If Spike Milligan was the most anarchic member of that cult 1950s BBC Radio show The Goons, Peter Sellers ultimately the richest and Michael Bentine the most sophisticated, Harry Secombe, who died on April 11th aged 79, was the sanest and, in his own way, the most versatile.
Apart from being a member of the wildly manic Goons comedy team, he was also a high-powered medium tenor equally at home in opera or musical comedy and, late in life, a presenter of religious television programmes.
Whereas the other Goons tended to extremes of temperament and behaviour, Harry Secombe specialised in nothing more dangerous and subversive than endearingly gormless voices and scatological gags like blowing raspberries. He was born on September 8th, 1921, the third child of a none-too-successful commercial traveller living on a council estate near Swansea, south Wales, whose hobby was drawing cartoons. He became a church choirboy at seven, was a cat in a Sunday school concert soon after, but blotted his copybook by reading the lesson in church in the north country tones of the popular comic Sandy Powell. At 16, he became a junior pay clerk for a steel firm at 10 shillings (50p) a week. With war looming in 1939, he joined the Territorial Army and "went off to war" with a flourish, standing on the front seat of a friend's open car and imitating Hitler with a comb as the moustache. Serving with the Royal Artillery in North Africa and Italy, he gravitated to concert parties and broadcast from Bali in Services Cocktail, a show run by Carroll Levis, who specialised in discovering unknown talent.
The young comic and singer toured US airforce bases in Italy, played the Fairy Queen in a panto and devised a comic routine in which, trying to shave, he immersed the whole area in lather - a sketch he was to use for years after the war. As a member of the Central Pool of Artists touring Italy he met another member, Spike Milligan, whose offbeat sketches were considered rather too advanced, but with whom he felt a professional affinity.
In 1946, he met Myra Atherton, whom he married two years later. They had four children.
He took his shaving routine to that unofficial academy for aspiring comics, the nude-show Windmill Theatre, and appeared increasingly on radio shows, sometimes using material written by Michael Bentine.
Jimmy Grafton, who wrote scripts for the comedian Derek Roy, kept the Grafton Arms near Victoria Station, which became the venue for jazz and comedy sessions involving Secombe, Milligan and Bentine. Later, Peter Sellers joined the trio for experimental shows intended for the BBC Light Programme but they were considered too "way out" and were shunted off to the more experimental and intellectual BBC radio channel the Third Programme.
In 1951, the Junior Crazy Gang became The Goons - complete with the sententious Major Bloodknock, the dithering Ned, Bluebottle, the villainous Count Moriarty, Eccles, and other fantastical persons who were to grip Britain for decades.
Harry Secombe, the most detached member of the gang, usually only joined them for the recordings of the broadcasts, arriving in a battered car from his singing and comedy engagements at music halls throughout Britain. His film career never really took off. The Song of Norway (1970), with Edward G. Robinson, fell flat. Davy (1957), for Sir Michael Balcon at the British end of MGM, was the story of a young comic given the chance of a singing career at Covent Garden but turning it down to keep his comedy team together. It caused a critic to write: "He sings like Caruso - Sugar Ray Robinson Caruso."
His Mr Bumble in the film of Lionel Bart's Oliver! (1968) was acclaimed. But it was Leslie Bricusse's Pickwick (1963) that made him. His song, If I Ruled the World, was an instant recording success, and the stage show was a triumph in Britain and on Broadway. In 1993, he revived it at Chichester, rejoicing that he no longer needed a bald wig: it became an annual event.
Harry Secombe appeared extensively in popular musicals, including The Four Musketeers (1967). He was especially well-liked in Australia, where during one tour he fell ill and was told he had only two years to live unless he stopped drinking and took his diabetes seriously. He managed to take off five of his 20 stone as well, and became president of the British Diabetic Association.
His health never prevented him from singing with several "serious" singers, including the duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers with Sir Geraint Evans. He also wrote two successful comic novels, Twice Brightly (1974) and Welsh Fargo (1981), as well as two volumes of autobiography and a number of fantastical stories for children.
In 1983, Bill Ward of Associated TV suggested a new "Godslot" programme with music and interviews from a different place each week. The idea was to talk to survivors of life's hardships, from concentration camp victims to cancer sufferers - anyone who had an uplifting story to tell. It proved a winning formula. The first contract was for six programmes. However, Highway ran for 10 years, covering 25,000 miles a year and attracting an audience of 7 million. It became, Harry Secombe remembered, a new way of life for him.
When it was killed - because it didn't fit the sort of people the commercials were aimed at - he recorded Sunday With Secombe for Scottish TV, and in the 1990s started presenting Songs of Praise for the BBC.
Captain of the Lord's Taverners Golfing Society for more than 25 years, he once introduced the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the first woman guests, as "the thin edge of a delectable wedge". Mrs Thatcher, apparently thinking it was a reference to her figure, huffily replied that she had never thought of herself as a wedge. It was perhaps fortunate that she had already given him his knighthood.
Sir Harry Secombe: born 1921; died, April 2001