Night Waves - Ken Dodd
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2012
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Sweet talks to the comedian Ken Dodd about his life and career. Seventy seven years after he made his debut as a ventriloquist in Liverpool Dodd is still touring the country with his Happiness show. In the 1960s he broke box office records at the London Palladium where he played twice nightly for 42 weeks and has sold almost as many records as the Beatles. He talks to Matthew about why he will never stop performing and his interest in the theories of humour and comedy.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.2 | This is a download from the BBC. |
| 0:33.6 | For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three. |
| 0:41.3 | Hello, 77 years ago, a small boy with the ventriloquist's doll made his debut before an audience at the St. Edward's Orphanage, Notty Ash. |
| 0:51.1 | He tap danced, he played the piano and the saxophone, he told jokes, some of which |
| 0:55.8 | he may still be telling. Since then, he's broken box office records at the London Palladium, where he |
| 1:01.5 | played twice nightly for 42 weeks. More surprisingly, perhaps, history will also note him as one of |
| 1:08.1 | Britain's most successful recording artists. Of the top five best-selling |
| 1:12.3 | records of the 1960s, four of them, inevitably, were cut by the Beatles. The one that wasn't |
| 1:18.6 | was Tears by Ken Dodd, which sold 1.52 million records, more than the Stones, the Spice |
| 1:26.0 | Girls or Elvis ever managed. |
| 1:28.3 | Ken Dodd is a landmark in British culture. When he goes, it'll be like losing Stonehenge or |
| 1:34.3 | the Admiralty Arch. Dodd is a performer who connects us to our oldest comic traditions, |
| 1:40.2 | and who steeped in the history and the theory of his art. I went to see his show a few weeks ago in Bournemouth, |
| 1:46.9 | where a crowded house sang with him, shrieked at his gags, |
| 1:50.7 | resonated with his sentimental good humour, |
| 1:53.5 | and went home, exhausted but grateful, five hours after curtain up. |
| 1:58.5 | You don't get quite that long with Ken Dodd tonight, but I hope you'll |
| 2:01.7 | be tickled to know that this special edition of Nightwaves is entirely devoted to him. I went to |
| 2:07.8 | meet him at the BBC studios in Liverpool, where a giant image of him goggles down from the glass |
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