How tickled I am to have known Doddy
After meeting the comedian as a young man 40 years ago, Michael Henderson looks back at his friendship with Sir Ken Dodd
‘Manchester man,” Ken Dodd liked to say, “Liverpool gentleman.” The self-romanticising city is the best place to start in an estimation of a life that brought so much joy to so many. Doddy was rooted in native soil, dying on Sunday night in the house in Knotty Ash where he entered this world in 1927. The son of a coal merchant, he never left Liverpool, a place he loved deeply, though never in a sentimental way. He was a Liverpudlian of the old school, certainly not a scouser.
That house on Thomas Lane was his castle. No matter how late the show, no matter how far from home, he and Anne Jones – his partner of 40 years, whom he married two days before his death, finally making her his Lady Anne – would try to cross the moat and pull up the drawbridge before dawn.
Our paths first crossed at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, one night in 1980. “Young man, I can give you 10 minutes tonight,” he told me, then a greenhorn reporter, “or maybe 15 tomorrow.” I returned the following evening. He gave me an hour and a half, and every minute was gold. Thus began a friendship that would last for years.
“It’s Kenneth Arthur Dodd here, young Michael,” one phone message began. “We’re in Buxton next week, a lovely Frank Matcham theatre. Come along at 5 o’clock, and we’ll have a bite to eat.” And so it was, at 3.10am, with Doddy telling stories, that I ran up the white flag. For him, it was merely another tour date. He loved to wind down in the company of others at the end of a show.
He knew every theatre in every town, and everybody who worked in them. “The people I admire above all are those who work on stage,” he told me. “Not just the comedians, but the actors. British actors are the best in the world, and my respect for them is absolute.” I caught him many times over the years in those theatres, in Birmingham, Stockport and Mansfield, as well as the London Palladium, where in 1965 he played twice-nightly (“and three times on Sunday”) for a bewildering 42 weeks. “I lost it only once, when I looked down one night and saw Jack Benny looking up at me.”
One autumnal evening, over fish and chips in Eastbourne, he said to me: “That actor came to see us last week, in Worthing…” Which actor? “The one who wandered around the desert. Lawrence.” Oh, Peter O’toole. “That’s the man. Lovely fella.” Modest he may have been, but he savoured the respect of his peers.
Towards the end, he was struggling. Catching him in Buxton last summer, it was apparent that his memory was slipping. He gave his last performance at Liverpool’s Echo Arena in December. The previous December, an audience member at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall demanded to know why he hadn’t been knighted. “Read the papers tomorrow…” he replied: he was named in the New Year’s Honours list.
I had hoped to meet up with him last month at the Garrick. I’d invited him to address the club’s annual drama dinner but he was playing somewhere else that night. He rang for a chat in January but, shortly after, spent seven weeks in hospital with a chest infection, and was only released last week. He spent his final hours in bed, holding Lady Anne’s hand. In the end, she told me yesterday, he slipped away.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have known Doddy – and to have gone some small way to repay him for his early act of kindness that helped along my career. Nine years ago, a new manager at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham told him he would not be booked as usual that Christmas. After this paper published my story about the scrubbed date and the local backlash, the theatre was shamed into putting Doddy’s Happiness Show back on its schedules.
“It’s all because of you,” he said. It wasn’t – but it was so nice to be told.