THERE’LL be no more trouble in store as Norman Wisdom, one of the country’s, nay the world’s, best-loved comedy actors died on Monday, October 4, at the age of 95.

According to his family, the diminutive dynamo, often referred to as the British Buster Keaton, passed away peacefully at his nursing home on the Isle of Man after a series of strokes. As well as his famous on-screen persona, the man Charlie Chaplin called his favourite clown was admired for his tireless charity work, which included spending time at the Bournemouth-based Youth Cancer Trust, which provides free, fun holidays for young people aged 14 to 30 and suffering with cancer or any malignant disease.

“When we asked him if he would visit us when he was in town a few years ago, he didn’t hesitate, he came straight away,” says YCT’s Georgina Hillman. “One of the lads in the group that was visiting at the time just loved comedy and he was completely blown away when he got to meet this comic legend, but Norman gave him all the time in the world and happily let him try out all his jokes on him.

She added: “He joked a lot himself, too, and I remember him saying: “I’m getting old and my memory is going . . . I’m getting old and my memory is going . .”

“He was charming; a lovely, gentle, caring man and we will all miss him dearly here.”

Former Bournemouth International Centre publicist Anthony Hardman visited him in his nursing home just last year and was deeply saddened by the news, but he has many fond memories.

“I worked with Norman on lots of occasions over the years, not just in Bournemouth, and he was such a lovely, lovely man.”

Johnny Mans, his agent for more than 30 years, said: “It’s absolutely devastating. I thought he’d go on until he was at least 100 and get his telegram from the Queen.

“He was not only a client, he was my best friend.”

Jan Kennedy, managing director of Billy Marsh Associates, the agency that discovered him in the early 1950s, said: “Norman was simply a beloved comic genius. His whole personality projected a childlike warmth and innocent appeal that touched the hearts of everyone.

“Norman literally made audiences worldwide cry with laughter, and his endearing talents live on through the universal happiness of his films and recordings.”

Although probably best-known to millions for those films, where he played the little guy in the back-to-front cap and ill-fitting jacket who fell over a lot while shrieking: “Mr GrimsDALE!”, Norman Wisdom had a fascinating career, which ran in tandem with an equally fascinating life.

Thoroughly miserable in a children’s home in Kent, he ran away. He was just 11. For a time he was homeless and by the age of 13 he’d left school and was working as a grocer’s delivery lad, though at various stages he was also a coal miner, a waiter and a page boy.

In 1929 he joined the Merchant Navy as a cabin boy. Still unsettled, he enlisted as a drummer boy in the 10th Royal Hussars of the British Army and wound up in Lucknow, India as a bandsman.

This was where the path to his true calling really began, for as well as learning to ride a horse and somehow becoming the Army’s Indian flyweight-boxing champ, he also mastered the trumpet and clarinet, and in true It Ain’t half Hot Mum spirit, while performing a comedy boxing routine in a gym, Wisdom discovered his love for entertaining.

After seeing him performing in a charity show at a town hall during World War II, actor Rex Harrison told him he would be mad not to turn pro.

He took his advice, and the rest is history.