Alexei Sayle one asked why the music hall died out and answered his own question with, 'because it was crap'. Much though I am an admirer of Alexei's work, I have lived long enough since to prefer The Good Old Days to his Comedy Store rants and whereas that once so vital 1980's trend had come and gone, the music hall still survived. As Louis Barfe points out,Variety died on 11 March 2018, the day Sir Ken Dodd died.
The long tradition of Dan Leno, Max Miller and Robb Wilton, that Doddy's act was a culmination of, and then some, would have ended sooner had it not been for his longevity.
His account is lively, full of illuminating anecdotes taken from interviews with Diddy David Hamilton, Danny Baker and others that knew and worked with him. It is not hagiography but balances the relentless exuberance of the stage show with the serious student of humour, the very Englishness and the difficult relationship with money. Like Tommy Cooper, whose stage fiasco was precisely worked out, but unlike Larry Grayson, who was naturally if endearingly inept, the tatifillariousness was as much a science as an art to the extent that Doddy really did have a Giggle Map that recorded which jokes worked best in which parts of the country and he had read widely on comic theory early and studied his heroes closely from the wings. The map was a map of the UK. He had no ambition to 'break America', which the likes of Morecambe and Wise failed to do, which is a good job because they wouldn't have known what to make of his fairy tale world of jam butty mines and Northern English crackpot whimsy.
If the 1960's was so all-conquering that he could keep The Beatles off number one in the hit parade and choose to do what he liked best, in live theatre, ahead of television and radio work, it was the 1980's that might have cost him dearly with his trial for tax irregularities. It cost him a fair amount, having employed the impregnable adversarial talents of George Carman whose miraculous result in the acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe was finessed by this further success against all the odds, and some might say, evidence. But, be that as it may, there is no such thing as bad publicity (although Gerald Ratner may not agree) and interest in Doddy redoubled after his court case. As Louis Barle reflects, Lester Piggott might have retained his honours and liberty had he employed Carman.
The trial had the effect of opening up more of Doddy's private life than he would have liked. A defence that he was so concentrated on his glee-making that he had no time for his financial affairs sits uncomfortably with the bank accounts, like that in the Isle of Man, that had slipped his mind. Also, Barfe finds evidence of a controlling nature in other areas of his life that somehow didn't extend to something as important to him as money. Stories similar to those of Marc Bolan paying the rest of T. Rex a wage of £40 a week while they were at the height of their powers are repeated in Doddy's pay policy. None of which should cast any aspersions on the generosity of either of them when it suited them. To call someone a 'complex' character is often a euphemism for something darker but Louis Barfe explains Doddy well enough in the space of 236 pages plus 10 of Introduction. Admirers are always going to be disappointed if they idealize their heroes and expect them to be anything other than human.
Happiness and Tears looks a bigger book than it is due to an appendix of 115 pages of Doddology, a non-exhaustive catalogue of theatre, television and radio appearances of little ostensible use beyond triggering nostalgia for the show business names that appeared alongside him, many of them now forgotten but for such listings, some you might not have thought and others one can be more, or less, grateful for being reminded of. In no particular order, because they might fall into different categories for each of us, Talfryn Thomas, Charlie Caroli, Gracie Fields, Alma Cogan, Yehudi Menuhin and, really, everybody else you can think of and then all those you can't.
By Jove, missus. By Jove. What a beautiful day, what a beautiful day to exercise the chuckle muscle and revisit the glories of the last and greatest of a generation. Shakespeare was a scriptwriter, missus, they couldn't touch him for it. Louis Barfe has provided a well-judged, measured account of the unaccountable. As it were.
