Latest news with #KenDodd
Scottish Sun
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Iconic theatre where film & TV legends including Ken Dodd & Charlie Chaplin once performed left abandoned for 17 years
The location has endured a topsy-turvy history STAGE EXIT Iconic theatre where film & TV legends including Ken Dodd & Charlie Chaplin once performed left abandoned for 17 years Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) HAUNTING IMAGES have emerged of a once-iconic theatre which featured legends including Ken Dodd and Charlie Chaplin. Images of the abandoned Tameside Hippodrome in Manchester show the venue riddled with peeling wallpaper, dusty seats and worn carpets. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 4 Eerie images reveal the dishevelled condition of the once popular Ashton Hippodrome in Manchester 4 Legends including Charlie Chaplin and Ken Dodd have performed there Eerie snaps also show the former control room stuffed with technical equipment as well as a refreshment stand complete with a price list of available drinks and snacks when revellers packed the venue. The images were captured by Urban Explorer Chloe Urbex. The gaff was designed by architect William Barlow and opened to the public in 1903. It was initially used as a theatre where it was used to house music hall acts, pantomimes and live performances. Three decades later, it was renovated and became a cinema when the popularity of film exploded. However, the spot fell into disrepair during the 1970s when appetite for film started to decline but was restored a decade later. It reopened in 1993, this time as the Tameside Hippodrome operating as a theatre once again, hosting a variety of events including plays, musicals, and concerts. The theatre's restoration efforts aimed to preserve its Edwardian features while modernising its facilities. 'I found it online and just climbed in an open window,' said Chloe. 'The atmosphere was quite scary as I went during the storm. Inside eerie hidden tunnels beneath busy street in Glasgow city centre 'The place is now decayed, eerie inside. 'It is like a time capsule. 'I love capturing the decay of places like this. 'I felt happy getting to document the hippodrome. 'Originally opened as the Ashton Hippodrome in 1903, the building was designed by architect William Barlow and served as a theatre. 'It was a popular venue for music hall acts, pantomimes, and live performances. 'Other people think the photos are cool. 'There were some scary moments with pigeons flying around it sounded like people were inside. 'The interesting thing about the explore was that it was relatively in good condition, it has been abandoned since 2008.' 4 The venue's control room is still in pretty good condition
The Sun
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Iconic theatre where film & TV legends including Ken Dodd & Charlie Chaplin once performed left abandoned for 17 years
HAUNTING IMAGES have emerged of a once-iconic theatre which featured legends including Ken Dodd and Charlie Chaplin. Images of the abandoned Tameside Hippodrome in Manchester show the venue riddled with peeling wallpaper, dusty seats and worn carpets. 4 4 Eerie snaps also show the former control room stuffed with technical equipment as well as a refreshment stand complete with a price list of available drinks and snacks when revellers packed the venue. The images were captured by Urban Explorer Chloe Urbex. The gaff was designed by architect William Barlow and opened to the public in 1903. It was initially used as a theatre where it was used to house music hall acts, pantomimes and live performances. Three decades later, it was renovated and became a cinema when the popularity of film exploded. However, the spot fell into disrepair during the 1970s when appetite for film started to decline but was restored a decade later. It reopened in 1993, this time as the Tameside Hippodrome operating as a theatre once again, hosting a variety of events including plays, musicals, and concerts. The theatre's restoration efforts aimed to preserve its Edwardian features while modernising its facilities. 'I found it online and just climbed in an open window,' said Chloe. 'The atmosphere was quite scary as I went during the storm. Inside eerie hidden tunnels beneath busy street in Glasgow city centre 'The place is now decayed, eerie inside. 'It is like a time capsule. 'I love capturing the decay of places like this. 'I felt happy getting to document the hippodrome. 'Originally opened as the Ashton Hippodrome in 1903, the building was designed by architect William Barlow and served as a theatre. 'It was a popular venue for music hall acts, pantomimes, and live performances. 'Other people think the photos are cool. 'There were some scary moments with pigeons flying around it sounded like people were inside. 'The interesting thing about the explore was that it was relatively in good condition, it has been abandoned since 2008.' 4
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Search Party's John Early: ‘You can only take a narcissistic monster for so long – it grates after 10 years'
There was a time when comedians weren't just about the jokes, they were about the crooning, too. I saw Ken Dodd shows back in the day where he broke up the tattifilarious nonsense with sentimental ballads and wartime songs. Can you imagine a 21st-century comic doing anything so uncool? Reader, you no longer have to – as one of the coolest comedians in the world wings his way to London with a show as much about the heartfelt chanson as the layers-of-ironic millennial bantz. The man in question is John Early, scene-stealing camp superstar of the HBO comedy-thriller Search Party, and sidekick to another whip-smart standup brain, Kate Berlant. Like Berlant – and like Catherine Cohen, Bo Burnham or the UK's own Leo Reich – Early's work fashions the navel-gazing, always-online, identity-as-performance spiritual anomie of his generation into outrageous comedy. Or at least, he does in his screen work. Onstage, it's a bit different, and includes straight-bat performances of pop/rock standards with the backing of six-piece band the Lemon Squares. 'In the beginning,' he says, 'I just felt, 'wouldn't this be groovier if I did this with a full band? Wouldn't it be fun to do a Britney Spears song with a 70s-inflected arrangement?'' Back then, the songs were – like everything else – a part-ironic posture. 'I would immediately find some jokey delivery to protect me through the song.' But things changed when Early recorded his first special last year. Now More than Ever includes a celebrated 16-minute routine lamenting the millennial generation's wasted youth, spliced with a plangent performance of the Neil Young number After the Gold Rush. 'That was a choice I made that changed my life,' says Early now, chatty and self-deprecating over a transatlantic Zoom. 'I always used to trust the audience to find the humanity underneath the irony. But people didn't often see that part of it, for some reason. Maybe today you can't trust them to, because we live in such an antisocial time, and people are so 'mallet to the brain' by the internet.' 'So with After the Gold Rush, for the first time ever, I fully just spoon-fed it. It was 'this is me baring my soul'.' It was the songs wot done it – so much so that Early subsequently released the show as an album. 'It's actually a very old cultural instinct, funny people doing sincere covers. Those are my heroes: the Bette Midlers, the Sandra Bernhards.' In the olden days, comedians performed sincere songs because the art form itself couldn't handle sincerity. That changed as comedy matured – but changed back again, Early argues, with millennials, so lost in irony's hall of mirrors, they must turn again to song to help free themselves. 'I am part of a generation of people that are like stuck together, a bunch of internet phrases that have been Frankensteined together. Singing takes you out of this poisonous, ironic-banter internet speak and lets you sit in time for three or four minutes, being wistful or sincere.' One might marvel that a lifelong satirist of millennial self-fashioning should himself feel trapped by it. But that's not all Early had to contend with. A self-described 'good Presbyterian boy', the son of church folk in Nashville, Tennessee, Early ascribes much of his work – ie portraying himself as 'a narcissistic monster' – to that background. 'I always thought there was something gross about portraying yourself in a flattering light,' he says, and so developed an oeuvre – his role as Elliott in Search Party prominent within it – that accentuated his 'psychotic, anxious, socially oppressive' tendencies. Away from the cameras, meanwhile, he delivered standup that felt like 'a safe way for me to actually be myself, to use the parts of me that are good at bringing people in and making them comfortable.' For years, he resisted broadcasting that live work, because 'I felt very allergic to putting a camera on that.' With Now More than Ever, he finally did so – and it came as a cathartic release. 'Because you can only take the monster for so long. It gets a little grating after 10 years of that.' All of which explains why London audiences are getting a rare glimpse of Early's live work this spring. 'Doing these shows has been very meaningful to me,' says the 37-year-old. 'I get schmaltzy on tour, I really love doing it. And as the [US] tour was ending I was like 'we have to keep going! It can't be over!' So we booked these London shows.' Content-wise, 'I don't want to promise anything too coherent,' he says, but it'll be 'my usual bloated, sweaty, wild show,' with guest appearances from his YouTube and Netflix 'southern Christian mom alter ego Vicky with a V. She will do – I was going to say a surprise set, but I've just given it away.' For comedy fans, it's a must-see – and perhaps, after all these years of Early hiding between inverted commas, worth a look for sincerity fans, too. John Early: The Album Tour is at Soho theatre Walthamstow, London, 28-29 May
Telegraph
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Ken Dodd: a Legacy of Happiness, review: a warm tribute to a poet of comedy
Would you place Ken Dodd near the top of a list of comedy greats? Most wouldn't. A recent YouGov poll put him in a lowly 50th place (the top three were Ronnie Barker, Billy Connolly and Peter Kay), one rung below Brendan O'Carroll from Mrs Brown's Boys. Perhaps that's because, as Sir Ian McKellen suggested in Ken Dodd: A Legacy of Happiness (BBC Two), you needed to see him live to appreciate his talents fully. 'The whole Ken Dodd experience is sitting there in his presence, responding to him and him apparently responding to you,' he said. 'How can that be reproduced on television? I think it must have been a bit bewildering, popular as he was on the telly, for people to quite understand why some of us thought that Ken Dodd was a bit of a genius.' That genius was explored in this documentary, a warm tribute piece built around Sir Ken's wife, Lady Anne. Since his death in 2018, she has dedicated her time and energy to preserving his memory. The programme followed her as she helped the Museum of Liverpool to mount a Ken Dodd exhibition, and pushed forward with plans to open a 'happiness centre' in the city which would combine her late husband's wish for a museum of British humour – 'an old jokes home', as he called it – with a place for performance and community events. Lady Anne allowed the camera inside the house in Knotty Ash where Dodd had spent his 90 years, and which is stuffed with memorabilia. The comic made her promise that she would destroy his notebooks; after some soul-searching, she decided to override his wish. There are close to 1,000 of them, in which he made copious notes about the science of making people laugh. Telling jokes was something he took extremely seriously and, as Frank Cottrell-Boyce put it so well, he did it without cruelty. 'It's very easy to make somebody laugh at somebody else,' Cottrell-Boyce said. 'But innocent laughter, the laughter that's just for its own sake – that is poetry, and Ken was the giant of that.' The documentary was narrated by one of Dodd's old friends, Miriam Margolyes, and was very much an authorised biography rather than warts-and-all. At 90 minutes' running time, it didn't go on for as long as Dodd's legendarily generous performances, but it could have done with some light editing – and more footage of him on stage making people laugh.
BBC News
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Sir Ken Dodd: Documentary gives rare insight into his private world
Extracts from notebooks belonging to Sir Ken Dodd are to be broadcast for the first time in a new documentary about one of Britain's greatest comics. Ken Dodd: A Legacy of Happiness gives audiences a glimpse into the his seven-decade career, and a rare insight into his private life before he died in gave instructions to his wife, Lady Anne Dodd, that after he died she should burn hundreds of his private notebooks, but she decided they were too important to Dodd said in one extract the Liverpool legend - who died in 2018 - talked about how he loved being Ken Dodd, and the energy laughter gave him. "One day he wrote, 'I love entertaining, I love the thrill of the audience, I love the power I get, the energy, the response and when they laugh and the feeling'...and right at the end he says, 'I love being Ken Dodd'."The BBC documentary, which took five years to make, also used home Ian McKellen and comedian Lee Mack contributed to the film. Sir Ian McKellen said: "He told me he marked the jokes and then at the end of each performance, removed the two that had got the fewest number of laughs, and put in two new ones."Comedian Lee Mack said Dodd put his genius into creating a "fool" character."If he put his genius into maths or classical music, he would be more easily recognised as extremely intelligent."But because you put it into looking like a fool people, sort of believed it."Ken Dodd: A Legacy of Happiness appears on BBC Two on Sunday 23 March at 21:00 GMT. Listen to the best of BBC Radio Merseyside on Sounds and follow BBC Merseyside on Facebook, X, and Instagram and watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer.
