This Much Is True

I went to his surprise fiftieth birthday party which he hated. Some friends had thought it would be a good idea — how wrong they were! He opened the door, thinking he was going to a quiet dinner and suddenly fifty people were shouting ‘SURPRISE!’ His face wobbled. He whispered to me, ‘Oh God, Miriam, what a nightmare.’ But he bravely and politely continued the pretence of loving it until he could make an escape.

When Kenny died in 1988, an open verdict was recorded by the coroner. But I think the bleak last words written in his diary the day before were a giveaway: ‘Oh, what’s the bloody point?’ Kenny had the gift of shifting the clouds away for other people, but not for himself. I had recognised that pain in him from the beginning and so had Maggie Smith. She phoned me out of the blue — it was probably our first proper conversation — after seeing the tribute to Kenny I had done on a TV programme. ‘You were the only one who saw his sadness,’ she said. They were close friends, sharing the same dry, merciless wit and drawling delivery. When she later joked that her entire career had been an extended impression of him, I could almost hear Kenny bashfully responding ‘Stoooppp it.’

I continued in radio comedy with Marks in His Diary, in 1979, directed by the young Griff Rhys Jones. It was his first proper job. That’s where I met David Jason, a lovely man. Our star was Alfred Marks, who was one of the world’s best joke-tellers. But the jokes took all day to tell, thus curtailing our rehearsal time to a frightening degree. Alfred had a joke for all occasions and insisted on sharing them with us. He should have had a show to himself, he didn’t need us. His joke-telling is only outstripped by Barry Cryer. Now 86, he still rings me up every few months with a new joke. I adore Barry, he is a genius; I just wish I could remember the quips as he does.

In fact I only have two reliable jokes. When the lights failed at an Evening Standard Theatre Awards dinner a few years ago, I rushed to the microphone to fill the gap. Luckily my jokes stretched just long enough for the lights to come back on.

I also worked with another legendary comic Kenneth: Ken Dodd, on radio first and then on TV for years. His shows were divine, if nerve-wracking experiences. He liked to rewrite the script up to the last moment; often I had no idea how a sketch was going to end, when he would push a crumpled scrap of script into my hand as I approached the mike.

How you look doesn’t matter on radio of course, but Ken was the last of the great music hall stars and his hair on stalks, his toothy grin and mad clothes (my favourite was a maroon maxi coat allegedly made out of 28 moggies) definitely enhanced his comedy on TV. He was very loyal and the radio cast — Jo Manning Wilson, Michael McClain and Talfryn Thomas — were all brought over to White City for the even more terrifying television recordings in front of live studio audiences. He pulled you in front of the camera, saying ‘Tell this joke, Miriam’, and until I saw it unwinding on the autocue I had no idea of the punchline.

Ken’s work seemed spontaneous but was deeply calculated and crafted. Every joke and the reaction to it was scored and marked down offstage in the notebooks he kept his entire working life. He got into the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s longest joke-telling session in the 1960s: 1,500 in three and a half hours (that’s 7.14 jokes per minute). Every time he introduced himself — ‘Good evening, my name is Kenneth Arthur Dodd, singer, photographic playboy and failed accountant’ — he was sharing the joke of his own successful court battle. In 1989 Ken was accused of eighteen counts of tax evasion. But what HMRC hadn’t realised was that no Liverpool jury was ever going to convict their favourite comic, one who still lived in the Merseyside home he’d grown up in, and the case was dismissed.