Ken Dodd by Griffin Stephen

Author:Griffin, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843177319
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books
Published: 2011-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

7

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Opening Pandora’s Box

‘KEN DODD’S SO STARSTRUCK he won’t come off … if he gets two years, he’ll do four!’ So went a joke – attributed to both Bernard Manning and Les Dawson – that was in circulation during the time of the Ken Dodd tax trial. With its blurring of accepted Dodd lore with the cold, harsh truth of his uncertain future, the joke somehow seemed an appropriate metaphor for the events that took centre stage at Liverpool Crown Court over a five-week period in the summer of 1989.

There is a certain ghoulish fascination about seeing a familiar face in the dock – even more so in one as loved and revered as Dodd’s. His was the kind of face that would normally be featured in a courtroom comedy sketch on TV, but unfortunately for Dodd, this was the real thing. The papers, of course, rustled with anticipation.

It was an extraordinary spectacle – almost on a par with the high-profile court case of Oscar Wilde more than ninety years previously: both were successful, flamboyant men at the peak of their profession; both had exceptional wit; and both, it could be argued, lived in a kind of fantasy world, each with their own unique take on society and the world at large.

In the public’s mind, however, there was one crucial difference between the likes of Wilde and Dodd: whereas Wilde’s love that dared not speak its name made him a pariah, a clear-cut, bona fide hate figure in late Victorian England, Dodd’s ‘enemy’ was, in a sense, our ‘enemy’ – the Inland Revenue. There was, undeniably, an undercurrent of ‘good on you, mate’ running through the whole trial – more perhaps in the north than in the south. After all, here was a man who had entertained thousands, a man who had illuminated the dark corners of many lives, a man who had given himself unstintingly to countless good causes, and what was his perceived vice? He liked a few bob.

‘He’s a money fetishist really, I’d have thought,’ says George Melly. ‘Doddy is obviously fascinated by money and less by possessions. He hates paying out money. He doesn’t spend it.’

This singular attitude to money – it is not without irony that ‘Ken Dodd’ has become rhyming slang for a ‘wad’ – is what many of his acquaintances first note about him. After writing a spoof protest song for Dodd that the comedian had liked, in the mid-1960s Mike Craig had been invited to meet with him in Blackpool. Craig lived seventy miles away, and though he managed to arrive at the rendezvous point on time, he had to wait and wait for Dodd to turn up. When the comedian eventually appeared at 10.20, he uttered the improbable line: ‘I’ve had to go for a fitting for a new suit!’ It was a thin excuse, as John Fisher’s Heroes of Comedy programme laid bare so graphically, since Dodd has been wearing the same silver-grey, generously-lapelled suit for decades. ‘He’s had that suit so long it’s come back into fashion,’ recalls Craig.

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