"An indistinct speaking voice and extremely unfortunate appearance." So said a BBC talent scout of Tommy Cooper in 1946, - neatly failing to spot the comedy potential of attributes that would make him one of the UK’s favourite comics.

Tommy Cooper had the face of a great clown. Lantern-jawed and heavy browed, he wore an expression of perpetually affronted innocence under his trademark fez.

Preferring mildly surreal one-liners to conventional jokes, he would perform like a man who had been thrust unexpectedly on stage for bizarre and inexplicable reasons.

His magic tricks never worked of course, but it was the way they failed that got the laughs. For all the apparent desperation of his act, it was the carefully honed work of a talented and dedicated performer.

He was born at Llwyn Onn Street, Caerphilly to Tom and Gertrude Cooper and the family moved to Devon when Tommy was 3 years old. After school he trained as a shipwright and tried his hand at comedy.

During war service in the cavalry, he was performing one night in Cairo. Needing a hat for his routine, he discovered he’d left his pith helmet behind. In a panic he grabbed a fez from the nearest waiter and got more laughs than usual. The fez stayed.

In 1947 the BBC repented and allowed Cooper on the air. It was the start of a dazzling thirty-seven years in which he was in constant demand by stage and television.

Like all the great comics he was not without eccentricities off stage. Deeply superstitious he never allowed his fez to rest top down – in case it trapped “the spirits”.

A great career ended all too soon when he collapsed on stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. His memory is kept alive by a legion of fans, a great many fellow comics among them.

In 2003 a nine foot bronze statue of Cooper was commissioned for the town of his birth, commemorating one of best things to originate from Caerphilly since the cheese.