At the height of his radio career, Dyer and his friend and rival, Jack Davey, were regarded as Australia's top quiz comperes.
[1] Bob and his wife, Dolly, were probably, after Sir Robert and Dame Pattie Menzies, the most recognised double act in Australia in the 1960s.
[4] In an interview much later in his life with Barry Jones, Dyer spoke of his childhood: Back in Hartsville County my elder brother, a Negro boy and I all grew up together.
[5] He returned to Sydney in 1937 as a member of the Marcus Show, doing a hillbilly and ukulele act on the Tivoli circuit, combining comedy with singing.
Australian radio personality Harry Griffiths was a child at the time but met Dyer through his musician father who played first trombone for the Marcus shows.
Dyer was given permission by the American radio and television star, Art Linkletter, to use and adapt his scripts and stunts in Australia.
[2] Another, Can You Take It?, comprised "scrapes and dares [and was] designed to outdo a similar show by his friend and rival Jack Davey".
[8] Harry Griffiths says of the two that Dyer's "gags might have been more obvious than Jack Davey's slick humor but Bob knew what people wanted.
[12] However, while Davey had the sharper wit, he "was essentially a radio performer who failed to make a fully successful transition to television".
[13] Australian radio personality John Pearce, who knew both Davey and Dyer, wrote in his autobiography that Dyer: allowed the television people to tell him how it [Pick a Box] could be transformed into the new medium, realising that TV is eighty per cent visual, and a gesture, a piece of visible "business" is far more important than all the clever, rapier-fast dialogue.
[14]Some well known Australian actors, such as Bud Tingwell and John Ewart, worked as assistant comperes on Dyer's radio programs.
As Tingwell had described it, the role of the assistant compere was to "do the big, posh Colgate-Palmolive commercials during the show as well as... the introductions" of Bob himself and the contestants.
In 1948, when he was also compering Winner Take All and Cop The Lot, Dyer launched the quiz show Pick a Box on radio.
In June 1971, a few weeks before the last Pick a Box was screened, Bob and Dolly both appeared in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.
[17] At the ceremony, the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Roden Cutler, who was "not generally known for his humour, asked Bob if he wanted to take the medal or the box it was in".