Bob Monkhouse has been bought back from the dead to spread the word about the cancer that killed him.

A new advert shows Monkhouse wandering through a graveyard, cracking jokes about death, in a campaign to raise money to fight prostate cancer.

The £750,000 commercial, which will be screened on TV and in cinemas, used a body double, a voice-over artist and computer technology to create the illusion that Monkhouse was back from the grave.

Monkhouse died in 2003, aged 75, after a two-year battle with the disease that kills one man an hour in Britain.

The ad says: ‘Just when you thought it was safe to turn on your TV again, here I am. Gosh, four years already, doesn't time fly.

Then he repeats his gag: ‘I wanted to die like my father, quietly in my sleep, not screaming and terrified like his passengers.’

Monkhouse's widow Jackie backed the advert, telling The Sun: ‘Bob would love this ad. It's funny but has a serious message. They've done a fabulous job bringing my Bob back.

‘I have lots of videos of Bob but it’s too painful to put them on. The finished ad is also difficult to watch because it’s so realistic.’

The footage of Monkhouse on which the ad was based came from a BBC programme that, unusually, showed the comic outdoors rather than in a studio. Experts at Red Bee Media then merged this with shots of a body double taken at a graveyard in Surrey.

Likewise, the words were a combination of actual recordings of Monkhouse and a soundalike.

The 40-second ad took nine months to make, and was made for the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation for free. Click here to watch it.