'Bring blankets. Bring breakfast': my night with Ken Dodd

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/oct/09/bring-blankets-bring-breakfast-my-night-with-ken-dodd

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I hadn’t sat down in Darlington Civic theatre two minutes when someone offered me a midget gem. Alex and his girlfriend Leanne, holder of the gems, were outside the demographic for Ken Dodd’s Happiness tour by some decades, at 29 and 31 respectively – but this crew have more in common than generation. They all really like sweets (the couple on my other side had more fruit pastilles than I’ve ever seen in one handbag). And they have concentration spans that baffle belief.

“Bring a flask,” said the lady at the box office, a couple of days before. “Bring blankets. Bring breakfast.” In the lobby, there was a clock for curtains down showing one in the morning.

This must be a joke, surely? Ken Dodd is 87 years old, and that would be five and a half hours of solid wordplay. “I’ve seen children grow out of their trousers,” Dodd exclaimed. “Hey, are you looking at your watch?” he asked a man in the audience. “A watch is no good for you in this show. You need a calendar. We might be finished by Tuesday.”

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Of course, this is his schtick, this is what got him into the Guinness Book of Records with a routine in the 1960s in which he told 1,500 jokes in three and a half hours – a routine of such comprehensive japing that nobody can have been left un-insulted. But still, really? “We’re all happy, we’re all friends, we don’t care what time it ends,”Dodd sang, exultantly, when the first half had been going two and a half hours and there was no sign of closure.

The shows are getting longer, on purpose; he made a joke about it being a challenge to your kidneys, and the laughter was quiet and pained. It’s music hall theatre of cruelty. “If it really is six hours, are you going to stay?” I whispered to Alex. “Course,” he said. “It’d be rude to walk out.” I wrote this off as a sugar high.

It is a convention when you write about comedy (apparently) that you don’t transcribe their actual jokes. That is waived in the case of Dodd, who stole half his jokes from Victorian times (“Where are you from?” “Bishop Auckland.” “How is he these days?”).

He flapped about by the mic, outrageously charming, disinterring a physicality from another age, needlessly changing into identical outfits of a different colour, like Miley Cyrus. “This is very dangerous, ladies,” he said, trying to turn his hair into an Elvis quiff. “I’m attempting this without gel.”

Surreal and dad-like, with only the odd deviation on the subject of tax avoidance and an ejaculation of patriotism (“Can we have a big round of applause for British farmers?”), for the first four hours you would need a heart of stone not to laugh. At 10.05pm with still no interval, a solitary, brave lady slipped out to the loo. After that, they go like dominoes. He breaks at 10.10pm, possibly taking this as his cue.

Alan, 69, said in the interval: “With the demographic of the audience, it’s amazing how many people lasted. You go to the cinema in the afternoon, and people start sneaking out after an hour and a quarter.”

The word Alan used to describe the show was “relentless”, but don’t think he wasn’t enjoying it. “To be honest, I can watch anything live. The trouble is with television, everything’s so good. There’s no shading. Here, he’s stumbling a bit and it makes you appreciate the good bits more. It’s like trying to work out how fast 100 yards has been sprinted on the telly. You can’t, you just know it’s fast.”

“It’s a shame,” said Betty, 74, “there aren’t more young people here, because I really think they’d enjoy it.” Me too, especially the unwittingly hipster joke: “I always ask a man with a beard, when you eat Shredded Wheat, how do you know when you’ve finished?” I think we could draw young people in with Alan’s line: “You see telly … it’s too good. How would you like to try something less good, and much, much longer?”

Linda, 51, Betty’s daughter, overheard an audience member disappearing into his car during the interval, muttering: “Do people not go to work in Darlington? I’ve got to get up at five.”

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The second half was more relaxing, since we no longer had to wonder, as he dangled his running time like a threat, whether or not it was an empty one. It was not. It began with a lady in a colourful jacket playing a synth version of Handel’s Water Music. “Especially because there’s been a big lot of commemorations this year,” she started, and then played God Save the Queen on a flute, after which she gave a double fist air punch with her head bowed, a kind of fascist-salute-as-devised-by-Facebook.

Dodd is supposed to be the sine qua non of comical bigotry, I’m sure I read in the 80s, but that’s not what people love about him. He’s no Rush Limbaugh. The biggest laughs are for things that are daft (“Self-assessment? I invented that”).

At 12.05am he told an incredibly long story about an old lady having sex with a gorilla that I’m pretty sure was sexist but I was too tired to tell. At 12.18am, by some miracle, it was over – it’s like being told by a doctor you’ve got three months to live and being grateful when it turns out to be four. He finished with a huge, rousing rendition of Happiness. I’ve got to give it to him – I was incredibly happy.