“GOOD idea, love, get stocked up for the night,” the barmaid cheerfully told me as she handed over a packet of crisps and a bag of Twirl Bites.
Ken Dodd’s stage shows are legendary for their length. A five-hour marathon seems standard, with fans gleefully warning I won’t leave the theatre until the early hours.
It sounded like a feat of endurance for the audience — let alone a man who turned 89 this month.
I was in Southport, Merseyside, at one of the last shows in his 39-date tour which began in June.
This Christmas he will be back on TV with a documentary about his life and will be making his 25th annual performance at the Liverpool Philharmonic on December 28 and 29.
But surely the master of the tickle sticks couldn’t have the stamina to last the night?
“Fifty per cent of this audience are optimists,” he said. “They’ve booked a taxi for twenty past twelve.”
It was just one of many references to the all-nighters which have made his name as much as his longevity in the business.
He joked: “You’ll leave here having had an experience. You’ll know what it’s like to be in a hostage situation.”
It turned out he wasn’t pulling our legs. Even he seems amazed he’s still performing, albeit it to an audience “waiting for hip operations”.
Apart from an excruciating musical interlude that involved a recorder and sea shanties, and an impressive performance by magician Amethyst, Ken played host for around three hours of the four and a half hours of entertainment.
It’s been 62 years since the coal merchant’s son made his stage debut at the now demolished Nottingham Empire. At his peak, Ken performed 300 shows a year.
This year’s tour has seen him sell out gigs at major theatres throughout Britain — Southport Theatre has a capacity of more than 1,600 people.
And despite still living in the Georgian farmhouse in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, in which he was born, he admits to a taste for the high life, staying in top hotels and driving a Mercedes.
Behind him on stage sat a drummer and a keyboard player, but there was no stage dressing, no gimmicks, not even a stool for him to sit on during the first half.
It was just the self-appointed Squire of Knotty Ash, standing slightly stooped, ruffling his hair every couple of minutes and telling joke after joke.
His volley of one-liners and word-play comedy had the audience in stitches.
Who wouldn’t laugh — or at least groan — at old-fashioned gags such as: “A shrimp went to a cocktail party. Pulled a mussel.”
Or “The vet said he’d have to put my dog down? I said, ‘That’s a bit drastic isn’t it?’ He said, ‘Well he’s heavy’.”
Not that he’s stuck in the past. Doddy took the mickey out of “Smiler” Victoria Beckham.
He childishly riffed about Donald Trump’s name, blowing a raspberry to emphasise his point, and implied Sun columnist Jeremy Clarkson was the world’s ugliest man during a skit about Quasimodo.
He’s more than happy to embrace and playfully tease his ageing audience, who he thanked for “spending your heating allowance” on tickets.
Telling the sea of bald pates and grey bobs about the number of care homes in Southport, he added: “They must be empty tonight.”
Doddy once achieved a Guinness World Record seven “titters per minute” during the longest joke-telling session. You still have to concentrate to keep up.
He looks in good health, apart from a regular cough, thought to date back to growing up in a house full of coal dust.
In fact he has only ever cancelled three shows, once for a hernia operation in 2007 and twice due to bereavement.
But last year he admitted he suffers memory blanks and has to use a script.
“As a comic, you can get out of it with a line like, ‘I have had amnesia ever since I can remember’, or ‘I’ve just bought this book on how to develop a super memory but I can’t remember where I put it’. So what you have to do is have a script.”
There was only one point, during a short sketch with an older female comedian dressed in a French maid’s outfit, that a script was evident.
The pair made light of the lapse as she bent down to pick a clipboard off the floor to read a punchline.
Otherwise, he relies on his prompter, his drummer, who shouts out the odd word whenever Doddy looks to him for help.
Whether it’s genuine amnesia or a deliberate forgetful old man routine, it never fails to raise a chuckle.
Brian Liptrot, 69, who was there with his wife Susan, both retired from Wigan, said: “For his age he’s just fantastic. We don’t know if he’s putting it on when he turns to his drummer or not. I think it’s an act. It was a great show.”
related stories
Harking back to his roots, he did a ventriloquism sketch with Dicky Mint, one of the mythical miniature Merseysiders the Diddymen.
That was Ken’s first foray into entertainment as a child, after his dad Arthur encouraged him to send off for a dummy after seeing an advert in a comic.
Ken left school at 14 and turned down an offer of a job on a newspaper because he was needed in the family coal business.
In his 20s he was a door-to-door salesman while putting on local shows at night.
In 1954, aged 26, he got his professional big break at the Nottingham Empire. Eleven years later he was doing a 42-week residency at the London Palladium.
He lives with his long-term girlfriend and sidekick Anne Jones, a musician and former dancer. They never had children.
There is a statue of him in Lime Street Station in his beloved Liverpool, as well as a painting of him in the National Portrait Gallery but, as yet, no sign of a knighthood.
Ken faced trial accused of tax evasion in 1989 and was found not guilty — and even now devotes a self-deprecating section of his show to it.
In the 1960s he had 14 Top 40 hits and boasts the third-highest-selling song of the decade, with Tears — the only non-Beatles hit in the top five.
Doddy serenaded us with lines from famous love songs, finishing each with a joke but demonstrating his voice is still going strong.
There’s plenty of innuendo in his jokes, but swearing is an no-no.
Despite his promises (threats?), to keep us in our seats till daybreak, he finished just before midnight and got a standing ovation.
Christine Hart, 57, a charity shop worker from Rainford, Merseyside, was there with husband Chris. She said: “It was fabulous. He should absolutely carry on.”
Fans wore broad smiles as they headed into the chilly air. Mostly because they had been entertained in that joyous, old-fashioned music hall way that may well die out with Doddy himself.
But yes, some were just relieved to be leaving at a decent hour.