He’d be tickled
Irresistibly cheerful comedian whose mixture of surreal nonsense and relentless gags rendered audiences helpless with laughter
Flowers and “tickling sticks” sit outside the Knotty Ash home of Sir Ken Dodd, as Lady Anne, his widow, prepares to give a statement yesterday after his death at the age of 90.
SIR KEN DODD, who has died aged 90, earned his unchallenged accolade as the clown prince of British comedy as a brilliant stand-up comedian, astonishingly energetic and inventive, and fully aware of the comic potential of his extraordinary appearance.
Although he was a huge success in theatres across Britain for more than half a century, he never quite managed to convey the essence of his work on television. However, his popularity, which had peaked in the 1960s, soared again when his private sadness, generosity and eccentricities were exposed during a court case concerning his tax affairs in 1989.
Dodd – whose frenzied and zany act generally entailed a barrage of one-liners, whimsical verbal inventions and lashings of sauce (but no smut) – continued the music-hall tradition of Max Miller, Tommy Handley and Arthur Askey long after everyone else considered it dead and buried. And there were those who considered him a superb exponent of that line of English nonsense that stretched back to the Middle Ages.
Frequently heard to proclaim “By Jove, how tickled I am”, Dodd made extensive use of an alternative vocabulary – “tattiphilarious”, “goolified”, “nikky-nokky-noo”, “discumknockerated” – that complemented his surreal descriptions of a fictionalised Knotty Ash. This was the Liverpool suburb where he was born and died in the same 18th-century farmhouse, with its mythical kipper trees, jam-butty mines, black pudding plantations and broken biscuit repair works. These flights of fancy brought comparisons with Edward Lear and with the 14th-century Land of Cockaigne, in which the churches had black puddings for bell ropes.
Having launched his career in 1954, Dodd adopted his trademark tickling stick two years later because he wanted to be more distinctive and had read about jesters and their traditional props. Despite his absurdly coloured costumes and scatterbrained aspect – saucer eyes, hair like a blasted hedge and teeth hung out to dry – he was an assiduous student of his craft, with shelves of books on comedy and constant recourse to authorities such as Freud, Schopenhauer and Bergson.
He was much helped in his studies by his fiancée Anita Boutin and, after her death in the 1970s, by Anne Jones, who attended all Dodd’s shows, compiling his “Giggle Map”, a comprehensive index of his jokes and the reactions they got at each venue; he almost fulfilled his early ambition of playing every theatre in Britain.
They worked out, for instance, that in Scotland audiences wanted oneliners, in the Midlands they loved singing, while jokes had to be delivered more slowly the deeper they penetrated the Black Country, and Nottingham was fond of picture gags, like the one about “the egg in the meat pie and the clever hen”.
For all his studies, Dodd’s success was based above all on the warmth of his personality and his desire to “tickle the chuckle muscles”. Coming on stage, irrepressibly and irresistibly cheerful, he would spread his arms wide as if to embrace the whole house and created an atmosphere akin to that of a party. His belief that “in the end it all comes back to getting the audience with you” was what made him such a bravura representative of the moribund music-hall tradition, but also meant that when he was addressing an invisible audience of millions, much of his art was lost.
Although television brought him wider recognition – and forced him to embellish his act with interludes provided by the Diddy Men – his fast-moving, improvising, vivid, chancy, every-night-different act demanded a live audience. Kept in their seats often until well after midnight by his notorious overrunning, there were many who thought that “genius” was an appropriate word to describe him.
“The sooner you laugh at the jokes,” he would say, “the sooner you can go home.” His relentless style, calibrated to crack six jokes a minute, or about 360 an hour, generated a remarkable phenomenon: laughter produced from nowhere. One psychologist, Professor Richard Wiseman, explained that Dodd’s knack was to get a rhythm going with the audience, whereby he said something and they laughed, which, once established, manufactured mirth irrespective of the quality of the joke.
As Craig Brown observed in a profile in The Oldie magazine in 2015 (to celebrate the comedian’s Oldie of the Year accolade), Dodd’s delivery was so fast that “you are generally laughing at the last joke but three … After a while, the audience begins to suffer from a sort of collective Stockholm syndrome, howling with laughter as much at their inability to escape as at anything more obviously funny.” A typical Dodd routine, Brown noted, was finely balanced on the borderline between sanity and madness.
Kenneth Arthur Dodd was born at Knotty Ash on November 8 1927. His father was a prosperous coal merchant and part-time musician; his mother played the piano. Ken made his stage debut at eight with a ventriloquist’s act, garnished with tap-dancing and music. He acquired his spectacular dental arrangement (which, as he observed, allowed him to “eat tomatoes through the strings of a tennis racquet”) when he fell off his bicycle.
He was educated at Holt High School, leaving at 14 to start delivering coal for his father. After four years he set up as a travelling salesman (selling detergents and hardware from the back of an old van) while entertaining in the evenings, by now being billed as “Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty, Operatic Tenor and Sausage Knotter”.
Tentative about turning pro, in 1954 he was signed up by a London agent and made his professional debut at the Empire Theatre, Nottingham. The next year he appeared for the first time on television in The Good Old Days.
From 1956 until 1964 he appeared in summer shows at the seaside. He had his own television show on the BBC in 1960 and that year recorded Love is Like a Violin, a saccharine ballad ideally suited to his light baritone. To his surprise it hit the Top Ten.
In 1965 he created a considerable critical stir with Doddy’s Here, which packed out the London Palladium and was seriously assessed by all the “posh” papers, prompting John Osborne to take the entire Royal Court company to see him. “Dodd is never still for a moment,” Jonathan Miller observed in the New Statesman. “He capers and skips, giggles, goggles and splutters with his upper front teeth.”
That year Tears, his weepy ballad, went to No 1, matching the Beatles by staying there for six weeks. Dodd had once considered becoming an opera singer until persuaded otherwise by Anita Boutin; he had always, though, interspersed his act with songs as moments of relief from the gags. His theme tune was Happiness. Declared Showbusiness Personality of 1965, he confessed to a fine feeling of plumptiousness.
In 1971 Dodd played Malvolio in a production of Twelfth Night at the Liverpool Playhouse to reviews appreciative of his restraint. He tried out a one-man show in 1973 called Ha-ha, an attempt to present a history of comedy.
The following year he undertook The Marathon Mirthquake at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool, telling 1,500 jokes in three hours and six minutes and entering The Guinness Book of Records. He created another record in 1975 with his 42-week season at the Palladium.
In 1977 Anita Boutin, to whom Dodd had been engaged for 22 years, died, aged 43, from cancer. Three years later he was first linked with Anne Jones, a former Bluebell dancer who had been playing the Good Fairy when Dodd was starring in Dick Whittington at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham. They were finally married two days before his death.
Dodd’s trial in 1989 – when he faced seven charges of cheating the public revenue, dating from 1973 to 1986, and four counts of false accounting between 1982 and 1988 – caused a stir, particularly in Liverpool, and led to a general awareness of how valued he was as a national treasure. The trial related especially to numerous bank accounts that Dodd held in the Channel Islands and on the Isle of Man, and to large sums of money which he kept in various attics.
His QC, George Carman, effectively suggested to the jury that Dodd was far from dishonest, although undoubtedly quite strange. Asked why he had £336,000 in cash in his attic at home, Dodd replied: “I know it is old-fashioned and eccentric, but I liked having my savings there. It proved to me that I have played the Palladium, that I was someone.”
He claimed that he had enjoyed going to the various offshore banks because he had been taught not to put all his eggs into one basket, and because it was pleasant to meet the staff in all the different establishments.
He said that he had not understood that, if you lived in England and had invested money abroad, whatever the tax laws of that country, then you still had to pay tax on the interest earned in that country. The misunderstanding with regard to cash sums, he said, was due to his believing the cash to be for expenses.
Dodd spent 21 hours in the witness box spread over six days, and came to look exhausted, ill and emotional as the trial progressed.
Several showbusiness associates – among them Eric Sykes and Roy Hudd – gave evidence on his behalf, referring to his charitable work. Dodd worked strenuously (and without charge) for cancer charities and to help keep open old theatres.
After deliberating for more than nine hours, the jury acquitted him on all charges. He did, however, have to pay £825,000 tax.
In 1990 Dodd starred in his first live television spectacular for eight years, How Tickled I Am, at the Palladium. In 1996 he appeared as Yorick in Hamlet.
He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Conservative Party, and of Margaret Thatcher – she, for her part, described him as her favourite comic.
He was appointed OBE in 1982. For years, the further honours that many felt he deserved never materialised, the consequence, it was widely assumed, of his entanglements with the taxman. But last year, at the age of 89, he was finally knighted, suffusing Dodd with another fine flush of plumptiousness. He held honorary degrees from the University of Chester and Liverpool Hope University.
His wife survives him.