“About five or six days later, I went out to the hospital and there was a sort of buzz in the air. As soon as I walked in, I could tell it was a different mood and place to what it normally was,” Ford said.

“I said ‘What’s going on?’ [and] they said, ‘You’re not gonna believe it. Guess who’s just been here? Bert Newton’.”

He had gone around to every single patient, spending time by their bedside and making them laugh.

“You’ve got to remember 31 years ago there were still enormous fears about how you catch [AIDS] and can you be in proximity, and nobody wanted to go to that hospital, even if you had loved ones here,” Ford said.

When Ford went on to visit his friend, he noticed Newton had left something on his bedside table: one of his four Gold Logie awards.

“I rang Bert and I said ‘I can’t believe you did that’ and he said ‘OK, I’ve probably broken some kind of Logie law and they’re going to come after me for giving away one of my Logies so don’t tell the story until I’m gone’,” Ford said.

On Sunday, tributes poured in for the larger-than-life entertainer, who had undergone surgery to amputate part of his leg below the knee earlier this year due to a life-threatening infection in his toe.

Wife Patti Newton described her husband as “the most wonderful man” who should be remembered “as the legend that he was”.

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“It’s very, very devastating. All our hearts are breaking because he was just the most wonderful man,” she told reporters outside her Hawthorn East home on Sunday morning.

“He had such a fabulous attitude. And he gave us so much joy right up to the end.”

Ford, who credits the success of his career to Newton, said the entertainer was a part of the fabric of Melbourne.

“It’s wonderful that he is being celebrated,” he said. “He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said there would never be another person like Newton. “Four Gold Logies, hosting the Logies on 20 occasions and entertaining Australians for over half a century,” Mr Morrison said.

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“There was a familiarity that connected us to Bert, but it also connected us to each other. We could laugh together. That was his gift. Bert could give and take a joke. He could laugh at himself, I’m sure that’s what made Australians warm to him as much as we did.”

Newton will be farewelled in Melbourne with a state funeral.

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