THE untimely death of Jeremy Beadle caught a lot of people by surprise, however he had actually been unwell for sometime. In a way his passing marks the end of an era that begun a long time ago.

He was vaunted as the TV Jester who brought us You've Been Framed and Beadle's About, programmes that captured our gullibility and hilarious error-strewn lives and produced them for the entertainment of the masses.

But as I mulled over his death I found myself thinking about another man who was really the pioneer of all this stuff.

His name is Jonathan Routh who in 1961 launched a television show on ABC TV called Candid Camera which ran for six years. He is still alive and at the grand old age of 80 is now a full-time artist who spends his time either in Italy or Jamaica.

Candid Camera was radical stuff produced in the days of black and white television when for the first time the public was finding itself as the star of the show. I suppose in a bizarre evolutionary link even Big Brother owes its soul to this programme of more than 40 years ago. There were some classic pranks and two in particular sprang to mind.

The team got hold of a Ford car, took the engine out, put a young woman behind the wheel and had it coast down a hill into a garage forecourt where she asked the attendant - they had them in those days - to fill it up with petrol.

She then asked him to check the oil and when he lifted the bonnet well it was wonderful television. The other also involved a car - and old VW Beetle which was gutted, cut long ways in half and joined together with a motorbike put in each half. The result at junctions as the car broke apart with each half veering off in a different direction was a hoot.

Sadly there's little left of the clips now. The only one I could find was on YouTube and was the famous goldfish' prank which saw a man eating one - it was actually a sliver of carrot - out of a tank in a shop in front of customers. That however, was from a later revamped Candid Camera series in the 70s.

It was on this bedrock that Jeremy Beadle built his television success, but these days not only are we the stars, we're also the producers. The sophisticated mobile phones and digital cameras can earn us a fast buck (well a rapid £250 any way) and while these clips may be funny they lack the artistic and entertaining inventiveness of Candid Camera and its sibling, You've Been Framed.

The death of Jeremy Beadle closes the chapter on a brand of whacky television that can no longer be replicated.