“My favourite sound is laughter,” said Ken Dodd. “It’s a beautiful sound; well worth working for. I’m proud to be a member of the laughter-making profession. I equate laughter with good music – it pleases me as much as Handel’s Messiah.”
There were as many laughs as tears at the comedian’s funeral on Wednesday, marked all over Liverpool with tickling sticks, which had been thrust into the hands of the city’s statues by council workers who had been up since 4am.
Outside St George’s Hall, Prince Albert held the reins of his horse with one hand and a red, white and blue feather duster in the other. The Beatles had a few each on the Pier Head, as did Cilla Black on Mathew Street.
The funeral was held at the city’s Anglican cathedral. Dodd, a committed Christian, loved visiting the cathedral, particularly for evensong, said its canon, Myles Davies. “He called it Liverpool’s best-kept secret, and would add, with a glint in his eye: ‘And it’s free!’” – a playful dig at the famously parsimonious Dodd, who, it emerged during his 1989 tax evasion trial, kept shoeboxes of cash under his bed.
Even in death, Dodd commanded a full house, noted fellow comic Jimmy Tarbuck. Three hundred seats were reserved for named guests. Among them were the latest Diddy Men, children from a local drama school dressed in outlandish hats and orange wigs, who followed his coffin out of the church as fans waved tickling sticks in the air.
Sixteen children from Knotty Ash primary school, near Dodd’s lifelong home, had been invited by Dodd’s widow, Anne Jones, who married him on his deathbed earlier in March after a 40-year courtship.
Headteacher Roanne Clements-Bedson said the children had grown up with the comedian, who was a regular visitor and had sent them pieces of his 90th birthday cake last year. Other pupils from the school’s deaf signing choir had signed the song Happiness as the horse-drawn cortege left the home where Dodd had lived since birth and set off on a journey to the cathedral past crowds five-deep.
The other 2,400 seats in the cathedral were set aside for members of the public. Some wore sombre suits while others appeared dressed for a nightclub. One man was in full Everton strip. Another had brought a dog in a double buggy dressed in sunglasses and a tiara.
Many, like 19-year-old superfan Jack Preston, were carrying tickle sticks. He had paid £60 for his on Ebay; it was an original, he insisted, having appeared on television in Another Audience With Ken Dodd.
Preston, a care assistant, has been Doddy-mad since he was three. He wrote to his hero and was invited backstage after a gig in Southport. It was a late night for a 13-year-old boy: the show didn’t finish until long after midnight and Dodd spent at least an hour talking to him afterwards.
“He always said you’d go home in the light,” said Preston, who remembered nodding off on the front row at an appearance at Blackpool Grand when he was only seven, only to be woken by Dodd promising to bring out Dicky Mint, his beloved ventriloquist’s dummy, if the little lad kept his eyes open.
Dodd’s marathon shows were a thing of legend, leading him to be hailed the patron saint of taxi drivers (because everyone missed the last bus home). Stephanie Cole, an actor and long-time friend of Dodd, noted that he shared two qualities with Stephen Hawking, who died three days after Dodd: both were geniuses, she said, “and both had a very original notion of time”.
Tarbuck told a joke about Dodd arriving at the pearly gates of heaven only for someone to ask Saint Peter if Dodd could “do five minutes”. No, said St Peter: “He’s never done five minutes in his life.”
Jan Rennie, 67, had come up from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire with her sister Linda Roberts, 74. They were armed with feather dusters adorned with ribbons on which they’d written: “Keep stretching those tickle muscles.” Earlier they’d been to see Dodd’s home in Knotty Ash. “It’s so lovely he remained there. We were talking to a local lady who said he took his car to the local garage and always said hello to everyone.”
The cathedral rang with laughter as his friends recalled his best gags. “Ken used to say ‘I’m not on TV much any more. I can’t cook’,” recalled John Fisher, an author and producer and long-time friend. The tears flowed when Dodd’s own voice sang out of the cathedral speakers with Absent Friends.
“Tatty-bye, old Doddy,” said Fisher.
