-camera antics as pretending aliens had landed in a woman's back garden, and persuading a job interviewee to take on the role of paid hitman? Yes, it seems, it is. And what's more, though he's been less than ubiquitous on our screens lately, Beadle has, in the last 10 years, also helped raise around £10m for charity - a feat which earned him an MBE in the New Year's honours list. He works behind the scenes of many charities - in particular, the Foundation for Children with Leukaemia - improving their fundraising.

"I was genuinely shocked," says Beadle, who has exchanged his panto costume for jeans and a blue and white floral shirt. "I was quite moved to be honest. My eyes welled up. I've always done charity stuff for my own reasons, and quite selfish reasons. I like to make a difference. It's very easy just to sit back and feel sorry. Well, I hate that, I hate pity. So I turn it into something very positive. It's very selfish. It's actually stopping me from feeling pity."

But despite the recent recognition of his efforts to help others, it's not clear whether the public is quite ready to return the compliment and welcome Beadle back to the prime-time stage that he dominated for nearly 20 years. From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Beadle was a television phenomenon, fronting huge popular hits including Game For A Laugh, Beadle's About and You've Been Framed - which, in 1994, even toppled Coronation Street as Britain's most popular programme. But while the shows were hugely popular, Beadle himself was never to everyone's taste: one poll declared him the most hated man in Britain after Saddam Hussein; another named him the most irritating character on TV.

The press scoffed at his beard, his suits, his comfortable waistline, his manner - you name it, they sneered at it - but, looking back, Beadle believes he was only picked on because he was "an easy target". "It's very easy for people to view the shows and feel sorry for the person I'm playing the joke on," he says. "People find themselves laughing, and think they shouldn't really be laughing at this, it's cruel. Are they going to blame themselves for laughing? No, they're going to blame the person who's doing it. I think there is a slight guilt thing."

It's not, however, an argument that will convince everybody - and surely the real reason why viewers eventually took exception to Beadle is that he had set up camp in the nation's lounges and refused to budge for 17 years. For three years running, he appeared on TV for 51 weeks of the year. Little wonder the Great British public had had a gut-full.

He doesn't blame the public for growing tired of his antics, and raises a guilty hand when accused of the crime of laughing at his own jolly japes. "I do, yeah, I think that must be quite irritating," he says, frankly. But then, Jeremy Beadle is used to struggling for acceptance.

Born in Hackney, east London, he spent the first two years of his life in and out of hospital undergoing surgery for Poland Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder which stunted the growth of his right hand. While he learnt to put up with the teasing at school, he still gets upset when journalists make "spiteful" remarks about it, or use it as a means to psychoanalyse him.

Beadle was the result of an affair his mother had with a married Fleet Street journalist; the relationship finished when his father realised his lover was pregnant.

To this day, Beadle has never met his father, believing it would be "an insult" to his mother. "People find it very, very difficult to understand, and I say it absolutely honestly with no side whatsoever, I genuinely believe that was my mother's business," he says. "It would be incredibly selfish of me to go out and talk to a total stranger. I actually think it would have almost been a slap to my mum. She gave me the love that I needed, the inspiration, the protection and the important things. I think it would make her feel that she'd left something out if I needed to find him."

With his mother working as a secretary - Beadle's father made no regular financial provision for him - Beadle grew up as a latchkey kid. At nine, he was put on three years' probation for stealing money from his teacher. Poor behaviour and appalling results in his mock O-levels led to him being expelled. After a series of jobs - he once set himself up as a "glamour" photographer and took pictures of topless girls - he made it on to radio, hosting his own show on a London station, before eventually getting his break in television as a writer for Celebrity Squares.

Today, Beadle lives in north London with his partner, Sue, a former model, with whom he has two teenage girls. The house is also shared with more than 20,000 reference books, covering pet subjects from sex and crime to comedy. Beadle has what you might call bizarre tastes. He is fascinated by the macabre - his collection includes post mortem reports - he even has a favourite murderer, Carl Panzrum, who killed more than 100 people in the 1830s. "He was so astonishingly rich in his honesty," he enthuses.

It was this love of trivia that gave rise to the recent Channel 5 show Win Beadle's Money, in which he was pitted against contestants in a general knowledge quiz (he lost only eight shows out of 52) and has even provided Beadle with a sideline as a quizmaster at private functions.

But, despite the charity work, the pantos, the quizzes and the MBE, Beadle's main ambition is still to return to primetime TV. Hasn't he had enough of the critics? And surely he doesn't need the money?

"There's too much experience in Beadle," he replies, slipping strangely into the third person. "I'm really talking about working behind the scenes. I get as much pleasure, if not more, from producing. I like helping, I see basic, basic mistakes [in other people's programmes]."

He is hoping his next project will be a factual show for the BBC. (Beadle was an ITV exclusive for 17 years.) "If Beadle was to suddenly burst back with a big light- entertainment show, I can imagine that the press would actually have a field day," he says by way of explanation. "They would say 'dumbing down' and 'Greg Dyke bringing in his [ITV] mates'. I think I need to be weaned back to the Beeb. And this will be a gentle way to do it."

Whether the public is ready to welcome back Jeremy Beadle MBE into its lounges remains to be seen.

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