Book review: The Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson

Les Dawson embodies a Britain that no longer exists. A black and white TV world of Opportunity Knocks, This is Your Life, mother-in-law jokes, four-day weeks and nicotine-stained northern clubs where a jobbing comedian could dodge the heckling and flying bottles to make a living. For several decades as one of Britain’s most popular comedians, Dawson was all this and much more, driven by a love of words and humour that would have raised him head and shoulders above the rest of his contemporaries if he hadn’t been just five foot four.

His lugubrious delivery, phlegmatic attitude, sarcasm, dodgy piano playing and jokes about his wife and her mother were a staple of Saturday nights and became the trademark that took him from the tedium of a day job as a Hoover salesman to the acclaim of a Royal Variety Performance. But there is so much more to him, as Louis Barfe reveals in this biography of the popular comedian who is still known for his trademark gurn 20 years after his death.

Barfe takes us back to the beginning, to the slum area of Collyhurst in Manchester where Dawson was born in the 1930s, into a poverty that necessitated a sense of family and community. The men were stoic and hard working, the women even more so, the latter giving rise to the characters of Cissie and Ada whose gossiping over the garden wall sketches were an affectionate homage. Their habit of taking refuge in silently mouthing out delicate matters was typical of women Dawson knew who had spent their lives working in noisy mills and learnt to lip read. It was such details born of familiarity that allowed him to make fun of his audience and for it to be received in the same spirit. Perhaps this is why his jokes about the women in his life didn’t see him pilloried for misogyny. “Take my wife, no take my wife … please” and “I knew the mother-in-law was coming to visit because the mice were throwing themselves onto traps …” or “My mother-in-law came to the door and it was raining so I said to her, ‘Mother don’t stand out there in the rain – go home” all became such favourites with audiences that Dawson felt compelled to include them in his set, 20-odd years after their first airing.

Not least among the mother-in-law joke fans was his own mother-in-law, who told him to keep the jokes in, and not to forget after she’d gone. However, when Dawson’s wife Meg died of cancer in 1986, he felt unable to tell jokes against her any more, crediting her belief in him as the reason for his success. It was Meg who insisted he persist and suggested he go on Opportunity Knocks, the talent show which saw him discovered by a nationwide audience and put on the path to success, becoming a TV staple on shows such as Sez Les and Blankety Blank.

Parts of the book are laugh-out-loud funny, always when Dawson’s own words are being quoted, such as when he talks of a paramour “whose bum was so big she was taller when she sat down” and another who “had so many chins she looked like she was resting her head on a pile of crumpets”.

Other parts are overloaded with too much arcane detail for the casual reader and Barfe often contradicts Dawson’s recollections in his autobiography. For example, the comic recalled being on stage when his daughter was born and Jimmy Tarbuck walked on to break the news with a bottle of champagne. Barfe quotes a newspaper that puts him at Manchester Maternity Unit with his wife.

Memories can play tricks, and does it matter if a little embroidery makes it funnier? However, while Dawson was the better storyteller, Barfe’s fastidious research unearths some gems. There’s the night Joan Collins asked a show’s producers why they let Dawson go on stage when he clearly couldn’t play the piano, and the revelation that at the height of the Alternative Comedy years, he went down a storm on an open mic set at the Comedy Store.

There’s his habit of discussing Freud and Nietzsche with anyone who would listen, the fact his trademark gurn is down to a boxing accident. There’s his interest in the paranormal and his desire to be a writer rather than a comic – he wrote several books including a sci-fi novel – plus his attempts to rein in his drinking after an all-nighter with Billy Connolly. Dawson was a complex man, but most of all he was naturally funny.

In the end it was his lifestyle that led to his early demise. Given that he admitted, “The only exercise I do is up, one, two, three, down, one, two, three, then the other eyelid…”, it wasn’t a surprise when he died in his sixties of a heart attack in 1993. But before his untimely demise he had given the nation’s funnybone a thorough workout.

• The Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson

by Louis Barfe

Atlantic Books, 304pp, £19.99