CHIC Murray died thirty years ago. But it's a mark of the man's rare comedy talent it seems he has never left us at all.

Chic was born Charles Thomas McKinnon Murray in Greenock in 1919 and began working life with an apprenticeship in engineering at Kincaid's shipyard.

His early life wasn't that tough, but Chic of course turned it into comedy gold.

"We were so poor; the ultimate luxury in our house at the time was ashtrays without advertisements," he claimed.

"It was all the wolf could do to keep US away from his door. A luxury meal was prairie sandwiches - two slices of bread with wide-open spaces between them. There were so many holes in my socks I could put them on seventeen different ways."

As a teenager, Chic played became a musician in amateur groups such as The Whinhillbillies and Chic and His Chicks. But he couldn't resist the urge to joke.

Success in the world of music halls came however when he formed a double-act with his wife, Maidi Dickson and billed themselves as The Tall Droll with the Small Doll. And with the union came the opportunity to tell wife jokes.

"I met her in the Tunnel of Love actually - she was digging it at the time. She's a redhead you know - no hair, just a red head. She went to a beauty parlour once for a mudpack. For two days she looked great, then the mud fell off.

"I told her once that black underwear turned me on so she didn't wash my Y-fronts for a month. She's a classy girl though, at least all her tattoos are spelt right."

Murray offered a comic vision of the world that was a mix of a straight gags and surreal stories. A straight gag; "She had been married so often she bought a drip-dry wedding dress. And the absurd? "Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

Chic Murray's intelligent comedy probably contained his career to the minds of the imaginative; he was never likely to make as Scotland's answer to Jimmy Tarbuck or Arthur Askey. Thankfully.

And when he did have the odd chance to reveal he was more than a comic oddity, it faded as quickly as it came. Chic was once offered a spot on the 1956 Royal Variety Performance, only for the show to be cancelled because of the Suez crisis.

He was taken on by a top American showbiz agent, only for the agent to be killed in a car crash.

Chic Murray did however make his London West End debut at the Prince of Wales theatre in 1957 and Harold Hobson of The Sunday Times, then the leading theatre critic, compared him to Proust and Beckett.

No wonder with lines such as; "This chap started talking to me about this and that, about which I know very little."

That's not to say however he was incapable of being silly; "It was raining cats and dogs and I fell in a poodle." Or how about; "My father was a simple man. My mother was a simple woman. You see the result standing in front of you, a simpleton."

The bunnet-wearing comic and his wife produced two children, Annabelle and Douglas.

"As a dad, he was very nurturing and loving and normal in that way but, yes, with his own brand of lunacy," his daughter Annabelle once recalled. "I grew up being told I was Dale Evans - Roy Rogers's wife - and Douglas wasn't my brother, but my sister."

Chic Murray's solo act is hard to describe. Vaguely camp, 'he'd tiptoe on stage as if he'd just undergone a painful rectal exam and approach the microphone by a meandering route.'

But when he got to the mike he'd produce a series of searing one-liners, such as; "I believe the minister's going to give a sermon today on the milk of human kindness. Well, I hope it's condensed."

And he'd flow into; "My next-door neighbour said, 'Is it okay if I use your lawnmower?' I replied, 'Certainly, just don't take it out of my garden.'"

Yet, Chic Murray's popularity didn't exorcise the demons. Chic Murray was sensitive, self-aware and needy. And he drank too much.

"There are two rules for drinking whisky; first, never take whisky without water, and second, never take water without whisky."

Thankfully however his dryer than sand performances weren't missed by film producers and he featured in the likes of Casino Royale (1967), as the headmaster in Gregory's Girl (1980) and played Liverpool Football Club manager Bill Shankly in the musical play You'll Never Walk Alone (1984).

Chic Murray was plagued by ill-health in his final years, but continued to work and tell jokes.

"I went to the doctor and he told me I only had three minutes to live. I immediately asked if there was anything he could do for me. He said he could boil me an egg."

The comedian's legacy remains however. He inspired the likes of Billy Connolly, and has been listed in several Top Fifty Greatest Comics of All Time tributes.

The omnipresent bunnet was removed for the very last time in Edinburgh in 1985 where Chic Murray died at the age of sixty-five.