A spokesman said: ‘The book is exactly as Feldman wrote it, his great friend Mark Flanagan, had it transcribed, with even the photos inserted where Feldman had noted where they should go. He later joked that when a Labour cabinet minister said to him, "Of course you vote Labour," Feldman replied, "No, I don't, because I'm a socialist! Although not quite hagiography, Robert Ross’s biography of Marty Feldman is too fawning to be anything other than a big old fan letter to its subject.

Reading this book a real sense of the man comes through, you can almost here that lovely lispy voice with its sing-song cadence. Thanks to lost show recordings and few repeats, all we really know him for is a hump and a great line about werewolves. And while I learned details about the man, I never really felt that he came to life here, not the way subjects of other biographies usually do.Like so many other people who ended up in the performing arts, he was evidently a neurotic all his life.

In 1974, Dennis Main Wilson produced a short BBC sketch series for Feldman titled Marty Back Together Again—a reference to reports about the star's health—but it never captured the impact of the earlier series. He also guest-starred in "Arabian Nights", an episode of The Muppet Show in which he was teamed up with several Sesame Street characters, especially Cookie Monster, with whom he shared a playful cameo comparing their eyes side by side. An exception was when during a promotional tour for The Last Remake of Beau Geste, he denounced the campaign led by Anita Bryant against homosexuality.The second series in 1969 was retitled It's Marty (this title being retained for the DVD release of the series). This is not a great book, nor a funny book, but it was honest and from the heart about an often overlooked genius. Don’t praise absolutely everything, don’t try and force your view of Marty’s genius into the reader’s face, and please, please don’t believe every anecdote a comedian repeats on a chat show couch. All the writings were discovered in the attic long after he passed away at far too young an age - possibly due to the abysmal traffic in Mexico.