Barnet's tribute to Beadle

Beadle, 59, worked with ex-Hendon Times editor and Barnet Football Club director Dennis Signy in 1991 to raise money for the Mayor's Appeal, which donated £140,000 to Children with Leukemia.

Mr Signy, who became good friends with the TV joker after the appeal, spoke warmly of his generosity and humour.

He said: "He was extremely supportive. We often went to the football together. He was an Arsenal supporter, and after games we would go around pubs together to raise money.

"He was extremely humorous, a very funny man, but he had quite a depth to him. Everyone said how much he's done for charity, and that's how I would remember him. He was at his peak of his fame at the time, but he would always muck in and help with everything. He was a generous man."

But charitable work was not Beadle's only connection to the borough: there was also self-interest. He met his wife, Sue, at a dinner party in Hendon in 1982, and allegedly chased after her car to get her phone number. They were married within the year.

Nick Canham has been Beadle's agent for the past six years. He describes his client as "a fabulous man".

"He was very genuine. He always had so much time for anyone who wanted to talk to him. There was no ego to him at all. Everyone says that his television career faded away, but they wouldn't say that if they knew how much work he turned down. He would only do things he enjoyed, like Celebrity Mastermind, which he won in 2005, or being in dictionary corner on Countdown."

Once dubbed the "most hated man in Britain", Beadle defied critics to garner regular television audiences of more than 15 million for Beadle's About and You've Been Framed. But these programmes disguised the entertainer's true fascination: trivia.

Mr Canham said that it was this, rather than the practical jokes for which Beadle was renowned, that he remembers most vividly.

"He always loved a joke, but his relationship with his audience was very different from our professional relationship," he said.

"We'd talk a lot about triva. He had maybe the largest privately held crime library in the country, bigger than most people's houses."

A former editor at Time Out magazine, Beadle was catapulted to fame in 1981 by the success of ITV's Game for a Laugh. Later, when his eighties fame faded, Beadle dedicated his time to writing trivia books, which sold in their millions, raising more than £100 million for charity.

Beadle used his own experiences with illness to help others: in 2005, he was diagnosed with leukemia, and he subsequently raised millions of pounds for Children with Leukemia and related charities. He also suffered from Poland's syndrome, which left him with a withered left hand, and was passionate about helping children fight the disease.

But it wasn't just illness that allowed Beadle to empathise with those less fortunate than himself. He came from humble beginnings, born in Hackney, East London, and raised in an all-female household on a council estate in Petts Wood, Kent. He never knew his father, who left before he was born.

One of Beadle's first jobs was working as a loo attendant, where glimmers of his future success were already evident as he lurked behind screens after dropping coins into the urinals, eager to see how people would react.

After a brief stint as a glamour photographer, Beadle finally found his niche in radio and television, first as a writer, then as a producer and presenter.

But it was the stunts he pulled on unsuspecting members of the public that made his name. Describing his role as a prankster to some, pesterer to others, he once said: "I'm the Fouche, Talleyrand and Cardinal Wolsey." In perhaps his most famous trick, he managed to convince a Dorset housewife that aliens had landed in her garden.

It is perhaps the biggest testament to his popularity that he never got punched.

The entertainer leaves behind his wife, two daughters, Cassie and Bonnie, and two stepchildren, Leo and Claire. They were all by his side when he died.