George Melly, who has died aged 80, was one of the most genial and genuinely popular figures in the world of British entertainment. Dressed like a 1930s gangster or a 1940s Harlem hipster, with a huge hat on his large head, his ample figure and rubbery face, with its mischievous hint of Mr Toad, were warmly welcomed wherever he went. He was a "personality" who actually had personality, a jazz singer who was also a cultural commentator, a devotee of the surrealists who wrote the story lines of a cartoon strip. Presenter-performer, autobiographer, libertarian and in his own word "tart", he was "Good-Time George".
Melly was born in Liverpool. His father, an easy-going man, came from a large and well-known local business family, and made a comfortable living in the wool trade, which he hated. Tom didn't mind what anyone did, so long as it made them happy. Maud, George's Jewish mother, had once dreamed of a stage career, and remained a leading figure in Liverpool amateur dramatics. (George's sister Andrée was to become a well-known actor.) Maud was the friend of many theatrical queens, and visiting stars such as Robert Helpmann, Frederick Ashton and Douglas Byng were often at the house near Aigburth Road, as was David Webster, then running a department store in Liverpool before taking over the Royal Opera House.
George wrote his autobiography backwards, starting with his early years in the jazz world, and working back to his childhood. Scouse Mouse (1984) is an affectionate account of 1930s middle-class Liverpool and its numerous Melly eccentrics. The snake in the Eden of Sefton Park was George's headmaster at Parkfield prep school, the alcoholic WW Twyne. A manic wielder of the house slipper, given to purple rages, Twyne deplored almost everything about the modern world except games. His denunciations of ballet and leftwing politics were so extreme that George knew, at once, that he would like both. Thus his interest in both anarchism and surrealism, developed at Stowe public school, can be traced to his comfortable Liverpudlian beginnings - just as his passion for fishing went back to family holidays in north Wales.
George clearly lacked officer-like qualities, and was unable to qualify even as a naval clerk when he was called up in 1944. He remained a skiving ordinary seaman for most of his three and a half years' service, leaving anarchist tracts on the messdeck to annoy his superior officers. He spent most of his leaves in London getting to know the surrealist circle that gathered round the Belgian poet and gallery-owner ELT Mesens, and relishing an exuberant homosexual life made much easier by his uniform. Rum, Bum and Concertina (1977), his account of this period, is extremely funny. As a convinced surrealist, George felt an obligation to be shocking and subversive, but his sense of reality and his sense of humour kept him out of serious trouble. After the navy he went to work for Mesens in his West End gallery, but was dismayed to find him a painfully bourgeois businessman, as he wrote in Don't Tell Sybil (1997), his memoir of their relationship.
Until then George had known jazz only from records, but he now started going to live performances of what was then called "revivalist" jazz. These were the years of early Humphrey Lyttelton, Graeme Bell and Cy Laurie. Quite soon, George was singing with Mick Mulligan (obituary, January 4).
Owning Up (1965) is George's first-hand account of the professional jazz world of the 1950s, when the drinking was hard, the travel incessant and the sex easy. Under Mulligan's influence, he developed a voluminous appetite for girls, and eventually got married in 1955, to Victoria Vaughan. Never wishing to be an original singer - the whole aim of his performance was to imitate, as far as possible, the great heroes and, particularly, heroines of the blues - George could not avoid bringing his own character to the music. White, middle-class and English, he was as unlike Bessie Smith as it was possible to be, but his homage to the black musicians was as successful as it was unlikely.
He also began to develop an independent reputation as a writer and critic. In 1956, Lyttelton resigned from writing the storylines for the Flook cartoon strip in the Daily Mail, which was created and drawn by his clarinetist Wally Fawkes, under the name of Trog. So Fawkes turned to George. Flook, an apparently cuddly creature from prehistoric times, was really a freethinking social critic who could be extremely sharp and subversive, and the strip proved a perfect medium for a surreal imagination. Later, George was to provide the same sort of service for Mark Boxer when he was drawing cartoons for the Times and other newspapers, including the Guardian.
With the arrival of the Beatles, the trad jazz scene went quiet, and Mulligan felt the call to open an off-licence. George took the change in his stride, becoming the Observer's first pop critic. Revolt Into Style (1970) was the first serious attempt to analyse pop culture by someone who was part of it. He went on to review television, then movies, from 1965 to 1973. He also wrote the scripts for two films - Smashing Time (1967), and Take a Girl Like You (1970), adapted from the Kingsley Amis novel.
His divorce in 1962 was followed the next year by marriage to the beautiful Diana Dawson, and he became a leading figure in the "permissive society", someone whose name was constantly attached to letters to the press, and who could be guaranteed to take the libertarian view on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.
George was still singing when asked, and sometimes when not. In 1974, ever the tart in search of applause, he went back on the road with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, and continued to tour the country with them for almost 30 years, growing increasingly deaf from standing in front of trumpets and trombones, but still pulling in the crowds. A series of articles he wrote for Punch about the pains and pleasures of the itinerant musical life were collected in Mellymobile (1982).
He was successful outside Britain, too, performing at Michael's pub in New York, and touring Australia. The Christmas stints at Ronnie Scott's club in London became a major feast in the calendar of British jazz, and he often appeared at the Brecon jazz festival, near his home in Wales.
When Chilton decided to retire in 2002, George began a new lease of jazz life with the trumpeter Digby Fairweather. Though he now wore a piratical black eyepatch after an operation, and sometimes had to sit down to sing - in 2005 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, then vascular dementia - and though his style never markedly changed, new people, particularly students, were always discovering him. Thus, his popularity remained firm through the shifting fashions of the music world, and his CDs continued to sell.
In 2005 he published Slowing Down, an account of what to other people might be thought the indignities of growing old. Never one to hide his own deficiencies, he and Diana later made a film about vascular dementia and the problems caused to both sufferers and carers. Only last month he made an appearance, announced as his last-ever performance, at the 100 Club in London at a fundraising event to benefit the charity supporting his carers.
His writings about art included an edition of Edward James's Swans Reflecting Elephants (1982), a book about Scottie Wilson (It's All Writ Out For You, 1985) and a touching account of his personal attachment to surrealism in Paris and the surrealists (with photographs by Michael Woods, 1991). He was delighted to open the Victoria and Albert Museum's surrealist exhibition last spring, and made a film about the subject with Alan Yentob.
Always an avid collector of paintings, George liked the primitive and the naif. There were African paintings on his walls and many by completely unknown artists, as well as by Edward Burra and Jim Dine. He paid for his beautiful stretch of fishing on the river Usk by selling a Picasso drawing, a Klee watercolour and a Magritte oil.
Here, for many years, he spent his holidays with his family in a converted medieval tower in the middle of the valley. When George wasn't there, Diana, as independent-minded as her husband and a friend to many writers, ran it as a b&b. It was under her roof that Bruce Chatwin wrote Under the Black Hill. Diana, their son Tom, Diana's daughter Candy, and Candy's daughter Kezzie, were his affectionate but critical holiday audience, and one or the other often accompanied George abroad when he was writing travel articles. He also had a daughter, Pandora, from his first marriage.
When the Usk became too much, he and Diana sold the tower and bought a cottage near Newbury, Berkshire, so he could fish in the Kennet. He wrote about his life as a fisherman in Hooked (2000). By this time, the once rebellious George had been taken so much to the heart of the establishment that he had been awarded no fewer than four honorary degrees - although he refused an honour under New Labour.
Like many people attracted to anarchism, George was neurotically fastidious in his habits, and there was much that was self-contradictory in his personality. A compulsive storyteller, he even talked loudly on the river bank as he cast for trout, a well-known way of frightening the fish. But he recognised the self-contradictions, indeed revelled in them, and made them his subject.
First and foremost a performer, he loved both to entertain and shock his audience, and though shocking naturally became more difficult as he grew older, he was never shocked himself. His favourite quote in old age was Groucho Marx's, "Hello, I must be going." Open-minded, open-hearted, he will be missed all over Britain by people of every class and kind.
· Alan George Heywood Melly, jazz singer, writer, critic and broadcaster, born August 17 1926; died July 5 2007
