Lady Anne Dodd presents her film “The Real Ken Dodd” at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall, as part of the Leicester Comedy Festival, on Wednesday 5th February 2025.
Ahead of this Lady Anne chatted to tell us more about their relationship and the legacy of Ken’s work.
Ahead of this Lady Anne chatted to tell us more about their relationship and the legacy of Ken’s work.
Unbelievably it is now seven years since Ken passed away in March 2018.
Not long after his death, I was approached by the Museum of Liverpool about the idea of putting on an exhibition about Ken’s life. I started talking to the producer of Ken’s very successful “Audience With” programme which we made back in 1994, Lorna Dickinson, who accompanied me to some of these meetings at the Museum. Discovering that this would be the first ever major exhibition on a British comedian we decided to put together a small team to make a programme about the process of working with a museum and broadcasters said they were very keen on the idea. Six months after starting this process of finding, archiving, and looking at a lifetime of entertainment memorabilia Ken had collected, COVID changed the world – especially that of the Arts – and all work on the Museum exhibition stopped. Everything was on hold as the broadcasting landscape changed but we did not want the work on the project to go to waste.
That short documentary has now metamorphosed into what is now a 3-hour film with a twenty-minute interval, covering what Ken’s legacy means to some of the country’s leading performers and documenting over four years’ worth of projects the Foundation has been working on culminating in the opening of the “Happiness” exhibition in September 2023. We held the premiere at the City Varieties Theatre in Leeds a venue which Ken last played in July 2016 and where in fact he made his first TV appearance in 1955, 70 years ago in the famous BBC show the “Good Old Days” He would continue to appear in that show from time to time until it finished in 1983 and it is a wonderful tribute to Ken that they have now named the Auditorium at the City Varieties theatre after him.
We decided to take the film on tour at a selection of some of the theatres Ken used to play regularly around the country – he had a “Giggle Map” of theatres across the nation, as he called it, and many of these theatres he would visit each year. He called it his “window cleaning round” He particularly loved the De Montfort Hall, in Leicester it’s a big hall with proper seats in a great location and we played it regularly, the staff were always very helpful, and Midlands audiences always give a great reaction. And being the comedian he was Ken ensured he would always have some good local material on the posh areas and the not so posh, local characters or the football teams etc.
Ken did appear at the Leicester Comedy Festival in 2014 when he was given a Legend of Comedy Award. Interestingly the night before Ken had been on stage in Brighton and we had a terrible journey up the motorway. When we eventually found the venue, we drove into the hotel basement car park and the organiser was kindly there to greet us. Well, it had been such a long journey the dog desperately needed to get out, so I opened the door and was greeted by a very welcoming “Hello, how are you?” and then an agonising “Ow!” The dog had nipped him in his haste to do what he had to do! Ken
has always had dogs in fact our backstage rider would read “No Dog, No Dodd” and one of my favourite jokes was about his old boxer dog. It’s all in the timing of course, and Ken would say:
has always had dogs in fact our backstage rider would read “No Dog, No Dodd” and one of my favourite jokes was about his old boxer dog. It’s all in the timing of course, and Ken would say:
Me grandad was in a tin bath in the kitchen, the boxer dog came in, scratched his ear – “ello . … they’re putting me meat in a bigger bowl!”
As well as filming the stop and start progress of the exhibition we were also recording the progress of many - but not all – of the philanthropic works which I came to be involved with on behalf of Ken. I am most proud of two in particular – the complete renovation and extension to the School opposite the Church in Knotty Ash which Ken attended as a child. It was re-named “The Sir Ken Dodd Happiness Hall” for Church and Community” and was opened by the then Earl and Countess of Wessex, Edward and Sophie – and what a wonderful occasion it was – their first joint engagements after COVID, on 10th March 2022, coincidentally Prince Edward’s birthday and four years nearly to the day of Ken’s passing on the 11th March 2018. This hall is in regular use. I happen to play the organ in St John’s Church, and we brought the clock back to life – and it looks wonderful on all four sides of the tower. Ken was a choirboy in his youth, he used to say ‘till they knew where the noise was coming from” – but of course, he had a super voice, and obviously loved singing which became such a large part of his act.
Another big project was the ‘Shakespeare North Playhouse Theatre’ – which now houses “The Sir Ken Dodd Performance Garden” an open-air stage – which I call his diddy amphitheatre. Whenever we were on holiday in Europe, Ken would search out ancient Greek and Italian amphitheatres – and declaim from the stage while I would have to climb to the highest point – and could hear every word he said, when I got my breath back! A bit like doing the ‘sound check’ in theatres for him over many years!
Shakespeare North approached Ken a few years before they had the funds for the building – and they said that if he was able to help financially – they could name a café or something after him. He joked at the time, “I think I’d like something a bit better than a café” so I know he would approve of what I did with his legacy in this unique and wonderful theatre complex which has won several awards. It is situated in one of the poorest Boroughs in the country, Prescot, about seven miles from Liverpool City Centre, where Shakespeare is reputed to have appeared in what was the only Cockpit theatre outside London and it is a fact that he came North with his players during the regular outbreak of plagues in London. This is very much a community theatre – and I have attended nearly all the productions they put on. Local people perform alongside professionals – and they have training courses for local children and adults. They are also committed to ensuring every single child in the Borough has a chance to see a production. A great number of children and adults – many of whom are not traditional
theatre goers attend these productions. There is a wonderful friendly and homely feel about the place, and they have many volunteer helpers, and it is a joy to me every time I sit in the Elizabethan theatre – all oak without a single nail, or in Ken’s performance garden during the summer months.
theatre goers attend these productions. There is a wonderful friendly and homely feel about the place, and they have many volunteer helpers, and it is a joy to me every time I sit in the Elizabethan theatre – all oak without a single nail, or in Ken’s performance garden during the summer months.
I see my role as keeping up with work that Ken was very much involved with. If he was ever asked to do anything – he would say ‘yes’, every time if he was available, and I often meet people who recall this fact to me, which warms my heart to hear. That was the way he was. Clatterbridge Cancer hospital was also close to his heart, it was where his first fiancée was treated before she passed away in 1977 and I looked at their bucket list – and when they built the new hospital in the centre of Liverpool, I picked ‘to provide radio and tv in each of the 110 bedrooms.’ They do wonderful work there for people being treated in very pleasant surroundings with restful views whilst they receive chemotherapy treatment.
I know Ken used to talk about a Comedy Museum – and that there really should be one – a National one perhaps. There are plans to build a ‘Ken Dodd Happiness Centre’ which would house items from the exhibition and hopefully stories of other comedians and this would be built alongside the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool. This was the theatre that Ken helped to save in the seventies when it was about to be closed completely. It is now a producing theatre that has won many awards and yet another place that is patronised by many people who have never been to a theatre before.
In the film, I travel to New York State to visit the American National Comedy Museum in Jamestown – the home of Lucille Ball. It was a wonderful and educational visit. The museum is quite incredible and full of very modern equipment – and some amazing technical features. Incredibly creative and very exciting. We were made very welcome and if anybody is over there, do go and see it – it’s an amazing interactive experience. In another building is Lucille’s Balls’ own museum which her family were incredibly involved with creating and I know Ken would have loved to visit. He had a lot of American humour books in what I have now put together as his library at home. Sadly, although he placed his favourite book “Wind in the Willows” in the library – he never saw it completed with thousands of books in this lovely old, converted outhouse. And there are still as many again in the house! Books were his passion and as a boy he was always in the Central Library in Liverpool, where there is now a bust of him in his favourite spot – the Picton Library and reading room.
When I received the letter from Liverpool City Council this week, nominating me for a Citizen of Honour, I was amazed, overwhelmed, undeserved, I feel, but greatly honoured. Apparently, it will be on a plaque on permanent display in the Town Hall, and Ken’s name is already there from when he received his Freeman of the City award in 2001! I love Liverpool, my adopted home for over fifty years. During the last six years, running The Ken Dodd Charitable Foundation with Ken’s nephew, John Lewis, I have met so many incredible workers and volunteers in a variety of charitable organisations, and particularly Liverpool Hospitals, who give extra time and effort to making people’s lives better. In my mind I share this award with them. But it is a wonderful recognition for spending what really have been joyful times doing all the things that Ken’s legacy and his wishes have enabled me to do on his behalf since he passed away in 2018. I am truly thrilled to bits or as Ken would say, I am completely discomknockerated!
Looking back at Ken’s life and achievements I think he was very pleased, particularly with the two “Audience With “programmes he made – because they were made at a time when all the new comedians were coming along with very different material – but I believe, and it was obvious that he ‘held his own’ and these programmes are very good pieces of entertainment history. He must have been doing something right still to be playing to packed theatres when he was ninety years of age, less than three months before he passed away.
I suppose my favourite moments are when I was with him at Buckingham Place when he received his OBE from the Queen in 1982, and again at the Palace when he was Knighted by Prince William. Not bad for a lad from Knotty Ash and my beloved partner for forty years and husband for three days. What wonderful public and private times we shared together. When seeing people at the stage door quite often they would tell him that they had lost their partner and didn’t think they could laugh again - I would watch him put a hand gently on their shoulder and say “you haven’t lost them – they’re still here and he would tap his own chest and his head. And it’s true. And what I have found on this legacy Giggle Map Tour is that at the end of the film when I chat to the audience it’s not so much questions they want to ask, rather to describe precious memories that they want to share about the time they met Ken and that has been such a joy to hear.
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