Sir Ken Dodd
The man behind the tickle stick
It is a cold night in December 2015. Hour after hour, until my jaw aches, until my back seizes up, I have been watching one of the wonders of the comic world regaling his devotees with material I have barely been able to scribble down fast enough. “Give me a home where the buffaloes roam – and I’ll show you a house with a nasty smell” … “The little boy next door refused to have me as his imaginary friend”… “I’ve got this book, how to develop a super memory – but I can’t remember where I put it.”
On and on it has gone until, suddenly, around midnight, Ken Dodd’s show has drawn to a close and I am bounding from one corridor to another, backstage at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton, trying to find the comedian for a pre-arranged interview.
After what seems like an eternity, I finally stumble upon him in his lair. His partner, Anne Jones, is bagging up the DVDS and memorabilia that have been on sale in the foyer and talking to a few lingering stage crew. Doddy, however, is sitting at a dressing-room mirror, a can of lager to one side, looking, as he wipes off the pancake make-up, as much like a coal miner who has finished his shift as a showman taking a well-earned breather.
And the first thing he does is point at my clown-sized feet. “By God, he’s got a bloody good grip on the sides of the Earth. What size are those?” he exclaims. There’s no grandeur about this grand old man of comedy. He’s soon asking after my children and contemplating the plight of flood victims in the Lake District earlier in the month: “To see your belongings destroyed, oh God!”
His eyes are bright, curious, constantly evaluating; despite his advanced years, his drawn features, I realise he’s as breathlessly excitable and engaged offstage as he was during the performance. Not that he isn’t drained. “It takes it out of you,” he admits. “Believe me, you know when you’ve done one. It takes a day or two to recover.” Even at this point, in his late 80s, there isn’t a scintilla of doubt he will tread the boards for as long as humanly possible, til death do him part from his calling. “Retire? Never!” he says mock-sternly. “The secret of keeping going is to feel that you’re necessary – to feel that you’ve some use in life. To feel completely useless, that’s awful. I couldn’t sit on a beach – oh no, that wouldn’t be me.”
For a while it looked as though Dodd might somehow go on forever – outlive us all. But yesterday it finally became apparent that the severe chest infection that left him in hospital for over six weeks had been the beginning of the end, when it was announced he had died aged 90, in the same house in which he was born, in the Liverpool suburb of Knotty Ash.
Dodd made his professional debut at the Empire Theatre, Nottingham in 1954 – and his ascent to the big-time was rapid; he had his first TV series by the end of the
decade, and chart success with the single Love is
Like a Violin in 1960 made him a household name. At the height of Beatlemania, and love of all things Liverpudlian, he was the darling of the West End, with his packed-out Palladium shows of 1965, managing a record-breaking 42 weeks; a second season followed in 1967 – at Christmas that year, he was invited to Windsor Castle to appear before the Queen and Prince Philip at the royal household staff party. The Queen Mother was a Doddy-phile too. He would return to the Palladium in 1990, the same year he finally agreed to appear on This Is
Your Life. “It frightened the life out of me – I thought it was the VAT man,” Dodd joked.
The touring continued to the end; he was scheduled to perform throughout 2018, but, as it turned out, his last gig took place at the Liverpool Echo Arena last December. With news of his death, tributes have been flowing – and will continue to do so. Although he didn’t have the same small-screen success as Sir Bruce Forsyth, he was equally a titan of post-war light entertainment – the last link with the great age of variety and music hall. With his passing, an entire era has come to an end.
It’s always an interesting theatrical footnote that Dodd helped inspire John Osborne’s classic play The Entertainer (1957), an evocation of the music hall comics whose audiences were stolen by television. Osborne interviewed him and even took the company of the play – including Laurence Olivier – to watch Dodd in action
(Sir Kenneth Branagh consulted him again ahead of his 2016 West End revival). Yet Dodd actually did his level-best to prove Osborne’s elegy wrong, or premature: far from going the way of the Dodo, Dodd stubbornly persisted with his craft.
“Dodd represents a unique link to our comic heritage – he is living archaeology,” his biographer Stephen Griffin wrote in 2005. “To enjoy the comedian in full flow is to appreciate the type of comedy that our grandparents and great-grandparents would have enjoyed in years gone by.” When Dodd was growing up, he was exposed to a now vanished world: “We went to the Shakespeare Theatre of Varieties, the Empire, the Pavilion,” he told me. “I saw many comics – best of all, I suppose, being Frank Randle. If there was such a
thing as a comic imp, he was it.”
“If I thought there was a little of Will Hay, Arthur Askey, Ted Ray, Robb Wilton [and] Frankie Howerd in me I would be very proud,” he once said.
Of that list, Howerd is the one we remain most aware – and appreciative – of; the other names have fallen into the domain of the comedy aficionado. With little television – little that reflects especially well on him – to his legacy, it’s possible that many people will go blank at the name of Dodd within a generation. And even in the near future the real risk awaits that his status will be revised downwards: in his later years, he didn’t perform in London, his fan-base wasn’t universal and he had his detractors, most notably Ricky Gervais, who in his 2009 show Science, compressed Dodd’s entire routine into the same repeated, exaggerated gurn.
Doddy, fascinated with the mechanisms of jokes, devoted to offering a requisite number of “titters per minute”, only alluded to his offstage self in the most cursory way. His was a world populated by throwback stereotypes: the milkman and the missus, not to mention those parochial and peculiar Diddy Men.
But what I established in seeing him numerous times – and meeting him too – was that his ability was, if anything, under-sung. Like those candyfloss feather-dusters, his tickling sticks, he whipped the rudimentary sugar of quick quips into an almost hallucinogenic avant-garde experience. This sat alongside his desire to spread happiness. There was something bizarrely rock ’n’ roll about it, something Zen too: your buttocks might have gone numb, your bladder near-burst, your car been towed away, but you were transfixed by the dauntlessness of it, as if watching man pitting himself, valiantly, against the mortality represented by the final curtain-call, and refusing to go out, except on his own terms.
Unlike most comedians of late, Dodd was a natural conservative. It was little surprise he supported Margaret Thatcher. But he was also suspicious of anyone in power. “I don’t take any notice of people who try to tell you what to do,” he told me as he headed home. “In every comedian there’s a streak of anarchy. I would never do anything to make people feel unhappy in my shows but if someone said: ‘You mustn’t do that’, I’d say ‘Paddle your own canoe’.” That could be his epitaph.