How Doddy had last laugh on the taxman
Comic legend dies AT 90
bUCK-TOOTHED, hedge-haired, indefatigable and beloved, Sir Ken Dodd has finally hung up his tickling stick for good after a career spanning six decades. “I tell people I’ve got the best job in the world, because I only see happy people,” he once said.
As recently as December, at 90, Sir Ken still had audiences on their feet at midnight in Liverpool – his stamina was as legendary as his jokes.
“I’m not on TV much these days. I can’t cook,” he quipped during what became one of his last ever shows.
His arsenal of one-liners was honed over the decades and could be deployed spontaneously to suit any occasion, while his marathon performances inspired awe. Watching a Ken Dodd theatre show could last five hours as he worked to fulfil his target of 7 TPM, or Titters Per Minute. “You think you can get away, but you can’t – I’ll follow you home and I’ll shout jokes through your letterbox,” he declared while still going strong at one show as it approached midnight. He would receive a standing ovation before signing autographs – a process in his younger years that sometimes went on until 3.30am. Born on November 8, 1927, he was encouraged to perform by his father who bought him a ventriloquist’s dummy. The teeth were the result of a dare to ride his bike with his eyes shut…
Sir Ken spent his early career working the theatres and music halls hoping for his big break. He performed as a professional comedian for the first time in September 1954, and was destined to become variety theatre’s greatest exponent. He is often described as the last of the old music-hall comics but made a successful transition to TV in the 1960s, trademark Tickling Stick and all.
He also enjoyed a successful singing career, charting on 18 occasions in the UK Top 40. His recording of Tears was the UK hit single of 1965, selling more than 1.5million copies in this country alone. For a time he even rivalled fellow Scousers The Beatles as a household music name.
But his greatest love was comedy and the access it gave him to the rigours and joy of a live audience. Such was his commitment, he even made the Guinness Book Of Records in 1965 for the longest run of any act at the London Palladium, performing twice a night and three times on Saturdays for 42 weeks straight. “With Dodd, what you get on stage is an observer of people,” said a critic, summing up Sir Ken’s lifelong fascination with the relationships that define us. In particular he liked quizzing couples in the first few rows of a theatre and using their responses as a springboard for humour.
But behind the apparently offthe-cuff comedic observations there was genius at work.
Fully convinced he would be returning to the stage after leaving hospital, where he was being treated for a chest infection, Sir Ken spent his days on the ward shaping new material for his Happiness Tour, which has been on the road for years.
Sadly, it was not to be. Less than 48 hours after marrying Anne Jones, a former Bluebell girl who had been his partner for 40 years, he died in the semidetached Georgian house in Liverpool’s Knotty Ash, where he had lived his whole life. It had been owned by his family, who ran a coal business, for generations and the backyard was once described as being straight out of Steptoe And Son.
Knotty Ash, of course, is also famous as the home of the Diddy
“Honolulu: It’s got everything. Sand for the children, sun for the wife, sharks for the wife’s mother.”
“I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law for 18 months. I don’t like to interrupt her.”
“Do I believe in safe sex? Of course I do. I have a handrail around the bed.”
“Did you hear about the shrimp that went to the prawn’s cocktail party? He pulled a mussel.”
“It’s a privilege to be asked here tonight on what is a very special anniversary. It is 100 years to the night since that balcony collapsed, ” – addressing people in the gods at a provincial theatre.
Men who work in the fictional Jam Butty Mines, among other whimsical places of employment he invented.
The original “diddyman” was in fact Sir Ken’s diminutive great-uncle Jack who was renowned for his singing and humorous stories. The Diddy Men are part of Merseyside mythology, pre-date Dodd and were referred to in the earlier act of fellow Liverpool comedian, the late Arthur Askey, whom Dodd cited as an inspiration.
It was while on trial for eight counts of defrauding the taxman in 1989 – including not declaring more than £700,000 in 20 offshore bank accounts – that some bizarre details of the comedian’s private life emerged. He was acquitted – but not before he was revealed by his barrister, George Carman QC, to be locked, to some extent, in the narrow world of his own home where he kept hundreds of thousands of pounds in suitcases, with scripts and 10,000 books piled from floor to ceiling. For Sir Ken read philosophers and psychologists to understand the nature of mirth and would lecture at universities on it, quoting Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein. The trouble is, he would add, none of them ever had to play the Glasgow Empire. A fact which left him highly tickled.
“The trouble with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.”
“Fivethirds of people have trouble understanding fractions.”
“The man who invented cats’ eyes got the idea when he saw the eyes of a cat in his headlights. If the cat had been going the other way, he would have invented the pencil sharpener.”