I Once Met… Ken Dodd
John Brealey
I met Ken Dodd one Friday in 1992. I was travelling by train from Liverpool to my home in Wiltshire.
On boarding the train at Lime Street, I secured one of four empty seats with a table and settled down to read my book in peace until I changed at Crewe. Or so I thought. More passengers boarded at Runcorn. One of them was a singular-looking character, with his back to me as he placed his bag on the luggage rack opposite. Eyeing the camel coat surmounted by a tiny short-brimmed trilby, beneath which long, lank hair extended well below the collar, I rather hoped he wouldn’t join me.
Then he turned and asked, ‘Mind if I sit here?’
Recognising him in a flash, I said, ‘Honoured, Mr Dodd!’
I watched, fascinated, as he opened his briefcase on the table, got out a document to read and then took out his lunch.
I was entranced by the ‘lunch’ – two jam butties for which the bread appeared to have been cut with a handsaw, about an inch thick at one end and half an inch thick at the other, oozing jam and thick butter in between. When he finished his lunch, I asked him to autograph the book I was reading. Then started the most memorable conversation of my life. I couldn’t believe how friendly he was – he spoke to me as if I was the celebrity, not him. It was not so much a conversation as a one-man show for my benefit, interspersed with lots of questions about the book I was reading, and what I did for a living. When he signed my book (about the First World War), he said the topic was of great interest to him also. He told me (and the rest of the carriage) about his trips to Ypres and the Western Front.
He moved on to his recent troubles with the taxman (he’d been acquitted of tax evasion in 1989). He talked of his frustration on stage, when theatre employees were frantic in the wings, tapping their watches at him as he overran; especially in Yorkshire, where he thought the stage-management people were a dour and miserable lot. Not at all like people from Liverpool who were the best in the world. ‘I’ll pay all the overtime!’ he’d said to the watch-tappers.
As I got off the train at Crewe, he stood up and walked part way down the aisle with me, still talking about the First World War.
He ended by saying, ‘Why do we have wars, John? Do you know what the world needs now, John? HAPPINESS!’
Then I got off to change trains while he returned to his seat to carry on to London.
Standing on the platform at Crewe, I felt as if I’d been hit by a verbal tsunami. But more than that, I felt I’d been in the presence of the most charismatic person I would ever meet.