Comedy colossus from a vanishing age
No hectoring. No political posturing. Absolutely no crudity. But, says ROGER LEWIS, no one was funnier than Doddy, especially on his favourite target – the taxman!
HE MARCHED on stage wearing a big moulting raccoon-skin coat, with buttons the size of dinner plates. On his head was a tropical pith helmet. He waved a Union Jack and sang bursts of ‘On the Road to Mandalay!’ composed by Rudyard Kipling in 1892. He then shouted to the eager audience: ‘Stand up for yourselves! Let them know you’re British!’ With masterly timing he added: ‘Play on their sympathies...’
Sir Ken Dodd, who died on Sunday aged 90, was the last of the great music hall comedians. When I saw him in full flight last year in Wimbledon, his act was defiantly anachronistic, enshrining a Blitz atmosphere, as if Hitler’s bombs were falling outside, or the Kaiser was still menacing our boys at the Front.
‘What a beautiful day,’ he said, ‘for going up to Count Zeppelin and saying: “You’ll never sell a sausage that size”.’
Doddy told archaic jokes about dumb blondes, nagging wives, cheating husbands, stockings, vests, long-johns, mean northerners, tin baths, girdles, soot and defunct TV programmes — though he seemed unaware they were defunct. He often mentioned his tax trial, which took place in 1989.
There were prolonged community singalongs, as if we were cheering ourselves up in an air raid shelter or hiding from the Boers.
There was a slightly queasy and surrealist story about his being a sexual reject, where Doddy said: ‘I shave one of my legs, ladies and gentlemen, so that in the dark I can caress it and pretend I am in bed with a woman.’
Altogether, seeing Ken Dodd live was to rediscover post-war music hall England where the strongest oath was ‘By Jove!’
Doddy was slightly more camp in the flesh than I’d expected, like a pantomime dame with elongated bony, expressive fingers and cartwheeling arms.
His rainbow make-up was unabashedly for the sulphur flare of 19th-century footlights, the rouge, the mascara and the purple lips.
For all that, he always went on and on about ‘happiness’ and a need to elicit ‘cascading cacophonies of chuckles, great gurgling guffaws’, Doddy’s waxen face registered pain and bewilderment better than positivity.
Indeed, when he pulled a funny face, making a meal of his jutting fangs, zany hair and staring eyes, he was a scary gargoyle, like a creature who’d fallen off a cathedral.
Entertainer George Melly, who once witnessed Doddy singing Sonny Boy to a ventriloquist’s doll famously named Dickie Mint, was similarly disconcerted, and thought Doddy was something of a ventriloquist’s doll himself: ‘You get him out of the box, push him on stage and he’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant’ — but not exactly recognisably human.
This is because Doddy was much more than a comedian. What he was doing was Performance Art.
I was transfixed as the jokes fell like leaves, one after the other — ‘Love is like a set of bagpipes. You don’t know what to do with your hands’; ‘I wanted to take my dog to obedience class, but he wouldn’t go’ — and the audience laughter ebbed and flowed in great gusts.
‘Fellas, why don’t you go home tonight, grab a handful of ice, throw it down the missus’s top, and say: “How about that for a new chest freezer?”’
THAT these were terrible jokes was paradoxically part of the fun, like Tommy Cooper’s magic tricks going wrong. Though bouncy and eccentric, trying hard to incite laughter as a reflex, Doddy in his delivery had a dryness as well as considerable nuance.
His state of being was one of surprising sweetness — enabling him to get away with a line like this: ‘My life has been a series of tragedies, ladies and gentlemen, culminating in tonight.’
Doddy possessed none of the rasping, hectoring, excitable quality common to stand-ups. None of their modern-day crudity. He did, though, have the great actor’s gimlet eye, which missed nothing. It was as if he was fully capable of noticing and reacting to each and every audience member individually — to see if they were paying attention or fidgeting or sneaking to the toilets. He addressed patrons in the stalls (‘yes, you, missus’) like Dame Edna purring at her ‘possums’.
He mumbled and coughed now and again, and seemed susceptible to pollen and dust.
Yet it was hard to know if this was genuine frailty as he was in his tenth decade, or whether it was all an ingenious way of helping win us over, to create the necessary intimacy, the bond between artiste and audience — because the show still lasted five hours. ‘This isn’t television, missus,’ he warned at one point. ‘You can’t turn me off.’
KENNETH Arthur Dodd was born on November 8, 1927, in Knotty Ash, Liverpool. He remained in the double-fronted family home all his life, the furniture and tablesettings still arranged as his late mother had left them. Knotty Ash is where he died.
It is one thing to have had a happy childhood, as Doddy did by all accounts, but quite another never to be able to leave most of it behind. And you hardly need to be a psychologist to detect here the origins of Doddy’s comic style, banging a drum, wearing silly hats, making a noise — he was the clown as grown-up baby.
His father was a coal merchant, who in his spare time played the saxophone, clarinet and double bass. He took his son to the cinema and theatre regularly — and the future entertainer remembered of the stars he saw that ‘those people looked so happy and healthy. That’s the job for me’.
Doddy was given a set of puppets, read leaflets on ventriloquism and began showing off in church halls at amateur dramatics and concert parties.
He left Holt Grammar School at 14 to help his father deliver coal around Merseyside — persuading, cajoling, selling things to the public — and at the weekend dressed up and billed himself as Professor Yaffle Chucklebutty, Operatic Tenor and Sausage Knotter, telling corny gags, indulging in goonish word-play (tattyfilarious, plumptious), and generally drawing attention to his goofy appearance, in order to amuse wounded soldiers at military hospitals.
The coal — ‘sex is what posh people have their coal delivered in’ — was first taken to Knotty Ash, and some say it accounted for that asthmatic cough of his.
Doddy and his brother would then deliver it by horse and cart, says BBC Sports presenter Garry Richardson, who made a documentary about his hero and was the last person to interview him.
‘Ken reminisced about how they went to Wrexham horse sales one day and bought “a wonderful horse called Duke”, and that’s how they travelled the streets of Liverpool,’ says Richardson.
‘After 12 years, Ken bought a Luton van and started work as a door-to-door salesman selling buckets, pans, polish, soap powder. He told me that’s where his rapport with audiences began.
‘He said: “I would knock on the door and say: ‘Good morning madam’.” The rest is history.’
Years later, Doddy reflected that ‘to make people laugh and bring some cheerfulness into the lives of so many people has been a very great privilege’. He was a true jester, his tickling stick his equivalent of the Fool’s pig’s bladder.
He made his professional debut at the Nottingham Empire in 1954 and was soon booked for summer seasons in Blackpool. Only in Glasgow was he heckled. ‘What a horrible sight!’ someone yelled.
Doddy had his own television series by 1959, and he was to remain a popular turn on The Good Old Days, where audiences dressed up in Victorian costume.
To win a family audience, he was frequently accompanied by puppets or child actors portraying The Diddy Men, lurid midgets who worked down the Jam Butty Mines, in the Snuff Quarry or in the Broken Biscuit Repair Works.
In 1965, Doddy packed the London Palladium for 42 consecutive weeks. Doddy’s Here! netted him £126,000. John Osborne, the playwright creator of failing musichall performer Archie Rice in The Entertainer, took the entire Royal Court Theatre Company ‘to see a real comic artist at work’.
By 1970, Doddy was earning £10,000 a week for his appearances. In 1982, his income was £1,154,566.
He also had a concurrent career as a singer of lachrymose romantic ballads, and Doddy’s records sold millions. ‘Happiness’, ‘Tears’, and ‘Promises’ were dislodged from the charts only by the advent of The Rolling Stones.
Money was very important to him, a symbol or indication of what he called ‘a colossal desire to be loved’, as measured by applause and tickets sold. Doddy hoarded his wealth — never spent any of it. Financial worth came to be a reflection of self-worth.
By 1986, there were 20 offshore bank accounts in places such as the Isle of Man and Jersey, holding £777,453. But most of his loot was kept in used notes and bags of coins stashed in the attic, under the stairs and in the wardrobes in Knotty Ash. There was £300,000 in a shoe box.
When the Inland Revenue prosecuted him for unpaid tax on the interest these nest eggs should have accrued, Doddy said he didn’t owe them a penny because ‘I live near the seaside’.
Though he was found not guilty after a four-week trial, he was left with legal costs of £2million, and the details that emerged, when he
was grilled by prosecutor Brian Leveson — the lawyer behind the Leveson Inquiry — were peculiar.
Doddy’s frugality, for example, would have impressed Ebenezer Scrooge, as since 1949 his total expenditure on all outgoings — i.e. across 40 years — was reported as £23,000. His annual disbursement on wine and meals out was approximately £50. The first time he went on holiday was when he was 51. Doddy’s counsel, George Carman, bewilderingly argued that his client hid money under the floorboards because ‘he feared Britain was on the brink of a civil war’.
But the truth is more that Doddy had an entertainer’s acquisitive ego — he was tenacious and obstinate (what was his was his. He did not like sharing or being told what to do). And if he was a genius at asserting his will over an audience, keeping us locked in for hours, this is because, in all areas of his life and work, he needed to have perfect control, complete manipulative power. Doddy’s ability to charm his audience wasn’t infallible. When a woman told him she was a cleaner, and he quipped, ‘Oh, so you’re a scrubber?’ she reached into her shopping bag, pulled out a leg of lamb and hit him over the head with it. ‘And that’s my tickling stick!’ she said.
Perhaps it was to avoid moments like this that Doddy — who had two long-term fiancees in his life — didn’t marry until the very end. On Friday, on his deathbed in Knotty Ash, he quietly wed his partner of 40 years, Anne Jones, a former Bluebell dancer.
Some years ago, he told the psychiatrist Anthony Clare that he ‘didn’t have time to get married’, and a shocked Clare replied: ‘In your list of priorities it wasn’t high enough, because you would do it if you wanted to do it.’
Ken’s first partner, Anita Boutin, was with him for 24 years until her death at 45 in 1977 from a brain tumour. The couple had been engaged for almost their entire relationship. She’d told one reporter when asked when they might wed: ‘It’s up to Ken.’
Anita was buried at the local church in Knotty Ash — where Ken’s mother had been laid to rest eight years previously — and each Christmas Day he would place flowers on both their graves.
It’s hard to imagine a sadder image of the great clown, who in backstage photographs could often appear melancholy and reflective, a milk-white ghost. He once said morosely: ‘I had no children. I had no Rolls-Royce. I had no villa in Spain.’ But much of this was his own choice.
Kenneth Branagh observed that Doddy ‘can suggest ticklish delight and black despair’, and cast him as Yorick in a production of Hamlet, where the character — normally simply a skull unearthed by gravediggers — appeared in a flashback. Doddy also played Malvolio, the tragically pompous buffoon in Twelfth Night, at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1971.
The late comic actor Ken Campbell, only semi-tongue-in-cheek, believed Doddy should have been invited to join the National Theatre. He’d not have been averse to this, and relished the thought of ‘the fear and the discipline of being a real actor in a team’.
But would he really have fitted into a team? I hardly think so. I can’t begin to imagine Doddy as an ensemble player. As he told Clare: ‘I was always trying to become a name. I was always trying to get to the top of the bill. I always wanted to be a star. I love being a star. I love being Ken Dodd.’
So we can see why he’d have been averse to marriage, why all his professional life Doddy avoided what he believed were the traps and impositions of family life.
It would have meant a loss of control — he’d have had to share something of himself.
Meanwhile, Anne Jones followed him everywhere. While the great man held everyone captive on stage, Anne would set up a little stall in the foyer and sell the Doddy memorabilia, the Diddymen hats and tickling sticks. I myself bought an inscribed copy of Doddy’s memoir, Look At It My Way, from Anne’s stall in the theatre in Wimbledon.
It is as a unique vaudeville phenomenon spewing forth jokes that Doddy will be remembered. When a critic tried to be clever and compared Doddy’s whimsy with P.G. Wodehouse, the comic retorted: ‘Wodehouse should try playing the Golden Garter Club in Wythenshawe on a Saturday night’.
THE Guinness Book of Records reckoned Doddy could tell 1,500 jokes in three hours, and Doddy’s rationale was ‘I try to give value for money’.
He kept touring until the very end, up and down the country — Bridlington, Cannock, Frome, Whitley Bay — filling theatres and floral halls on Sunday afternoons, keeping the audience there until Monday morning. ‘You think you can get away, but you can’t. I’ll follow you home and shout jokes through the letterbox.’
No one doubted the threat was real. When I saw him live, I’d never felt quite so transported back in time. The support act was a George Formby impersonator, which helped intensify the Forties mood. ‘We’ve been walking him around the theatre to sober him up,’ said Doddy generously. ‘Give him a big hand.’
Doddy then glanced at the auditorium and said it reminded him of an outpatients’ department and a geriatric ward. ‘Under your seats you’ll find a Will Form.’
Hours later he still wouldn’t relent and, like a benign dictator, he exacted his control over us. ‘Do you give in?’ he entreated at last. And by then, of course we did.