Published in the Liverpool Echo, 12 March 2018.
Ken Dodd and the Theory of Relativity
This story is about how I tried to keep Ken Dodd’s lecture on Shakespeare down to 45 minutes...
Yes, I invited him to give a lecture on Shakespeare at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the Laugh-In Festival in 2005. I knew Shakespeare was one of the loves of his life and that he played a very famous Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1971. ‘Malvolio’, he said ‘was the sort of man who’d go to a strip club and shout “what time are the jugglers on?”’
I met him the morning of the lecture and asked him how he had slept in the Tudor hotel we’d booked for him, he was rarely up before midday but brushed off his evident chagrin by responding ‘very well thank you. Hot and cold running ghosts’. The chauffeur-driven Rover swept in to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre with Ann following behind in the Corsa. Ken, seeing a disabled patron leaving the box office, walked right up to him and said, ‘Alright Alf, how long you been on wheels?’. The man’s name was not Alf, he’d certainly never met Ken before and I think he had places to be; but he ended up hanging out with us for the rest of the afternoon as Ken posed by the Avon holding a skull and a tickling stick.
The plan was that he was going to give his address and then be interviewed by my friend, the up-and-coming comedian Mark Watson, who’d made a name for himself for doing shows that lasted 24 hours. I thought they could compare notes. I opened for Ken, explaining on stage that he only had 45 minutes, cue raucous laughter from the audience. I said that we had an RSC SWAT team in the dress circle with tranquiliser guns who would take him out on the dot of 12.45pm if he was still going. ‘Besides’, I said, ‘there’s a very nice lunch booked for 1:15’. He smiled, headed to the lectern and winking said ‘good luck, son’.
As he eased in to his third hour, he’d just told the audience ‘I knew Liverpool had been made European City Of Culture when I went up to Kirkby - Liverpool’s Ponderosa - and saw a car jacked up on Dostoevsky’, I had to tap Mark on the shoulder and tell him that his trip from London was probably a waste of time and that he almost certainly wasn’t getting on. At about half past three the festival’s schedule was in tatters, Armando Iannucci and John Oliver who were supposed to be doing a panel discussion with Ken on the subject of writing controversial jokes at 2pm, were pacing in the wings, and the audience, that included a who’s who of eminent Shakespearean scholars were wild with laughter. I didn’t know what else to do. So I walked on stage with a table, table cloth, two chairs, a napkin tucked in to my shirt and a knife and fork in my hands, sat down stage left and waited. It took him 20 minutes to even look up. The audience of course barely noticed I was there.
On some plane of alternate reality that lecture is still going on, audience screaming with laughter as Ken wheels out two thousand further one-liners about Pericles. Perhaps that was his real magic power; a man who bent time for those that observed him. Comedy’s living, breathing theory of relativity.
© Phillip Breen