spill the beanz BobbyMac...
or the diddymen get it...!!!
lemmo...
Hmmmmmm?????????????????????????
div>
spill the beanz BobbyMac...
or the diddymen get it...!!!
lemmo...
Hmmmmmm?????????????????????????
div>
hello BobbyMac how are you my friend???
Lemmon...![]()
![]()
Luv the guy.
(Mentioned this before on another forum)
When I was in West Derby Comp, Bankfield Rd wing, he used to walk past our school to visit his long term girlfriend who has since sadly passed away. We used to mob him and he'd spend ages chatting with us. I was a snot nosed skinhead at the time and he nicknamed me Bald Eagle![]()
In my opinion, here's the best ever Ken Dodd interview.
(Mail on Sunday 21st Oct 2001 - By Robert Chalmers)
Whitley Bay. There is something very alarming about hearing Ken Dodd use the f-word. You would no more expect it from him than from the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Big Ears. But he has just said it. Twice actually, and with feeling. And the worst of it is, we've only just met.
He's speaking about his 1989 trial for tax evasion. If he did do an interview, he says, he wouldn't talk about that. He brought this up, I remind him, not me. 'It took three months of my life,' Dodd explains. 'Two years, if I'm truthful, worrying about it. And now it is so boring. It is so f*****g boring'
It's a little after 1am. we are in the tiny dressing room at the Whitley Bay Playhouse, just outside Newcastle. Dodd is in a check shirt and casual trousers, holding a pint of lager. All around him are large notebooks, full of jokes. Messages to himself, in black felt-tip, are scrawled all over his left hand. His face still shows traces of yellow make-up so thick that he calls it Fenceguard. His manner is deeply wary. That said, he looks far more relaxed than the haggard figure whose face stared out from the front page of every British newspaper 12 years ago, wearing the expression - if I may conflate three images used by other reporters at the time - of an elderly hamster going through the sound barrier backwards.
His stage jacket, hanging on a rack is covered with what looks like a giant's dandruff: flakes of plaster were failing on him, an unscripted distraction, throughout the show. The Whitley Bay Playhouse is beautifully atmospheric and welcoming. But it's no place for a legend.
'That's one thing I won't talk about,' he says. 'The trial. The other is my personal life. I don't have a personal life. He pauses. 'Well - not in that way.' Not in the way, he means, that he fears might enthuse me.
Why, Dodd asks, am I here? Because he is the last of the great generation of British comedians. And because I don't understand why a man of his age - 74 in November - should live as he does, playing one-night stands, night after night. He's like Bob Dylan: a great talent punishing himself on the road, when he could be relaxing at home. It's a comparison that a man of his generation might see as unflattering.
'I don't,' he says.
So why do you and Bob do it?
'We do it, 'says Dodd, 'because that is what we do. We do it because that is what we are.'
He gives me a can of lager. Anne Jones, the former dancer and airline personnel manager who has been his partner for the past 20 years, puts her head round the door. An engaging woman in her mid-50s, Jones, like Anita Boutin, who died of cancer in 1977 after a 24-year engagement to Dodd, has the title of fiancée, not wife. There are people, she gently reminds him, still queuing outside.
What would I call this article, he asks, if it ever appeared?
'Confessions Of A Fan'
'Really?' Dodd gives me a look of intensified suspicion.
It has taken months to get to speak to him. The other thing he shares with Bob Dylan is a famous dislike of the Press. There was a brief flurry of articles following the unmentionable court case. Now, in the words of one of his aides, he has given almost no interviews for ten years.
Whitley Bay is the latest stop on a tour that has taken me to see him at Skegness (twice), Worthing and Eastbourne. I've been staying in small seaside hotels, or driving through the night to get home. Living like he does. In the process, watching him, I have come to realise that Dodd is a genius.
At each venue I've left him a postcard, all of which went unanswered. Then tonight, in Whitley Bay, at the stage in his act where he reads out dedications to invalids, he said 'I'd like to say hello to young Robert Chamlers'. At first I took this to be a final, sarcastic snub, but when I came backstage just now, he seemed to be expecting me.
He starts talking about the people he worked with; the great music hall stars, like the alcoholic comedian Frank Randle, and Rob Wilton. 'If I could say I walked in their footsteps,' he tells me, 'I would be very proud. I think they left me to switch the light off. I am the last one. They've all gone. Frank Randle, Norman Evans. Max Miller. They're my heroes. They're my boys.'
There's a knock on the door. It's 2am. He has another show here tomorrow evening but no, he won't meet me during the day. 'Come backstage tomorrow,' he says
The bulk of Dodd's performance is unchanged every night. It's the few minutes where he improvises that are really captivating. He begins by asking the front row about their occupations. Tonight there was a painter, a mechanic, then a beadle. 'You're a what?' the comedian said. 'A beadle' the man repeated. 'You mean you go out, 'Dodd said, 'helping the men in red jackets with the whips and the horses?' 'I'm a beadle, 'the man said, 'at the university.'
'And you, sir?' Dodd said, moving on. 'I'm a pensioner,' the man replied. 'I knew you were retired,' Dodd told him. 'You've got one of those half-price haircuts.'
'I'm sorry,' he continued, 'I shouldn't mock. Because men do need a rest from work. They get stressed. They have to go to these massage, er - there's one just near here. These places have soft music, and ladies who have devoted their lives to this healing art, using aromatic oils, and... 'That's where I've seen you,' he said, turning back to the front row. 'Beadle my eye. I've only ever seen you in your socks.'
The irony about Ken Dodd is that it is now - with his regular television work behind him - that he is at the height of his powers. He has reverted to what he does best - live, front of cloth comedy. He performs three or four nights most weeks of the year, in venues that seat between 600 and 3,000. He sells out everywhere. His show lasts from 7.30pm to around 12.45am. There are support acts, but Dodd is generally on stage for more than three hours.
Most of his audience, as he himself says, are people waiting for a hip operation. He's embraced old age as a stage of life that - like youth - can grant a license to disregard social norms. In old age - like Richard Pryor with racism and crack - Ken Dodd has discovered his definitive subject.
The next night at Whitley Bay, he does routines about incontinence and Alzheimer's. 'Last week,' he says, 'I was in our bathroom with one foot in the bath, and one foot out. I stood there asking myself: was I getting into the bath, or was I getting Out of the bath?' 'So I call downstairs to my brother Billy. He says, "What is it Ken?", I say, 'Come up and help me. I can't remember if I was getting into the bath or out of the bath" , I wait for five minutes. Nothing happens. I shout downstairs, "Billy, where are you?" 'He says, "Ken, was I coming up the stairs, or was I going down the stairs?"'
Back in the dressing room he tells me: 'I want your word that you have not come to do a hatchet job on me.' He takes his shirt off to reveal a white, not too overweight torso. He coughs. Soon his thoughts are back with the trial. 'I don't give a bugger who else talks about it,' he says.' Because I won. But I don't like discussing it.' This does sound rather like the Ancient Mariner telling you he will discuss anything but nautical matters - not least because Ken Dodd's dealings with the Revenue feature heavily in his act. ('Self assessment? They pinched that idea from me you know.') Not that his reticence is difficult to understand. Dodd is rigidly guarded by nature, and the trial exposed every area of his life, from the £336,000 stashed in his attic, to the injections Anne had been receiving in their attempts to have a child. During a Radio 4 In The Psychiatrist's Chair interview, recorded before his legal difficulties, Anthony Clare pressed the comedian to explain why he never had children, a question he evaded, somehow sounding furtive.
Talking to Ken Dodd when he's in make-up, your gaze tends to settle on his eyebrows. They're daubed on using greasepaint, following the line of the lowest of many furrows in his brow. He asks me if I have children. 'Oh,' he says, when I tell him I do. There is a new tone in his voice. Just for a moment, the condition of fatherhood has obscured the stain of journalism. 'You're a family man.', How many children?' he asks. 'How old? What make?
He is, and always has been, a family performer. Right from the start of his career, in 1954, Dodd has had clear ideas about what is acceptable in comedy. 'I believe there's a rainbow of laughter, says. 'At the top, there's white. You can hear that any time you want - you've got two little lads. It's pure joy. At the bottom there is shock. I'm in the middle somewhere.' He coughs again. ('I'm on four bottles of Buttercup syrup a day,' he says on stage. 'I can't cough. I daren't.') 'Is it bronchitis?' I ask. At the trial he was depicted as a sick man who might never work again Twelve years on, I suspect he may be conceding the seriousness. 'I haven't got bronchitis,' he says. It's OK. I went the doctor's and he told me, "It's asthma." They can do something about asthma.'
One of his admirers, I tell him, is the greatest talent of the new generation Johnnny Vegas. I'd met him in Manchester the previous week. (Vegas recently queued for an hour outside Ken Dodd's stage door at St Helens just to shake his hand.) Dodd told Vegas, who recently won the celebrity special of The Weakest Link, that to succeed he'll need to do something about his voice, The comedian, who is 30, told me he has no idea how Ken Dodd physically endures his schedule. 'Come on,' Dodd laughs. 'I hold the record for the longest run at the Palladium - 42 weeks. Twice nightly, three times on a Saturday.' Can we meet again? I ask him, as I'm leaving. Perhaps. At his home? (Ken Dodd still lives in the Knotty Ash farmhouse where he was born, the son of a coalman). 'No.'
New Brighton: Like many Liverpool taxi drivers, the man who picks me up at Lime Street has stories about Ken Dodd's mythical talent for thrift. ('I don't believe in tips,' Dodd tells audiences.' I think they spoil people.') I travel to New Brighton, across the Mersey from Bootle, with Alan Bleasdale. He's hardly a natural soulmate for Dodd, who was once pelted with eggs while canvassing for Margaret Thatcher. But Bleasdale, like everybody I spoke to in the business, testifies to Dodd's Philanthropy 'It's easy to be generous with money,' Bleasdale says. 'Far harder to be generous with your time.' It has become a risible cliché to say that an entertainer does a lot of charity work, but Dodd's commitment to good causes has been like a mission.
A few puzzled youths look on as, along the otherwise deserted seafront, Ken Dodd's travelling army is pouring into the Pavilion Theatre - a last pocket of grey defiance which won't accept that the resorts are finished.
'What a wonderful way to end a career,' Dodd tells them. 'Forty seven years in showbusiness. Struggling, night after night and dreaming of stardom. Then waking up and finding myself in New Brighton.'
He coaxes his hair up into a peak, where it remains, like a dunce's cap, then turns his back on the audience. It's a trick he did in the Sixties, but now it reveals areas of pale scalp. I'm old like you, the gesture says, and I don't give a ****, and I'm not going out quietly, and neither should you.
'What do they give us on television?' Dodd asks. 'Black and white films with John Mills. Then Frank Windsor appears saying: "Have you paid for your funeral? Crack now, or we'll send you off in a bin bag."'
The interval comes a little before 10.30pm.
We'll let you out for a few minutes, but no running away,' Dodd says. 'This is like antibiotics. You have to finish the course.'
In his dressing room during his hour-long break, Ken Dodd greets Bleasdale, whom he's met once before, like a lost brother, then gives me the kind of look that Boswell might have got from Johnson on a wet day in the Lowlands.
'One reason I admire what you do,' Bleasdale tells him, 'Is that I can go back to the stalls now, and most people won't know who I am. But when you walk on that stage, you go out there naked.' 'No,' says Dodd. 'I don't go out there naked.' He gestures towards his joke books. 'I go out there armed to the bloody teeth.' He says he needs the notebooks to consult: he's about to record a sequel to his 1994 special, An Audience With Ken Dodd, widely regarded as one of the best one-man shows ever. But the way the books are always there makes me suspect he needs them like a touchstone.
It's a curious thing about many artists, I venture, that they don't know what makes them good. Things happen by instinct.
'I remember Frank Randle,' Dodd says. 'He looked like a gargoyle. If you asked him to be funny, he'd blow raspberries. But Randle just was so funny. It was as if there was a comic spirit inhabiting him. That was the sense I had. Something inhabited Frank Randle.'
'There have been great comics,' Dodd goes on, 'who are aliens. I do not believe that Frank Randle was of this planet.
Because there was something very odd about him. 'It's a feeling I've had about Ken Dodd himself from the moment I met him.
'Not me,' he protests. 'I know exactly what I'm doing.' And yet on stage, he admits, 'something takes over'. 'You go out there,' he says, diving for the shelter of the second person pronoun, 'and it takes you.'
He holds up his copy of The Mail on Sunday. 'We live in a crazy bloody world,' he says, as he makes his way back onstage. 'I think we clowns are the sane ones.'
'Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy,' Ken Dodd sings to the crowd at New Brighton. 'It's not your style.' I can imagine him requesting the phrase as his epitaph. It's the way he deals with the world.
The rare occasions when he has been obliged to stop accentuating the positive have, curiously enough, found Dodd at his most memorably articulate. The trial was an example. 'What does £336,000 in a suitcase look like Mr Dodd?' the judge asked. 'The notes 'he replied, with a gentle touch worthy of Oscar Wilde, 'are very light m'lud.,
If Ken Dodd was ever persuaded to explore the dark end of his comedy rainbow, either on stage or in print, it would be his masterpiece. It isn't going to happen. 'I know what would sell a book,' he once complained. 'The sleepless nights. The terror.'
Yet all comedians bring their past on stage with them, possibly more than they know. Towards the end of every show, Ken Dodd sits with his dummy ****ie Mint on his knee, and sings a lullaby to the wooden doll: 'My son, my son, my only pride and joy. My son - my life, my boy.' There's a pause, and the doll replies 'My dad, my dad. 'Emotionally, this scene can generate a far more intense empathy in a hall than it ought to. In Skegness it had a woman in tears.
Liverpool: I meet Ken Dodd for the last time a week later, during the interval of his show at the Liverpool Empire. He is more tense than usual. 'It's not you,' Anne Jones tells me. 'This is a large venue. Liverpool's very important to him.' Something has happened since we last met: the attack on the World Trade Centre. I've wondered if he will acknowledge recent developments, especially as part of his act refers to the Gulf War. 'I knew it was serious,' it goes, 'because I heard her gargling.' The routine survives unaltered. It's surprising, I tell him, that he has resisted the temptation to add some topicality to this section. 'That's not what I do,' he says. 'What I do is about happiness; about bringing people joy.' You can see the expressions of his audience as they pour out into the early hours.
But if there's one memory that stays with me from this summer, it's of another set of faces: a row of rubber masks, discarded by child dancers, lined up on the floor outside Ken Dodd's dressing room door at New Brighton. They were placed in a line, waiting to be picked up and returned to storage in his house. Each was modelled on the features of a great comedian - Max Wall was there, between Stan Laurel and Tommy Cooper. His heroes; his boys. The ones who've left him to turn off the lights when he leaves.
Like them, Ken Dodd will probably be dead before the extent of his talent is adequately celebrated. As his punishing tour continues, there are millions all over the country who will hope it is many years before that brilliant last light goes out.
Ken Dodd. The Biography. by Stephan
Griffin.
(Michael O'Mara Books Limited).
A good read. You can get it from the library.
great interview, he is a true gentleman & icon...
love the guy...hey missus...
Lemmo...![]()
Christopher T. George
Editor, Ripperologist
Editor, Loch Raven Review
http://christophertgeorge.blogspot.com/
Chris on Flickr and on MySpace
What amazed me was some bunch of whoever they were voted Peter Cook the funniest British man ever. Peter Cook I hear you mummble. Yes, they said Peter Cook. A lot of his stuff was missing with me. And a lot just plain unfunny. My Ma would switch the TV off if he came on.
Ken Dodd is ignored and yet at nearly 80 he is doing sell out performances to all ages. The man is phenominal. The funiest man in British history without a doubt. His track record speaks for itself. Unmatched. No one even comes a poor second.
The new Amsterdam at Liverpool?
Save Liverpool Docks and Waterways - Click
Deprived of its unique dockland waters Liverpool
becomes a Venice without canals, just another city, no
longer of special interest to anyone, least of all the
tourist. Would we visit a modernised Venice of filled in
canals to view its modern museum describing
how it once was?
Giving Liverpool a full Metro - CLICK
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The new Amsterdam at Liverpool?
Save Liverpool Docks and Waterways - Click
Deprived of its unique dockland waters Liverpool
becomes a Venice without canals, just another city, no
longer of special interest to anyone, least of all the
tourist. Would we visit a modernised Venice of filled in
canals to view its modern museum describing
how it once was?
Giving Liverpool a full Metro - CLICK
Rapid-transit rail: Everton, Liverpool & Arena - CLICK
Save Royal Iris - Sign Petition
Ken Dodd is an icon as far as I'm concerned. He's the greatest.
I could never see anything in Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Monty Python, The Goodies .. they just didn't make me laugh out loud. Their humour didn't appeal to me at all.
I could never laugh at Max Wall - he was scary ! Mind you I was a kid when he was on telly.
I liked Spike Milligan tho' ... he was off his head ! ha!
He had a lot of serious stuff to say as well though.
Ken Dodd is a true gent and kills me with his humour. When I return home, you sometimes see him parking up at the side of his house and you always give him a wave. One of his video's that is taken out from time to time - he sometimes slips in things about when he got done for fraud and when telling a story about tax in the 1900's his finished off with
'Those days tax was tuppence in the pound.......I thought it still was!'
Brought the house down I can tell you!
Max Wall was totally off his head. Couldn't quite work out why he made me laugh so much as a kid. You can still buy Max Wall wigs, btw
I didn't like him 'cos he was always dressed in that horrible black coat and strange black leggings or something ! I didn't like that funny walk and his deep voice .... and his whisps of hair ... he looked frightening to me when I was a kid !![]()
.
ps,
I just looked at your link .... he was scary !
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