It's May 1967, in the days when Britain really had talent. Hughie Green is hosting yet another of his Opportunity Knocks. And here, at last, comes fame, banging on the door of a tubby, pudding-faced Manchester comedian. What first gag would he pick for his Desert Island Disc? "I toyed with the idea of playing Ravel's 'Pavane pour une infante defunte' but I couldn't remember if it's a tune or Latin prescription for piles. Mind you, I've always been musical Mother used to sit me on her knee and I'd whisper, 'Mummy, Mummy, sing me a lullaby do,' and she'd say: 'Certainly my angel, my wee bundle of happiness, hold my beer while I fetch me banjo.'" Collapse of stout national TV audience. Les Dawson is on his way.
That single big break matters hugely. Dawson was already 36 when it came, a battered veteran on the northern clubland circuit. Of course, Hughie Green couldn't offer him some smooth, untroubled trip to the top. The unfunny fact of life for comedians is that comedy is a cruelly fashionable business. You're either up or you're down. The London Palladium is either full or the Blackpool Opera House is half empty. Television either wants you or you're Ken Dodd on the circuit of the digitally excluded (heading for Clacton and Southend on Sea later this year). Introspection and self-doubt are your natural bedfellows.
Still, once Les Dawson broke through, he never really slid back. From 11 series of Sez Les to the wilder lunacies of Blankety Blank, he was always around and always hilarious: mordant, a misogynist about wives, mothers-in-law and sundry blights of existence, a master of bathos with an infinitely flexible fizz and wonderful timing. Who else is there to sit alongside him in any 20th-century collection of great British comedians? Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper, Hancock, the eternal Doddy but then the list grows shorter and more contentious.
Perhaps time has treated Les Dawson a little less kindly than Cooper or Morecambe with Wise. His workaholic TV output isn't there much on Gold or the other TV nostalgia channels. His novels are out of print, his straight acting experiments forgotten. Maybe his standup was better than his sketches. Maybe his old joke book sometimes needed a spring clean. But Dawson was a giant, and half an hour of rediscovered video can still set you rolling today. The bronze statue of him a few yards from St Annes pier is more than an adopted home town paying respects. It signals something permanent: the remembrance, a million times over, of great good times.
And yet, in its detailed and always lucid way, Louis Barfe's biography is at its most fascinating when it tackles the early Dawson, young Les in search of a break and not, for a second, knowing where to find it. Born: 1931, in the teeth of the great depression. Father, an often unemployed bricklayer. Home, a two-up, two-down in Collyhurst, the most benighted chunk of north Manchester, grandpa and granny's house which his dad and mother, his dad's brother and young Leslie were forced, in penury, to share. Education: Moston Lane elementary. Qualifications: nil. First jobs: helping out in a draper's, then stacking shelves in the local Co-op grocery.
Nothing in this recital of deprivation hints at any sort of opportunity knocking. Nothing prepares you for the way Dawson wrote his own scripts, memorised them in a trice, constantly displayed a breadth of vocabulary that left Collyhurst far behind. He was bright, bright, bright. Educational opportunity today would have sent him to university. There might then have been no comic talent, hewn from adversity and the rich tradition of Robb Wilton, Norman Evans and Frank Randle, left to mine. What, be an intern at the Co-op? No fear. What, travel the region night after night doing pub and club gigs, when I have to be out on the doorstep every morning trying to sell vacuum cleaners? It was a long, rugged, relentless road to travel.
He started as a singer, and failed. He played the piano, but not well enough. His comedy only found its voice one night at the Empress Club in Hull when, after too many drinks to settle his nerves, he lurched into this "superbly decorated kipper factory, this renovated fish crate", and explained that "I don't do this for a living, oh no, just for the luxuries in life like bread and shoes". He was, finally, a durable stage version of his own sweet, savage self.
The last of a dying breed, then, buried by the very lack of new learning paths to glory, deprived of old-fashioned music halls, variety bills, even end-of-the-pier shows (as Bognor heads for Benidorm)? Perhaps. Standup these days is more clubs plus single nights on the road with an exhausting schedule but without the space to linger and look for laughter. You're the guy who fills in the pauses on Graham Norton's TV sofa. You are part of an ensemble, not a star.
Les Dawson was versatile almost to a fault. He could riff with John Cleese and bring Alan Plater scripts to life. He was more, far more, than a product of his time. But, even so, we shall probably never see his like again, for the roots of the north are in MediaCity not Blackley now. All praise to Louis Barfe. He's got the context as well as the jokes right here. He gives you more than the booze and the fags and the sometimes tortured hero of standard showbiz biographies. He makes us realise what we lost when Les Dawson died, and reminds us to tip our flat caps the next time we hit St Annes.
