HAPPINESS AND TEARS

THE KEN DODD STORY

LOUIS BARFE

Head of Zeus, 336pp, £20

Sir Ken Dodd was the last of the vaudevillians. As Alexander Larman put it in the Critic: ‘By his tickle stick shall ye know him. In the annals of 20th-century comedy, there was no other figure quite like Kenneth Arthur Dodd, a man whose persona went hand in glove with his inimitable appearance. A great shock of hair sticking up as if he had received a potent electric shock; two enormous, protruding, buck teeth, comic and vaguely sinister at the same time; and, of course, his tickling stick, forever held priapically aloft.’

Louis Barfe’s biography of a strange comic genius was praised by critics. In the Spectator Patrick Skene Catling called it ‘industrially thorough’. Dodd’s career ended with his death in 2018, aged 90. His deathbed marriage to fiancée Anne after a 40-year engagement (his first engagement lasted 24 years) avoided 40 per cent inheritance tax. For the famously tax-averse Dodd, it was, as Skene Catling observed, the ‘ultimate tickle’.

In the Times, Roger Lewis recalled seeing Dodd live: ‘I did think he was something of a joke machine, but one that wasn’t likely to run out of inspiration.’ In his 80s, he was still touring. Wrote Lewis, ‘Audiences could be trapped in the theatre for five hours at a stretch. “I’m not like television, missus,” he’d warn. “You can’t switch me off.” He said the usherettes would hand out will forms.’ David Collard in the TLS also saw him. ‘When he finally let us all go (“Tatty-bye everybody! Tattybyyyye!”) we staggered from the building like liberated hostages.’

But Dodd was, in the end, an enigma. He lived all his life in the house in Knotty Ash Liverpool in which he was born, never even having it rewired. As Collard put it: ‘He was thoughtful, eccentric, guardedly candid in interviews and immediately likeable but also, it seems, entirely unknowable.’