PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
The dictionary according to Les Dawson
Les Dawson, comedian and would-be writer, was a lover of words. He caressed them for what he considered to be their beauty and was not, on occasion, particular about their aptness.
"Trees scraping like fingers of harlots across the sky," he said,"-I love all that.
"Ashen-faced mourners hunched close, leaden skies and the pallid features of the very grieved.. I can see it like a Utrillo painting."
The comedian was a national emblem - po-faced, secure in his talent, cutting incisive, writing most of his own material, carving up mothers-in-law; droll as a bereaved clown (as he would no doubt have put it).But it was never his true aim. Always at the back of his achievement was a need to be taken seriously through his long-standing flirtation with the English language. "I would like to have been a serious writer," he told me. "I wrote a book about pre-Bible and no-one would touch it: my idea of how things really were, written as a novel.
"The English language is terrific. A great backcloth. A shame we don't use it more. A Scouser once described his council house to me: 'It's like a vampire's haversack.' Beautiful. I once got the biggest laugh on a TV show by saying, 'He bludgeoned a frump in a Huddersfield bordello.'"
He had tried to find writers to take the weight off his career, but they disappointed him by trying to find the quickest way to a laugh. "They forget Jack Benny, who waited for a laugh line. I have three minutes of a cabaret act which is not meant to get a laugh. It is just descriptive." Frank Randle, the old Lancashire comedian, could make him both laugh and cry. He particularly admired Robb Wilton, W. C. Fields, and Will Hay, and there were echoes of them all in his work.
Les Dawson came from a poor family in Collyhurst, Manchester, and had said, "The only things we folks were rich in was love." What they lacked in material things, they made up in other ways. "I think that is the secret of bringing up kids - give them that love first and they will turn out right."
His first job was in a warehouse. He had no plans. "I did not know what I wanted to do until I was in my twenties. I broke off an engineering apprenticeship and joined the Army because I was bored.
"In those days, to get a job with the CWS meant security with a capital S. But security cloys for me. It restricts the psyche.
"Eventually, I went to Paris to write. I did not know which was Left or Right bank. I just wanted the cheapest digs, and what happened? Starved. Used to play the piano in a brothel. I wrote an article which was published in Paris Match - an Englishman's impressions of the Seine. I still have the cheque."
Back from Paris, he sold Hoovers and kept writing. He had entertained troops with songs at the piano and "the odd gag."
Along came an offer to do six days in Hull - "about £14 for the week, hard graft. On Thursday night they were virtually throwing everything at me. I couldn't face them on the Friday, so I got slightly the worse for drink; and when the curtain rose, I couldn not get off the piano. I'd gone. Slumped. I looked at 'em and started doing the dead-pan act. Well, not really an act - just saying how cheesed off I was with life generally. To my bewilderment there was a faint titter and that grew to a crescendo."
He had, he said, been phoney before - doing an act. "You have to be yourself. The hard work set in then. TV came alongl. It got harder still." The rest is well-enough known; he reached the peak of a comedian's career and became a national symbol.
And yet… "I'd love to have been in cloisters somewhere in Cambridge. Musty books, crumpets and tea, fire in the hearth, good minds, solid minds all around; a pipe, fingering and looking at the books.
He got on well with his mother in law despite the jokes. "Never stop telling jokes about me," she said. "We don't lampoon them," he said. "It's all done with affection. Let's face it, they have the ultimate power."
He started TV in 1964 and had his own series from 1972. He appeared in Jokers Wild (series), Stars on Sunday, Sez Les (series), Royal Command Performance (1973), and took over from Terry Wogan as host of Blankety Blank. He achieved more than most comedians can ever hope for without losing his roots, inflating his ego or changing his attitudes.
And if there had been a chance to go back to the Left Bank in Paris to write the immortal book, he would have put all that behind him - and gone.
Or so he said.
Thankfully, he did not.
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007