by Louis Barfe
Henson had developed the puppets originally for the US children’s show Sesame Street, but had been trying to take them to a wider audience. With the exception of some appearances on Saturday Night Live in its early days, Henson had not been able to interest any American networks in his creation. The impasse was broken when they came to Elstree to appear in a Julie Andrews special for ATV. Lew Grade ‘was tremendously taken’ with what he saw and told Henson that the Muppets could have a series of their own, a series that Grade then sold back to the US network CBS.31
‘Spesh’ acts apart, the seventies also saw the final flowering of performers who had come up through the variety ranks in the traditional way, having entered the business while there was still a circuit to speak of. All were of a standard befitting their experience, but a couple stood out from the rest, such that they are still fondly remembered, years after their death. One was Tommy Cooper. Like many comedians born during the reign of King George V, Cooper found his performing feet in the services, although his earliest shows as a conjuror had been for the benefit of his colleagues at the British Power Boat Company in Hythe, near Southampton, where he had been an apprentice before the Second World War. It had been there, when a trick involving an egg on a piece of elastic went wrong but got laughs, that Cooper first glimpsed the comic possibilities of magic by misadventure.
He seems to have spent most of his wartime service in the Royal Horse Guards as a protected species, beyond the rigours of conventional military discipline, aided by his status as the camp clown. Given to performing in a pith helmet, he adopted his trademark fez when working with a Combined Services Entertainment unit in the Middle East. Someone appeared to have taken the pith, so he purloined a waiter’s headgear and a comic legend was born. After demob, he worked at the Windmill Theatre, and appeared on television, including a spot in the first variety show to come from the BBC studios at Lime Grove, in December 1950, but the new medium seemed unsure how to handle his obvious talent. Indeed, it wasn’t until the late sixties that Cooper was presented to his best advantage on television, by which time he was already a national treasure through his ceaseless live work in theatre and cabaret and further guest appearances on TV variety shows.
The first of television’s unsuccessful attempts to harness this force of nature was It’s Magic produced by Graeme Muir for the BBC in 1952. Only one series was made, and it wasn’t until 1957 that anyone tried to repeat the experience, when Associated-Rediffusion made one series with him. Then followed a one-off Saturday Spectacular for ATV, and a series called Cooper’s Capers in 1958. Once again, the trail ran cold, this time for eight years. Cooper had made several memorable guest appearances on the Billy Cotton Band Show, and Bill Cotton Junior, as BBC TV’s head of variety, had wanted to sign Cooper for a series. There was then an internal kerfuffle over whether the Cooper show should be made by the variety department or Frank Muir’s comedy department. When the comedy department won, but decided to make a pilot before proceeding to a series, Cooper’s agent Miff Ferrie took his client to ABC at Teddington.
Unfortunately, the first ABC outing was as unsatisfactory as his previous television shows. Ferrie had a tendency to regard himself as a comedy expert, despite being, in writer David Nobbs’ estimation, ‘about as funny as Liverpool Street station’,32 and consequently he often interfered with the creative process to disastrous effect. The show’s format – the credit or blame for which was taken by Ferrie – was an odd mishmash of a variety show and a cod current affairs programme, under the title Cooperama. There were the usual speciality acts and musical guests – one surviving show features a pair of acrobats in the first half and jazz clarinettist Acker Bilk in the second. However, instead of being allowed to front the programme himself, Cooper was interviewed about his life and exploits, some genuine, some fictitious, which would then be illustrated with sketches in flashback. The original plan had been to enlist a genuine heavyweight interviewer, but when none proved available, actor Derek Bond was booked. Bond had some experience as a genuine interviewer on the BBC’s Tonight programme, but was less than ideal when playing one from a script.
Happily, ABC’s second attempt – Life with Cooper, beginning in 1966 – hit the mark. Out went the interviewer, leaving Cooper to speak to the audience directly in stand-up mode, and out went the guests, leaving a good, tight sketch show. It was to be the blueprint for all Cooper’s subsequent television shows.
Les Dawson was another performer who, like Cooper, was in a league of his own. On a very superficial level, Dawson was just another northern comic, telling mother-in-law jokes. In fact, Dawson was a craftsman, honing his material carefully, choosing each word very deliberately for the maximum effect. His mother-in-law jokes were eloquent, often showing him to be the frustrated novelist that he, for many years, was. He was a master of bathos, his florid descriptions building the audience up perfectly for a vulgar punchline. A prime example was a lyrical monologue about sitting, taking in the beauty of the night sky, that ends with Dawson realizing that he needs to put a new roof on his outside lavatory.
Tough audiences in rough areas warmed to him because of his lack of false jollity, and because they recognized one of their own. He had been born in 1931 in Collyhurst, one of the poorest parts of Manchester. Before achieving success as a comic, he had been a Hoover salesman, an apprentice electrician of stunning ineptitude, a National Serviceman and the pianist in a Parisian brothel. His was the comedy of misery and resignation. ‘Good evening, fun hunters’ was a regular opening line to his act, delivered with heavy irony. When he made his first major television appearance in the sixties, he explained the dressing room hierarchy – top acts on the ground floor, lesser acts on the first floor, and so on. Then came the killer punchline: ‘To give you some idea what they think of me, my room’s full of falcon droppings, and the mice have blackouts.’33
He had good reason for his pessimism, as his career received many setbacks before he hit the big time. In the fifties, he had become a protégé of comedian Max Wall. One night, when singer Edmund Hockridge dropped out of Wall’s television show, Dawson was asked to step in. At the eleventh hour, Hockridge changed his mind, leaving Dawson to watch the show alone in a pub. In any case, his connection to Wall soon became worthless, as the elder comedian was hit by scandal following his decision to leave his wife for a younger woman, something that would barely register as a misdemeanour nowadays. It got worse. On the night that a representative of the Delfont agency was due to see Dawson performing at a Liverpool club, the venue burned to the ground. He made several television appearances, including a run of bookings on Big Night Out with Mike and Bernie Winters, but he seemed to be permanently stalled until he auditioned successfully for Opportunity Knocks, Hughie Green’s long-running talent show. He was a smash hit, and this led to a booking on the untransmitted pilot for Blackpool Night Out. Given Dawson’s known tendency to find the cloud in every silver lining, we can be sure that he was telling the truth when he said in his first volume of memoirs ‘in show business parlance, that night I “murdered” them’. A couple of bookings on the actual series followed, and Dawson stormed it every time. He had arrived.
Throughout the second half of the sixties, his profile in the clubs and theatres was high, and he was eagerly booked for regular guest appearances on other people’s TV shows, but it wasn’t until 1969 that he got the chance to shine in his own star vehicle. Yorkshire Television’s first head of light entertainment had been veteran gag writer Sid Colin, but he soon decided that executive life wasn’t for him, and so his deputy, That Was the Week That Was alumnus Jack Duncan, took over. It was Duncan who approached Dawson, during a Christmas show at Leeds Grand, to make his own show for Yorkshire. A chance remark from a dancer gave the show its title, Sez Les, and the first series began in April 1969.
The university-educated Duncan and the elementary school-educated Dawson had more in common than was immediately apparent. Both were jazz fans, so when Dawson suggested using the Syd Lawrence O
rchestra as the show’s house band, Duncan was only too willing. Dawson wanted to be recognized as a serious novelist, while Duncan worked rather reluctantly in LE, feeling that his natural home would have been in drama or documentaries. ‘When Sid left, Donald Baverstock asked me to do the job. Well, I had a family to bring up, it was more money, but I didn’t want to be stuck in LE, because I wasn’t any good at it,’ he claims. ‘My background at Oxford was serious, heavy stuff. Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Faustus. I was never known for being a funny man at all.’34 In this assessment, Duncan does himself a great disservice. He might have been even better in drama, but this is the man who commissioned Rising Damp. Certainly Dawson thought highly of Duncan’s abilities as a comedy and variety executive. Writing some years after Duncan had abandoned television to run his own bookshop, Dawson declared ‘if I had my way he’d be back in the studios. He had ideas and was never afraid to stand by them’.35
Although it was almost exactly contemporaneous with the innovative Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and indeed some late shows in the run featured John Cleese as a supporting player, Sez Les was not in the business of pushing back boundaries. It was a traditional variety-oriented, sketch-based comedy show with musical guests. Where it scored was in having great scripts, sympathetic production and a star who was absolutely ready to seize his big chance. Of the writing duties, Dawson wrote his own monologues, while the bulk of the sketches were penned by David Nobbs – also the show’s script editor – and Barry Cryer. In his autobiography, Nobbs remembered an audacious quickie written by Cryer with great fondness:
Les, in a filthy raincoat, enters a posh bookshop, asks ‘Got any dirty books?’ John [Cleese] looks at him in disgust and disdain, a whole variety of scornful looks which we timed at fifty-four seconds, then says ‘Yeah, what kind of thing are you looking for?’ Try that without the pause. There’s no joke at all. The pause was the joke. Eat your heart out, Harold Pinter.36
It was during the Sez Les years that Dawson developed the characters with which he would become most closely identified: bespectacled sex maniac Cosmo Smallpiece and the gossipy old dears Cissie and Ada, played by Dawson and the always reliable comic actor Roy Barraclough. Dawson’s Ada – named in honour of his real-life mother-in-law – is particularly noteworthy, being an obvious homage to Norman Evans’s ‘Over the Garden Wall’ act of thirty years earlier. Dawson and Evans had mobility of features in common, and the mannerism by which Ada pushed up one of her breasts while talking was an echo of the older comedian’s act. Dawson also became known for horrendously out-of-tune piano playing, all the time exhorting the audience to sing along, apparently oblivious to the fact that singing along with such a discordant racket would be impossible for all but the most tone-deaf.
In 1977, after eight years and sixty-eight shows with Yorkshire, the BBC enticed Dawson over to become one of the stars in its light entertainment firmament. His first series was a straight-ahead variety show in which he was paired with singer Lulu and producer John Ammonds. Alternating fortnightly through the spring of 1978 with the wildly popular Mike Yarwood in Persons, The Les Dawson Show was an unexpected flop, and Dawson began to wonder if he had made the right move. The follow-up series, The Dawson Watch, produced by Peter Whitmore, was more formatted – tackling a different subject each week in comic form – and more successful. Dawson also kept his profile up with guest appearances on other BBC shows, including a memorable spot on Shirley Bassey’s 1979 BBC1 series, in which he reduced the normally composed Bassey to genuine tears of laughter with his musical antics.
In 1981, a return to the variety melee, with Ernest Maxin as producer, proved to be a hit. In the absence of Lulu, Maxin came up with Kids International, a multi-racial troupe of child performers. ‘I wanted to break down the racial hatred that was going on in this country,’ says Maxin. ‘The Brixton riots [had happened], the press were exaggerating. Being Jewish, I had a lot of that when I was a young boy. I decided to get a United Nations of children together between the ages of 6 and 11. I wanted about 30, so I auditioned 1,000 children of all different races, [from] within the home counties radius. There was a classical boy pianist, a black boy, and I taught him to play jazz. There was a little black boy who was 8 and a half, I taught him to dance like Sammy Davis and Fred Astaire. We had Japanese children, Arab, Israeli, Chinese, Indian – a complete cross-section. I put them in the show with Les, and they were so successful that Norman Murray, who was Les’s agent, said “For the next series, we’ve got to take them out. They’re getting too successful.” I was getting thousands of letters into my office in dustbin liners.’37 Kids International went on to make their own special in May 1982, but their career was finally curtailed by the problem that had brought an end to Maxin’s own career as a child performer. As they grew up, they stopped being cute.
Their replacements had no such built-in obsoleteness, indeed their appeal depended entirely on their maturity. Dawson had appeared in a stage show with the traditional complement of stick-thin dancers, and had decided to do his bit for equal opportunities by employing a dance troupe composed of larger ladies of a certain age. Some involved with the production were unsure that the Roly Polys would work, but in the event, they took off in a way that surprised even Dawson.
Throughout his life, Dawson had been overweight, a smoker, a heavy drinker and a worrier. The death of his first wife, in 1986, had put an almost unbearable strain on him, and he had eased off on his career to be with her through her illness. He took over Blankety Blank from Terry Wogan in 1984, the production-line recording methods requiring far less effort than his usual shows. In 1989, he also took over Opportunity Knocks, which he had won in the ABC days. The show had been revived in 1987 by the BBC, with Bob Monkhouse at the helm, and the voting now done by telephone rather than by post. Hughie Green was nowhere to be seen, however, despite owning the format. ‘We paid him £5,000 a week on the condition he didn’t come near the studio,’ producer Stewart Morris explains. ‘All he wanted to do was knock everything.’38
Monkhouse’s departure was financially motivated. ‘The BBC paid him nothing, flumpence,’ Morris relates. ‘He got a decent offer from ITV and off he went, very sensibly.’ Dawson came in for two series, but his lugubrious presentation was a world apart from Green’s winking, smirking declarations that everything and everyone was wonderful. Morris remembers that despite being ‘lazy’ when it came to rehearsal, Dawson was ‘an absolute delight to work with. He’d sit me down in his dressing room with a little glass of something and I’d say Les, you have to run through the material, I’ve got to hear it first, because if there’s something in there that I know I’ve got to cut out, I’d rather you know now. He’d have me crying with laughter, absolutely in tears. What a lovely guy.’39
1989 also saw Dawson marrying for a second time, but the happiness was cut short on 10 June 1993, when he succumbed to a heart attack. Dawson had somehow managed to remain unique while also being part of a proud lineage of lugubrious, pessimistic comics and a perfect example of a particularly northern type of humour. When he passed on, an important piece of variety history died with him.
Like Dawson, Ken Dodd has always taken the business of laughter very seriously. The wild-haired Liverpudlian comic has a knowledge of variety’s heritage equalled, among performers, only by that of Roy Hudd. John Fisher, who became a respected TV executive and comedy historian, can testify to the power of Dodd’s recall. While still a student at Oxford in the 1960s, he met Dodd when the comedian was at the city’s New Theatre: ‘He was absolutely wonderful. I sat with him and chatted about the old time comics, magic and spesh acts’40. Several years later, when Fisher was working at the BBC’s Manchester television studios, the pair met again, and ‘he remembered me as somebody who’d been in his dressing room at Oxford. There’s no reason why he should have done. A great man’.
Always a highly individual performer, with his electric-shock coiffure, protruding teeth and tales of the Knotty Ash jam butty mines, Dodd now st
ands alone as the torch-bearer for live variety. Now in his ninth decade, he continues touring the nation’s theatres, selling out wherever he goes, and keeping the audiences entertained until after the last buses have run. While The Ken Dodd Happiness Show also contains several other supporting acts and the Diddy Men, the bulk of the stage time – often three hours of a marathon five-hour performance – is occupied by the star.
Although he is far more than just a catchphrase merchant, several lines have become closely associated with Doddy, not least ‘How tickled I am’ and his regular declarations that everything is ‘tattifalarious’. If the mother-in-law joke was Dawson’s calling card, Dodd’s equivalent is the ‘What a wonderful day for . . .’ gag, in which all manner of daft, cheeky, inappropriate activity is suggested. ‘What a wonderful day for going up to the Kremlin,’ runs one, ‘and asking “Is Len in?”.’ He also corrupts clichés and quotes beautifully, for example, ‘If music is the food of love, give us a tune on your sausage roll.’
He began his professional career with an engagement at the Empire, Nottingham in 1954; by 1958, he was topping the bill in summer season at Blackpool. One of Dodd’s earliest influences had been Suzette Tarri, a comedienne with a mildly risqué Cockney charwoman act. When, some years after her death in 1955, John Fisher saw pictures of Tarri in action, he noted that her main prop was a feather duster, which Doddy appropriated as the famous tickling stick.
Dodd’s crowning achievement was his record-breaking run at the London Palladium in 1965, in Doddy’s Here, with the vocal trio, the Kaye Sisters, and comedy beat group, the Barron Knights. The Times’ reviewer observed that while ‘in his way, an engaging comic’, Dodd was guilty of self-indulgence and dishing up ‘the corniest patter about kippers and nightshirts’ along with ‘gags one thought dead with the thirties.’41 The audiences had no such reservations and kept the show running from 17 April to 11 December, when it had to make way for the Palladium’s annual pantomime.