Ken Dodd: still happy at 78

Michael Henderson

04 October 2006

More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes Aristotle

The ‘Happiness Tour’, he calls it, and it will only end when they put him in a box. ‘Happiness,’ he says, getting philosophical, ‘and pleasure are very different things. Pleasure is fleeting, whereas true happiness comes from contentment. In life, in all our lives, there must be comedy, but inevitably there must also be tragedy. For me happiness is hearing the sound of laughter, the most beautiful sound in the world.’

In that case, he must be the happiest man who ever lived. Since he made his debut at the Empire Theatre, Nottingham, in 1954, Dodd has been convincing people that so long as he is on stage, life is a boon. Even now, at 78, he plays 120 shows a year, and every one lasts at least five hours. Invited to deliver an address on the history of comedy last year at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, he was affronted when they took away the mic after a mere hour. In Doddy’s book, that amounts to a gargle.

‘By the time I let you lot out,’ he tells audiences, ‘Tony Blair will have visited another five countries.’ At a recent show in Eastbourne he said ‘tattybye’ at 12.47 a.m., and while a few dozen people had left to catch buses, more than a thousand stayed to cheer. There were some flat moments mid-way through the show, but the third ‘shift’, a little matter of an hour and 42 minutes, was such a tour de force of sustained barminess that, as they shuffled out, young and old alike looked bewildered.

The night before, in Worthing, Peter O’Toole had motored down from London to catch the show. ‘He looked me up on the internet, apparently, to find out where I was playing. Last year Barry Humphries arrived one night in his private plane.’ That tickled old Doddy, an unabashed admirer of the only solo comic (‘not stand-up, please — that term was invented about 20 years ago’) who can stand alongside him without fear of embarrassment.

Some great performers attract the envy of their fellows. Not this chap. According to Eric Sykes, ‘he should be available on the NHS’. John Osborne, directing at the Royal Court in 1965 when Dodd was breaking the house record at the London Palladium, where he played twice nightly for 42 weeks, took the entire company to watch the master at work. ‘We all went away exhilarated,’ wrote Osborne, ‘by this incredible phenomenon of human invention and overwhelming energy.’