Sir Ken Dodd
Comedian
Born: November 8, 1927; Died: March 11, 2018
SIR Ken Dodd, who has died aged 90, was an eccentric, idiosyncratic and inventive comedian who became a huge star in the 1960s and then never stopped working. Not only did his career in comedy last for more than 60 years, his stand-up shows were famously long and would often last into the small hours. “The usherettes will be round soon to take your breakfast orders,” he would sometimes joke, and his fans lapped it up.
The reason he kept going for so long – he was still touring well into his 80s – was that for him comedy was a kind of compulsion. He certainly did not need the money (he made a fortune early on in his career and famously was accused of evading tax on it) but what he did need was the reaction of the audience. Bob Monkhouse once said that for Ken Dodd, everything off stage was just an interval. Speaking to The Herald when he was 83, Sir Ken tried to explain what the motivation was for touring incessantly – at that stage, he was still doing 200 shows a year. “I’m utterly stage struck,” he said. “When I’m not working I get a bit edgy. The feeling of hearing an audience laugh is the most beautiful sound in the world.”
His strategy on stage was to fire the gags out (he always aimed for “5tpm” or “titters per minute”) rather than explore his own life for material in the style of modern comedians. His shows were also always upbeat and optimistic.
His catchphrase was “What a beautiful day!” and he would always end his show with his theme tune Happiness (“Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess/i thank the Lord I’ve been blessed/with more than my share of happiness”).
It was a style that particularly found favour with audiences in the 1960s when Sir Ken became the biggest comedian in Britain. His stage show Doddy’s Here! in 1965 still holds the Palladium record for the longest running comedy show at 42 weeks and confirmed Sir Ken as a comedy superstar, although he had been working solidly as a professional comedian by then for around 10 years.
He was born – as if there is anyone who doesn’t know it – in Knotty Ash in Liverpool, the middle child of three to Sarah and Arthur Dodd. His childhood was relatively happy, although his father’s gambling sometimes led to visits from the bailiffs.
His first experience of showbusiness was through his father Arthur who took his son to the variety theatres of Liverpool where he watched the likes of Arthur Askey and Ted Ray.
Yet his first job on leaving school was working with his father in the family coal merchant business. He was determined to break into showbusiness somehow, though, and had a break when he auditioned to entertain the forces during the Second World War. He was spotted by Hilda Fallon, who ran a concert party called The Mersey Mites and asked Dodd to join.
By now he had become more of a comedy act than his original ventriloquism.
His professional debut was at the Empire Theatre in Nottingham in September 1954 and the same year he appeared at the Glasgow Empire, sometimes known as the graveyard of English comedians. “I was terror-stricken,” he said. “My first line was, ‘I suppose you are all wondering why I’ve sent for you?’
“That got a bit of nervous titter and then a drunk, in the middle of the third or fourth row, uncoiled himself from the seat, looked at me and shouted, ‘Crivvens, what a horrible sight!’ Then the drunk collapsed back into his seat. The audience roared with laughter and I was saved.”
By the following year, Sir Ken was playing a summer season at Blackpool on the same bill as Morecambe and Wise and by the late 50s, he was topping the bill and had his own TV series The Ken Dodd Show on BBC. Later, the Diddymen puppets that appeared on the show got their own series Ken Dodd and the Diddymen.
He always finished his stage act by signing a comic song and also became interested in recording ballads. In 1964, he released what would become his theme tune, Happiness, and in 1965 Tears was a massive hit. Some of his comedy material was not, on the face of it, fairly simple (and in later years some of it looked distinctly sexist) but Sir Ken’s loveable personality would often carry the audience through any jokes that didn’t work.
The nadir of his long career was undoubtedly the tax trial in 1989 (although it did provide a few good jokes for him later on). The allegation was that he had given false returns dating back to 1973 underestimating his income and profit, but to defend him he engaged one of the most famous QCS of the time George Carman.
In the end, he was cleared of all charges to much cheering from the public benches.
He always lived in Knotty Ash and died in the home in which he was born. Sir Ken had two long-term relationships in his life, first with Anita Boutin, who died of a brain tumour in 1977 at 45, and secondly with Anne Jones. They married just days before his death.