What a beautiful day... best one-liners from Knotty Ash
VERY LITTLE was off-limits to Sir Ken Dodd as he made generations of theatre and TV audiences laugh.
“I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law for 18 months. I don’t like to interrupt her,” he quipped, in between the windmill-like gesticulations of the arms that punctuated his act.
He had developed his unmistakable patter on a succession of TV and radio shows from the early 1960s. When he took his act on the road, he brought not only himself but also an orchestra and supporting cast. He was keeping variety going single-handed, one theatre at a time.
“I’ve seen a topless lady ventriloquist. Nobody has ever seen her lips move,” he said of one act.
He wrote his early material in partnership with Eddie Braben, a fellow Liverpudlian who shared his sense of humour.
Braben had been a fruit-and-veg man on the markets, and had an ear for the common voice. Their material was used up as quickly as they could write it, first on the BBC Light Programme and then on Doddy’s Music Box, the Saturday-evening ITV series produced by the Northern weekend contractor ABC that did much to make him a household name.
“How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows. It’s never been tried.”
Dodd and Braben fell out at the end of the 60s, and his loss was Morecambe and Wise’s gain. They had just parted company with their writers, Sid Green and Dick Hills, and when the BBC learned that Braben might be free, they brought him to London to meet Eric and Ernie.
Doddy carried on regardless, developing the one-liners beginning with “What a beautiful day...” that would sustain him through the 70s.
“Tonight when you get home, put a handful of ice cubes down your wife’s nightie and say: ‘There’s the chest freezer you always wanted’.”
Though he pretended not to take himself seriously, comedy was an abiding passion for him.
“My act is very educational,” he said. “I heard a man leaving the other night, saying: ‘Well, that taught me a lesson’.”
He also even came up with a few lines about his tax status. “They stole that idea from me,” he said of the Inland Revenue’s selfassessment scheme.
“I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny because I lived near the seaside,” he added.
“In the 1800s, one of the MPs in London decided to introduce tax. In those days it was 2p in the pound. I thought it still was.”