Latest news with #KenDodd:ALegacyofHappiness
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.
