Unflappable yet flawed, Frank Bough deserved better than the BBC's cruel jokes

“Here’s a lovely fella whose face has been seen more times on the telly than the weatherman”. It was January 1974 and Cilla Black was introducing a broadcaster who arguably surpassed her as a national treasure. “I’m ever so pleased to welcome as  my guest… Mr Frank Bough.”

Black’s enthusiasm was genuine as she welcomed the face of Grandstand to her chat show, Cilla. As was the applause that rang around the studio. Bough radiated a low-key mischievousness as he came on and was coaxed by Black into singing (a clearly rehearsed number) in which he listed the many sports covered in his day job.

As an encore, he and Black then joined to commentate on a football match “played” by two teams of bulldogs done up to look like Leeds and Chelsea. Viewers at home must have been gagging on their Angel Delight.

It’s hard to think of many sports presenters who could carry off the equivalent of a singing-and-doggie football Cilla Black guest spot today. Can you imagine Gary Lineker on X Factor? Gabby Logan on Britain’s Got Talent? It wouldn’t happen. Even if it did,  it is unlikely they would exude the quantities of good sportsmanship Bough does as he sings to Cilla. Watched on YouTube 46 years after the event, his twinkling amiability still casts a spell.

But you won’t read much about that side of Bough, the Grandstand and Breakfast Time host who has passed away at aged 87. Instead, drugs and prostitutes have predictability dominated coverage. This is especially true of the BBC itself, where a radio eulogy made sure to cram in loads of juicy details about his cocaine-fuelled dalliances in 1988 and the 1992 photographs of the broadcaster leaving a dominatrix’s flat that finished his career for good. Forget about the first line of his obituary: Bough’s indiscretions have consumed vast swathes of posthumous real-estate.

What such prurient coverage glosses over is just how beloved a presenter he was. And it downplays the degree to which the public stayed with him even as his bosses failed to give their support. Moreover, it is chilling to consider he was sacked by the BBC even as sexual predator Jimmy Savile destroyed lives with impunity. Savile’s monstrousness was an open secret. Yet he was never held to account while Bough was shown the door without hesitation.

“I’m not a wicked man, nor do I mean any harm or evil to people. I've made mistakes, but everyone's entitled to do that. No one suffered but my wife, my family and myself,” Bough once said. “It was a brief but appalling period in my life. Don't condemn my entire career for a brief episode I regret.”

There was undoubtedly genuine shock when in July 1988 the News of the World reported that Bough, then 55, had taken cocaine and participated in parties at which he donned ladies' underwear. Foolishly, Bough believed that going out and holding his hands up would stand him in good stead. He didn’t understand that the wolves were going to rip him apart, whatever he did.

He told the News of the World that he’d been going through a difficult patch of too much work and too little sleep (although he had stepped down as Breakfast Time presenter 12 months previously). A chance meeting with a prostitute and her boyfriend at a London nightclub had led to one thing, and then another.

“During the evening she encouraged me to sniff this white substance which she told me would make me feel better,” he said. “It certainly did. I’d never felt so relaxed.”

Far from putting an end to the matter, the interview made him a laughing stock. Bough must have reasonably assumed that what he did off the clock was his own business. And that the state of his marriage was likewise of concern to nobody but him and his wife.

The BBC didn’t share that perspective and soon he was looking for work. He found it presenting LWT’s Six O’Clock Live and anchoring ITV’s 1991 Rugby World Cup coverage. Yet this second act of his career came crashing to an end in 1992 as the Sunday Mirror alleged he had enjoyed sado-masochistic abuse by a leather-clad “Miss Whiplash” at a bondage parlour in Marylebone.

Bough admitted he had been foolish and caused hurt. He also insisted his private life was his private life. “I have been exceedingly stupid and I accept that," he said. "I caused a lot of pain to my wife and my family and I bitterly regret all these things – but I have to say that I believe that everybody, when they have difficulties with their marriage or sexuality, surely has the right to sort these things out in the privacy of their own home.”

Poking fun at his peccadilloes soon became a national pastime. The BBC was an especially enthusiastic chucker of rotten fruit via satirical current affairs revue Have I Got News For You? There, presenter Angus Deayton skewered Bough on a weekly basis.

Bough became so woven into the show’s fabric that he even appeared as a guest in 1993 (another ill-considered attempt at taking the higher ground). Instead of being decent and holding back, Deayton plunged the knife with even more feral glee than usual. How bittersweet those memories must have become when the host was himself the victim of a 2002 News of the World sting and reports that he had taken cocaine and “romped” with prostitutes.

Deayton was dismissed after further allegations surfaced. Nobody at the BBC was minded to defend him – certainly not Have I Got News For You? team captains Paul Merton and Ian Hislop – though polls confirmed the public was on his side. They knew people were complicated and that what you saw on TV didn’t represent an individual in their entirety.

In that respect, Deayton’s professional demise was Frank Bough all over again. When news of Bough’s lively private life surfaced in 1988 the widespread response was bemusement – certainly not shock or furore. His onscreen persona was of a knowledgeable and kindly uncle. And it was undoubtedly the case that Bough’s kinky side was hard to wrap your head around.

But if he obviously had his flaws and a dark side, it seemed cruel of the BBC to allow him to become its favourite punchline. Even more so given the evil squatting at the heart of the broadcaster in Savile (Jim’ll Fix It remained on the airwaves until 1994 – outliving both Bough’s BBC and ITV careers).

Bough's dismissal flowed from an assumption that the public is unable to see TV presenters as complex and contradictory figures. Yet there is no evidence to suggest audiences could not have both disapproved of Bough’s drug-taking and use of prostitutes and also looked forward to seeing him on Holiday, the travel programme he was fronting at the time of the scandal.

Bough truly was respected. Back when people were allowed to look their age on television, he had the air of a slightly sceptical granddad. He was hired to front Breakfast Time because of his experience with live TV on Grandstand. Opposite Selina Scott and Nick Ross on Breakfast Time, he was the perfect morning pick me-up.

His co-presenters basked in that calm too. “He brought a sense of serenity and reassurance,” recalled fellow Breakfast Time host Ross. “His unruffled composure made us feel this had all been done before, and on the first morning, as the last minutes ticked down to our opening transmission, when hearts were thumping and nerves were jangling, he clapped his hands and — addressing the producers and the technicians as much as Selina and me — gently and firmly said, “Calm down”. We did.”

No need to rush on Planet Bough: everything, whether that be interviews or the football scores, would proceed in its own time. In one of the few episodes of Breakfast Time on YouTube, there’s a slight mishap as he introduces a segment and the camera lingers on him too long.

He doesn’t panic or even look slightly ill at ease and that unruffled self-assurance was contagious in the best sense. It’s a shame the BBC didn’t similarly hold its nerve when he was unmasked as a flawed human being with a complicated personal life – but a human being all the same.