What is the legacy of a great comedian? In the past it lay principally in private memories. My own aged brain is filled with recollections of laugh-inducing eccentrics such as Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Max Wall, and Jewel and Warriss (the best of all double acts). Top of the list is Ken Dodd whom I spent countless hours – possibly days – watching in a variety of venues ranging from the London Palladium to a working-men’s club in Wythenshawe.
In the case of Doddy, a more permanent legacy is now in prospect in the shape of the Sir Ken Dodd Happiness Centre at the Royal Court in Liverpool. Planning permission has been given for the creation of a four-storey space that will house vital parts of the Dodd archive – including the thousand notebooks on comedy his widow, Anne, thankfully preserved – and will also celebrate Liverpool’s comic tradition and offer guidance to the next generation of laughter-makers. It will cost £15m, much of which comes from the Sir Ken Dodd Charitable Trust, and should be open in time for the centenary, in 2027, of the great man’s birth.
It is an enticing project enthusiastically backed by practising performers and Dodd-followers who recognise that their hero had a forensic interest in both the source and the value of comedy. “Ken knew the therapeutic value of laughter,” says Miriam Margolyes in a film, The Real Ken Dodd – The Man I Loved, currently showing around the country, in which Anne Dodd explores her late husband’s intellectual voracity, religious faith and obsession with laughter.
In the course of the film, Lady Anne and her producer, Lorna Dickinson, visit America to see what form a durable legacy might take. They go to Jamestown, New York, to visit a museum dedicated to the life and work of Lucille Ball and her comic partner and onetime husband, Desi Arnaz. What they discover is that it is possible to create something that is a mixture of research centre, archival record and performance space.
While unequivocally welcoming the creation of the Sir Ken Dodd Happiness Centre, I have my own modest proposals as to what it should include. While exhibiting its source’s notebooks, props and costumes, I hope it would offer regular showings of the two editions of An Audience With Ken Dodd he recorded for television: for a generation that never saw him on stage, they offer the best indication of the verbal fusillade and visual invention that contributed to his comic genius. I would also like to see a bursary for budding comedians; an annual lecture, from a writer or performer, that analyses the changing nature of comedy; and a series of panels in which guests, from home and abroad, explore humour in different regions and countries. Sir Ken once claimed that “a joke that gets a laugh in Glasgow barely raises a smile in London – but that’s because they can’t hear it”. Beneath the gag lay a lifetime’s preoccupation with comedy’s infinite variations.
If my proposals for the centre sound academic, I can only say they are in the spirit of a man who initially billed himself as Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty, who owned more than 50,000 books and who spent hours in Liverpool’s Picton Library where today there is a bust in his honour. The legacy of a great comedian is partly based on inextinguishable memories. But I hope the Happiness Centre, while providing an abundance of laughter, reminds us that a crucial part of Ken Dodd’s inheritance was that he took comedy seriously.
