Jeremy Beadle suffered a perversely English fate. Born with a deformity, mocked at school and tipped for failure by his teachers, he nonetheless achieved massive success. For years he gave television viewers exactly what they wanted, and plenty of it. When his audience deserted him he quietly devoted his time to charity and cerebral pastimes. He was, in all these endeavours, modest, self-effacing and generous with his time. Given the chance to preen in an OK magazine spread, he simply said: “I’m not clever enough to be doing what I do, and I’m not gifted enough to achieve what I’ve achieved. It’s all been a matter of luck.”

Luck or design, he was reviled for his success. A poll in 2001 revealed Beadle to be the most hated man in Britain after Saddam Hussein, something which caused him enormous hurt and years of exasperation afterwards as journalists and the public never tired of asking him: “How does this make you feel?”

His crime, if such it was, had been to occupy primetime television for a decade and a half; long enough to sour his original impish appeal and turn him into a modern folk devil. Since then almost every victim of miscarried justice, petty officialdom, overzealous lawgiving or mindless vandalism has told their interviewer: “I thought Jeremy Beadle was about to show up.” Jeremy Beadle became a benchmark; the exact point where horror, hurt and humiliation exceed a decent person’s endurance.

Jeremy James Anthony Gibson Beadle was born of an extra-marital affair, and his father — a Fleet Street sports reporter — soon abandoned his mother. Though he knew who his father was, Beadle never met him, saying that to do so would have been disloyal to his mother. He was born in a nursing home with Poland’s Syndrome, which meant that his right hand never properly developed and needed many operations. He hated school, of which his enduring memory was of verbal abuse from other children and teachers filling his margins with snide remarks: “Are you sure, Beadle?”, “Are you dreaming, Beadle?”.

At ten he was put on probation for stealing a pound note from his teacher, which became a police matter when he ran away. He was sent for psychiatric analysis at the Maudsley Hospital in London, where he found that he thoroughly enjoyed the logic puzzles they set him. Despite leaving Beadle alone with valuables, his assessors could not tempt him to steal anything else and his liberty was restored. His school later asked him to come back to give a special assembly. Beadle told the headmaster that, after his treatment there, he would return to the place only to burn it down. Six months later, somebody else did the job for him.

Expelled at 16, Beadle drifted for more than a decade. He worked as a baker, an assembly line worker, a lavatory attendant in Germany and a fruit picker in Spain. He sold advertising space and set himself up as a glamour photographer. In the early 1970s he began working for Time Out magazine in London, then Manchester, and began to organise music festivals. He organised the Bickershaw Rock Festival in 1974 and made his first appearances on radio and television as a promoter defending youth festivals from the proposed Night Assemblies Bill. Beadle abandoned this business — he later said that he hated “the hangers-on, the fakes, the frauds” — and slipped back into obscurity as a cab driver. Between shifts he began to submit programme ideas to LWT, drawn from his hobby of collecting intriguing facts and lists. He supplied the On This Day column of the Daily Express and was given a break by Bob Monkhouse, who used his material on Celebrity Squares.

He worked as a presenter for Capital Radio, then LBC, and was recruited for Terry Wogan’s game show, You Must be Joking, steadily perfecting his talent for tricks and wind-ups. In 1980 he presented the children’s Saturday morning show Fun Factory, alongside his LBC colleague Therese Birch. The next year he worked with producer Clive Doig on The Deceivers, a programme about hoaxers, jokers and conmen, as part of a BBC drive to produce grown-up material for children. It was lauded as a fascinating programme for all ages, and was followed by Eureka!, another fact-laden slice of edutainment. Such shows might have defined Beadle’s niche had it not been for Game For a Laugh.

This hidden camera show was a direct descendent of Candid Camera in the 1970s. The pranks, however, had become a little darker and focussed on the victims’ fury rather than the pranksters’ silliness. Originally presenting alongside Henry Kelly, Matthew Kelly and Sarah Kennedy, Beadle was the only presenter to last into its second incarnation, alongside Debbie Rix and Martin Daniels.

He progressed to Beadle’s About in 1987, where he invariably turned up as the head park keeper, area manager or traffic controller when all the people playing lesser jobsworths had been thoroughly sworn at. At this moment the tension was broken, the victim was persuaded to see the funny side, and the nation laughed — as much through relief as enjoyment. Remarkably the series passed off without violence, and almost everyone at the butt end happily took the cash and signed the release for broadcast.

There followed seven years on Granada’s You’ve Been Framed, a British take on the American series Your Favourite Home Video. The public’s pratfalls — collapsing wedding cakes, children falling over and over enthusiastic dogs hurting people — were sent in by the public’s amateur camaramen. One programme in the show’s early run reached 18.7 million viewers, and the series was credited with single-handedly keeping camcorder sales afloat through recession.

At first darkly comic, the show gradually waned and became more saccharine and fluffy. Undoubtedly Beadle had the best of it: by the time Lisa Riley took over in 1997 its viewing figures had tumbled. Beadle’s About had by this time been cancelled; the appetite for public-at-large shows was on the wane, though You’ve Been Framed has since been revived with Harry Hill. New shows, Beadle’s Box of Tricks and Born Lucky, were flops, and Beadle faded from the public gaze. Columnists continued to vilify him, particularly Victor Lewis-Smith. There were popular rumours that Beadle’s raison d’être was to punish the world for his withered hand, that he shook hands with it as a practical joke and that he refused to work with anyone who showed a reaction to it.

He hit the headlines again when it was leaked to the Daily Mirror that he had helped a friend dying of motor neurone disease to obtain details of how to kill himself. “When a friend needs help I wouldn’t turn my back,” he told reporters. Several hacks sniggered that the real mercy killing would have been the other way around. “I don’t just get criticism,” he told The Daily Telegraph in October 1998. “I get abuse”. The article promptly heaped on a load more.

Beadle’s autobiography, Watch Out! flew straight on to the remainders piles and a pantomime he was to star in was cancelled after selling just 13 tickets.

He went back to compiling facts, this time for quizzes, and had a regular brainteaser column in the Daily Express. He organised pub quizzes, well attended by celebrities, in aid of the Foundation for Children with Leukaemia. Beadle was himself found to have the disease in April 2005. He had narrowly escaped death the previous year when a large kidney tumour was discovered, quite by chance, during a check-up for something else. Just three days into his recuperation, his mother died. Recently he had been suffering from pneumonia.

He returned with Win Beadle’s Money, a fairly faithful reproduction of the popular US show Win Ed Stein’s Money. In this, he got to show off his enormous capacity for trivia. His guests, usually outclassed, won just often enough to keep things interesting.

Beadle never really reached an understanding with journalists, whom he lauded both as the most interesting people he knew and condemned as jealous liars. He fluctuated, too, between demanding decorum and telling every dark detail, between inviting questions and angrily saying that the line had been crossed. The producers of Celebrity Stitch Up, first aired in April 2005, were delighted when Beadle would not sign the release for a prank played on him, saying that he could give but not take. Clearly he could — he was the butt of hundreds of practical jokes over the years — but there were certain buttons he could never tolerate being pushed.

Beadle supported numerous charities — notably Children With Leukaemia — and it is estimated that he raised some £100 million in total. He was appointed MBE for his services to charity in 2001.

In 2005 he married longtime girlfriend Sue Beadle, who had taken his name, after press reports of an affair between Beadle and a photographer. He is survived by her, their two daughters, and by his wife’s son and daughter from a previous relationship.

Jeremy Beadle, MBE, television and radio presenter and columnist, was born on April 12, 1948. He died on January 30, aged 59