I don't think the name Mike Bongiorno will mean anything to our English readers but if I tell you that he was the Italian Bruce Forsyth, then you may get a measure of why his death is such big news.

I'd seen him on TV many times – not for nothing was he called 'il Re del Quiz', 'the Quiz King' – but even I didn't appreciate how long he'd been around and what he'd been through.

Mike was born in New York. His paternal grandfather was from Sicily and Mike and his Italian mother returned to Turin when he was little. This explains something that I had wondered about before – he's not called Michele on TV or any other similar version, but Mike – Maik, once the Italian accent has been added.

During World War II, Mike left school and, thanks to his knowledge of English, was used as a means of communication between the Allies and a group of Italian partisans. He was captured by the Gestapo but when taken to be shot, was apparently saved because they found American documents on him. Instead, he was held at the San Vittore prison in Milan for seven months before being taken to a concentration camp at Bozen/Bolzano (then in Austria, now in Italy, as you'll know if you read this post by J-P http://www.travels.jptreen.com/node/36 or if you live there as some of our readers do) and then on to Mauthausen in Austria. He was released before the end of the war when a POW exchange took place between the USA and Germany.

Mike worked on radio in New York after the war and returned to Italy in 1953. He presented the first official public transmission ever made by Italian state TV (RAI). It was a programme called 'Arrivi e partenze' – 'Arrivals and departures' (sounds riveting, doesn't it. I do hope the name wasn't a literal description). He then presented Italy's first TV quiz – 'Lascia o radoppia?' ('Stop or double?') in 1955 and went on to present many other quizzes besides.

The most memorable one for me, because I used to watch it with my nonna (Italian grandmother), was 'La Ruota della Fortuna' – 'The Wheel of Fortune', which he presented from 1989 to 2003. In it, contestants essentially played hangman on TV, except that instead of dying, on paper or otherwise, they would be awarded money for guessing letters and, eventually, the phrase correctly. The money awarded per letter depended on what you got when you spun the wheel and whoever had the most at the end, won.

Mike had a very bumbling manner which was analysed by Umberto Eco in the 1960s. Eco concluded that Mike was good at portraying himself as being no better than average in every respect so the viewer could feel that they were more sophisticated than him in some way. 'No effort has to be made to understand him... He represents an ideal that no one has to push themselves to be able to reach because anyone is already at his level. No religion has ever been so indulgent with its faithful. In him is cancelled the tension between 'being' and 'ought to be''. Unsurprisingly, Eco's thesis has been widely considered over the past few days, with most writers disagreeing with it.

Antonio Mazzi said that Mike 'was not a representation of mediocre TV, but of an educated TV without excess... Someone who, through games, united grandparents and grandchildren [well, yes, here I would have to agree, at least in terms of personal experience] and made different generations enjoy themselves [yes] and reflect [er...]... An American was needed to make all Italians unite.' (An American who was at least three-quarters Italian and spend his formative years and most of his life in Italy, but let's not split hairs, eh?) Part of the obituary in the Rome Metro read 'Mike Bongiorno was the very image of Italian TV. An intelligent and educated TV, hidden by reality trash and shouted talk shows.' I do wonder, though, whether that last sentence might be used to describe any country's TV output and therefore any country's favourite TV personality.

Mike had just arranged to move to SKY Italia (Rupert Murdoch) after Mediaset (Silvio Berlusconi) did not renew his contract (who wouldn't want to work for one of these guys?) and was due to begin a new quiz show this autumn – 'Riskytutto' (apparently a modern edition of his show 'Rischiatutto' ['Risk everything'] from the 1970s based on 'Jeopardy!' on which I cannot comment as I have never seen either).

In fact, Mike's long association with Berlusconi served to put some of the younger generation off him. Italian blogger 'Il Russo' ['The Russian'] wrote the following on 9th September. 'Having spent years devastating the intelligence of the media spectator... I will never forgive Mike Bongiorno for making my good grandmother vote for Berlusconi, I won't forgive him for having contributed to the growth of that monster of commercial television which has dumbed-down Italians, making us get to what we are today... Sanctifying him is the national sport. Cry for him again and again; I, thanks to heaven, will not.' When Berlusconi stood to make his part of the eulogy, a voice from the crowd shouted 'Go away'.

Mike died in a hotel room in Monte Carlo, Monaco while on holiday at the age of 85. He was given a state funeral in the Milan Duomo on 12th September. The authorities wanted to bury him in the Cimitero Monumentale where Italy's important people go but his family decided to respect his wishes and bury him with his mother in the family tomb near Lake Maggiore.