‘By the time we started the late show, we were in danger of running into overtime for all the bar staff. I had to make a deal with Ken. Just get me to an interval by ten thirty, so I get my staff paid up and out, and then you can go on as long as you want after that. Needless to say, he was delighted with that.’
‘What time did it all finish up, then?’
‘It was after one.’
So Ken would have been doing the guts of eight hours onstage. It’s no wonder that, as he’s gotten older, he’s put that punishing schedule behind him. I asked Peter how long ago this was.
‘It must have been about five years ago maybe?’
Ken would have been in his mid-seventies.
Let me be clear about one thing. I am not a lifelong Ken Dodd fan. I have nothing against the man; it’s just that his brand of comedy didn’t seem to travel to Ireland when I was growing up, especially in comparison with his contemporaries, like Morecambe and Wise, or Les Dawson. There was something very English about it, it seemed to be all silly wordplay and Union Jack coats and performing children. I have only vague memories of his act. I wasn’t attending as an act of homage. I’ll be honest and admit that there was a genuine danger of my hating it and, moreover, hating it for five hours. This was comedy from a different generation, after all, and if it was a long evening of pre-enlightenment cracks about stupid Irishmen and shiftless foreigners like an extended working man’s club set, then I would be in a great deal of pain. (Physical pain, too, given that I would also be squeezing my capacious modern Gaelic arse into a seat made for a Victorian.)
I didn’t think that Ken was going to be Bernard Manning but, to be honest, that was because I didn’t know what to expect.
I certainly didn’t expect to be wrenched from my dinner to come and meet the man.
‘Get over here,’ Peter said on the phone. ‘Ken knows you’re in the audience tonight and would love to meet up before the show.’
I dashed over, praying along the way that I’d eaten enough to get me through the night. When I arrived, Ken was at the end of his soundcheck. He wasn’t in his stage clothes yet, but already his hair was standing on end, and his eyes were sparkling with energy.
He greeted me with an exaggerated stage bow.
‘Good evening, sir, and what an honour it is to have you here with us,’ he said.
I’m not practising false modesty here, but I was genuinely surprised that he had any clue who I was.
‘Oh that show you do. Mock the Week. Those lads are very witty. But, vicious, the lot of you.’
It turned out that Ken is across all of our work.
‘That lad from the North-east, he’s very good, if you can understand him, he’s very funny, Ross Noble…’
We wandered backstage so that the audience could be let in. In his dressing room, he explained the complex rationale behind the five-hour shows.
‘It’s my party. I enjoy it. Why would I stop? When you’re at a party and you’re enjoying yourself, you don’t want it to stop, do you?’
And he gave me a reassuring look.
‘If you don’t make it to the end, I won’t mind.’
When the audience had sat down, I got a chance to check out Ken’s demographic. It was certainly older than my crowd, but still with a striking number of young people dotted throughout. I didn’t feel like I was intruding. Reassuringly, there was even a gay couple in front of me. If the gays are attending, you’re usually safe enough. They have great antennae.
At seven thirty on the dot, the lights went down, the band struck up a fanfare and an offstage voice barked out the announcement:
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Ken Dodd Happiness Show! We hope you’re going to have an evening filled with laughter! Now please welcome the Squire of Knotty Ash, Ken Dodd!’ And we were off.
I can only give you a sense of the show, of course.
This is partly because these are Ken’s jokes, not mine, and he’s earned the right to get the laughs off them, not me. But it’s also because, in the absence of recording equipment, it’s difficult to keep track of that amount of material. I would occasionally race to the bathroom and write down a couple of jewels in a pocket-sized notebook but was aware that if anyone saw me they would naturally presume that I was trying to steal his material. That was a scandal I’d sooner avoid.
Watching Ken Dodd do his full show is like tracking a spaceship as it passes all the landmarks of the comedy universe, travelling further and further into the uncharted depths. In comedy, where you rank in the stratosphere can often be told by how long you’re allowed to perform for.
Ten minutes, for example, is the standard length of the open-spot set you’d start your career with. It’s also the length of a set in an American club, and of the sets Ken would have done in the variety bills throughout his career. Ten minutes into tonight’s show, Ken has taken the acclaim of the crowd, introduced the band and made the first of a great deal of quips about just how long the show is going to be (‘How exciting to think that we’re all going to spend the next seven and a half hours here.’). He’s insulted the age of the crowd (‘I thought I was in Out-patients’), the venue and the city of Leeds. He’s done gags about Gordon Brown, the credit crunch, Elton John’s wedding, dog obedience, an imaginary giraffe; even, at this point, I am going to stop trying to remember the topics, let alone the gags, he’s firing them out so fast. He would later tell me that this punch, punch one-liner style came about in the rough-and-tumble bills of the fifties, where crowds were quick to move you along.
‘They have a plaque in Glasgow, y’know. It just says, “Des O’Connor fell here.”’
At the twenty-minute mark, we were passing the standard time for a set in the UK clubs. By now, Ken was making the first allusions to his well-publicized run-in with the revenue commissioners.
‘I hate it when those envelopes appear in the post each morning. Those brown envelopes. You know the ones. With “Inland Revenue” written on them. I got one the other day. It said, “Self-assessment Tax”. Self-assessment? I invented that.’
That, my friends, is a brilliant joke. If I ever get accused of tax evasion (Dodd was acquitted, let’s not forget), I’m stealing that joke.
By the forty-minute mark, we had passed the standard length of a headline set in the out-of-town (i.e. out of London) clubs. At this stage, I was beginning to see the craft behind the gags as well. A great comic is funny between the jokes. Otherwise any fool could just learn some gags off and have a career. Other comics want to see how you handle the quiet moments; and Ken had some lines of schtick that I would have been proud to use.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll find something you like,’ he had told us earlier, midway through yet another quickfire burst. At one point, when a gag had got a smaller response than he thought it deserved, he upbraided the crowd. ‘There’s a name for what I’m doing here, y’know,’ he said to them, proudly. ‘It’s called… struggling.’
At the hour mark, we were passing the length of the standard Edinburgh Festival show. The move from forty to sixty is the most difficult in comedy, as the smart money says that audiences only laugh for about fifty minutes uninterrupted, meaning that you have an awkward lull in energy just as you try to wind them up for the finale. Ken sidesteps this with the first of the sing-songs, occasionally serious but usually nonsensical, with the crowd doing animal noises or Elvis or a laughing policeman. And if they mess up their part?
‘You only have to remember that little bit. I’ve got nine hours of material to get through tonight.’
By the ninety-minute mark, we’ve caught up with the majority of touring shows and DVDs.
It was beginning to look like Ken would reach 12.45 a.m. as promised without even pausing for breath, but at this point he takes a break and invites on one of his support acts, a singer who performs a turn of classic British war-time songs.
I’m not a huge fan of vocalists – as a child I used to loathe it when comedy shows suddenly used
to stop and bring on a singer to deliver a standard – but, more than that, from her song choice, you could see that this lady was targeting herself at the older members of the crowd. And you suddenly realized that Ken hadn’t been. There had been nothing in the previous hour and a half that had felt dated. But suddenly it was all ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ and the older folks singing along and, for the first time, I felt out of place. As the nice lady sang ‘We’ll Meet Again’, I began to feel my arse getting very numb for the first time.
Luckily for me, after twenty minutes of songs, Ken came back on and did another hour.
By the end of it, he had matched my record time for the room almost exactly. And, although he won’t have realized it, he then underlined his superiority by calling the interval.
During the break, when I wasn’t furiously scribbling down some of the gags and taking in food and drink, I quizzed a couple of the younger people around me as to why they had come along.
‘It’s Ken!’ the man behind me said. ‘We grew up with him.’
‘I first saw him thirty-five years ago,’ said another. ‘And he only did two and a half hours then.’
We then tried to guess how many of the punters, having sat here for almost three hours, would come back for more. The best guess was about three-quarters, but none of us would have been surprised if it had been as low as half. When the curtain came up, though, we’d only shed about 10 per cent of the crowd, and given that at least that many were septuagenarians, this was a pretty good return.
The second half resumed with another of Ken’s guests. This time it was a magic act, a gloriously surreal magic act, where, without comment, an unending supply of birds was revealed from within empty containers, while the band played popular tunes. At one point, a duck flew off the stage and, with no response from the magician, an audience member felt obliged to retrieve it and place it back on the stage. And all the while the band were playing the theme music to Hawaii Five-O.
Later, I would learn that the magician had an ostrich but that it was unavailable that night. I bitterly regret missing the ostrich.
After twenty minutes of bird-revealing, the stage was ceded to Ken and, just to round things off, he did a tight hour and three-quarters.
‘You do realize, don’t you, that most of your families have reported you missing by now?’
It was midway through this section that I was struck by an absence.
We had been led through a massive catalogue of jokes. I’ve probably never heard the words ‘And the doctor said…’ more often in my life (and I’m married to a doctor). We’d had singalongs and sketches and a magician and Ken doing a ventriloquism act. But in almost five hours there hadn’t been a single Irishman joke. Or ‘Paki’ joke. Or any of the other pre-PC old comedy staples that I had been dreading.
Before the show, Ken had let slip his philosophy on comedy.
‘People forget,’ he’d said, ‘that it should all be about one small three-letter word. Joy.’
It’s easy to draw a line between the older generation of comedians and the newer acts by just pointing to ‘Three men walk into a bar…’ and ‘There were these two black lads…’ and being grateful that those old jokes have been put out to pasture. For the really wonderful comedians, though, it was never just about the jokes.
The great comics create their own world, built on their personal crazy logic. We should just be guests in a universe of their creation. It could be angry, or amiable, or surreal. When you watch a great comedian of any generation, you get to take an all-too-brief holiday in their upside-down world. And it feels like a privilege.
By the end of the show, the 90 per cent of us who’d stayed were cheering Ken over the line.
At the finale, there were more songs, we were all standing, and a snow machine fired up and flares went off. We were all hand-in-hand singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and Ken took his final bow to a standing ovation and, without encore, stepped off the stage.
After the show, he graciously invited me into his dressing room, and we shared a few beers and talked like old showbiz troupers together, swapping war stories and comparing rooms we had played. He told me of variety acts long forgotten (‘There was a lady contortionist, Eva May Wong, I don’t know what she was wearing, a bikini or something, but there was a lot of Chinese showing…’) and crazy supports (‘The act was three walruses, and they would do impersonations of Hitler…’). We agreed about the north of England being easier to play than the south, about how the City Varieties was the best room to play but that the Gaiety Theatre on the Isle of Man was the prettiest. He showed me the notes that his keyboardist had kept of all the new impromptu lines that had appeared that night. I settled into the warm glow of being part of some glorious line stretching back to the music-hall acts of the Victorian age, until I began to get a little dozy and realized that, if I was tiring, the eighty-two-year-old man who had just finished a five-hour stand-up show, might need a break as well.
And, with much bonhomie, and the gift of a tickling stick, I said my goodbyes to Ken Dodd.
On the way out, I checked my notes. The Happiness Show had finished at 12.50 a.m. Even with all the jokes about the length of the show, the old pro had only gone five minutes over.
Chapter 19:
The Final Show (parts 1 and 2)
Nine months in, a hundred and three shows done and, in mid-November, we reach the final night of the tour. And if the secret purpose was to unearth the English psyche, it’s perhaps right that we should end up in Tunbridge Wells.
Tunbridge Wells (properly Royal Tunbridge Wells, of course; that’s what it said on the sign as we arrived) is a spa town in Kent about 30 miles south-east of London. It’s a small enough town by English standards, but the BBC once described it as the spiritual home of Middle England. It has a Conservative party-dominated council, is 97.5 per cent white and one of the safest places in the UK, with very low levels of violent crime. It has an unemployment rate of about 1 per cent, which is far below the national average. In 2006, the town was listed as the third best place to live in the UK by the Channel 4 programme The Best and Worst Places to Live.
It is genteel and well-to-do, arcaded and prosperous; it has been thus for a few hundred years. In 1606, Lord North discovered a mineral-water spring here and persuaded his posh friends to come and take the waters. His doctor suggested that the waters could cure ‘the colic, the melancholy and the vapours, that they could make the lean fat and the fat lean’.
Royal visits, including those of Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza, who took the waters here in an attempt to cure her infertility, made it into a very fashionable place. Catherine was a great one for popularizing things; she was actually the first to popularize tea drinking here, after the country had spent most of the 1600s drinking coffee.
The London beau monde took to Tunbridge Wells passionately; by the eighteenth century, it was the destination of choice for the luminaries of the London Theatre scene, people such as dramatist Colly Cibber and actor David Garrick. They were drawn here by Richard ‘Beau’ Nash, who was at that time the ‘Master of Ceremonies’ (essentially the party-master general) for the equally pretty and quackladen city of Bath. Tunbridge Wells was, in his eyes, a colony of his kingdom in Bath, and he policed it rigorously, especially the wells and the colonnaded Pantiles area, which were strictly divided by class, with only the gentry allowed on the upper walks.
In 1909, King Edward VII granted the town the prefix ‘Royal’ in recognition of its long association with the royal family (Royal Leamington Spa is the only other town in England granted this honour).
Personally, sticking ‘Royal’ on the front of something has me racing in the opposite direction, in this case to the smaller and less feted Tonbridge, a few miles away. I’ve always fought for Tonbridge when I play Tunbridge; they didn’t sell muddy waters to dumb royals four hundred years ago and have suffered since, but they shouldn’t feel let down in the historical crime stakes. Tonbridge was the location of the largest
cash theft in British history, when over £53.1 million was stolen from a Securitas depot there in February 2006. Only half the money has since been recovered.
Even more impressively, the United Kingdom’s first speeding fine was handed down by the Tonbridge Petty Sessions court in 1896. The Victorian boy-racer was a Mr Walter Arnold of East Peckham, who had to cough up a one-shilling fine for doing eight miles an hour in a two-mile-an-hour zone. To give some sense of this breakneck pace, Mr Arnold was only caught when a policeman chased him on a bicycle.
So Tonbridge gets to be the poorer (although not much poorer, this is still Kent) and cooler relation; while Tunbridge shoulders the burden of being shorthand for an entire type of Englishness.
This is partly because it has been mentioned as such in many books, plays, films and television programmes, including The Importance of being Earnest, A Room with a View, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Perhaps most famous is the final, loaded line of Lawrence of Arabia, when Prince Faisal asks the English diplomat Dryden, played by Claude Rains, what he thinks of the new British hegemony over the Middle East. ‘On the whole,’ says Dryden, ‘I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.’
The sign-off ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ became a running joke in Private Eye and other magazines, used to send up a certain kind of oversensitive, pedantic Middle Englander. The authors of those ‘Why, oh why, oh why must the BBC…?’ letters to Points of View which completely overestimate the importance of a minor problem and use it as evidence to back up the firm belief that England is, as ever, in rapid decline. There is now a pretty horrible website – disgustedoftunbridgewells.co.uk – which encourages people to contribute similar letters of complaint. If you want to get a feel for what kind of letters they want, here’s a quote from the site: ‘… the curse of Political Correctness probably had a more detrimental effect on our lives than Brussels, New Labour, American foreign policy, immigration and terrorism combined.’
Tickling the English Page 24