A hair-raising star of comedy

THE trouble with Freud, Ken Dodd once remarked, is that he never had to play the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night.

Scotland is the setting for my favourite version of a famous story about the comic, who died on Sunday at the age of 90.

The musician Phil Cunningham tells the anecdote with tattyfilarious style – and swears it is all true.

After a gig in the NorthEast, Phil was invited into the manse of the local church for a few drams. Noticing a large picture of Ken Dodd, he remarked that he, too, was a great fan.

The minister coldly replied: ‘That’s my wife.’

Dodd, the comedy king of Knotty Ash, could have had even closer links to Scotland if he had dipped into his piggy bank and become a Scots laird. He went to view the hamlet of Kendoon, on the edge of the Galloway Forest, because it sounded like his name.

Had Doddy paid the £27,000 asking price, he could have looked out over his Scots estate by climbing to the top of Dodd Hill. A few miles away was Loch Ken, where he could have gone for a dip.

What always struck me about Dodd was how well he knew and loved his local audiences, telling a Widnes audience that their heavily industrialised town was the only place in Britain where brown daffodils grew, while Sellafield is where tom cats lit up at night.

Glasgow changed after being the cultural city of Europe, according to Doddy, who said Weegies no longer had street fights. Instead there were ‘pavement debates’.