The language of laughter
Les Dawson has played a few old women in his time, but nobody quite like Nona. For a start Nona is 100 and apparently indestructible; she says little, eats obsessively, is utterly self-centred and ultimately destroys those around her. She is also a metaphor: for the hyper-inflation that raged in Argentina in the wake of the Falklands war.
Nona – a play written by Roberto Cossa, to be shown on Saturday evening on BBC2 – is an unrelentingly black comedy about the disintegration of a family in the face of economic collapse. Quite what a Saturday-night audience switching on to see Dawson perform witty monologues and mother-in-law jokes will make of it is anyone’s guess. It is not easy viewing, and with a cast representing Argentinians but displaying a rich mix of northern accents, there is a certain ambiguity of tone. You feel that if Borges had written the odd episode of Coronation Street, this might have been the result.
One puzzle was to find Dawson – star of stage, screen and innumerable summer seasons – doing such a, well, unusual piece. He dismisses my parochialism: “The script arrived and it took my breath away. It was a challenge. You get put into little pockets. If you do something for a long time, then that’s supposed to be all you can do. I’m not a clown desperate to play Hamlet, but nor am I just a meaningless red-nosed comic who falls on his bottom a lot.”
The play was very big in Buenos Aires, did poorly in Paris, and has never been put on here. Whether it will be panned in Preston remains to be seen. Whatever the verdict, Dawson isn’t too bothered: “I enjoyed doing it and that’s what concerns me. If you court constant publicity, you don’t become a person, you become a property. If people can’t accept you’re doing different things, I’d sooner them not watch it. You have to do what you believe in, and the older you get the more you want to explore.”
As he says, at least by getting him to play a centenarian, the BBC saved on make-up. He also defends the northern accents: “As far as I am concerned, it could be anywhere. We couldn’t play it with mock South American accents, and there’s something about the northern accent that does make a line sound funny.” He’s right: “You’re like a car bumper shimmering in the moonlight” doesn’t add up to much, but say it liltingly in Liverpudlian, as the workshy, tango-writing Chico does, and it’s hysterical.
Nona is not Dawson’s first attempt to cross the comedy-drama divide. In the mid-1970s he starred in a series of three short plays called The Loner, written by Alan Plater. The critics were not impressed. “Too Beckettian, too much like Godot,” says Dawson. “The public quite liked it, but the hacks went to work with machetes. But I seem to draw that sort of attention, which I don’t mind because I think if they criticise, it shows they’re interested.”
The thick skin is necessary: at the same time as The Loner was being savaged, a series called Dawson’s Weekly written by the esteemed team of Galton and Simpson – creators of Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son – was being equally harshly treated. The Guardian’s Peter Fiddick, reviewing the pilot which spawned the series, was content merely to quote TV Times’s slightly unfortunate plug for the show: “It’s hell going on holiday with Les Dawson.” Dawson is philosophical about the failure: “The scripts weren’t bad but they were hangovers from Galton and Simpson’s work with Hancock, which is flattering in one sense but not in another.”
The tag of “the new Hancock” was as difficult for Dawson as for every other comic who has been lumbered with it. They were, after all, very different characters. Hancock was the lower-middle class twerp with pretensions that would invariably be exposed; Dawson always knew he was beaten to begin with. He discovered his morose, self-deprecating style by accident. Playing a club in Hull where “if they let you live, you were doing well”, he prepared himself for the ordeal with a few drinks at a nearby pub. Once on stage the beer took over and, slumped at the piano, he abandoned his usual routine and started to talk directly to the audience.
“Thank you for the brief spatter of applause that greeted my appearance on the stage of this renovated fish crate,” he began. “It’s a great pleasure to be working here; in fact it’s a pleasure to be working anywhere. I’m booked here tonight and I have a booking for next October – not just engagements, to me that’s a career … I’m so far behind with the rent the arrears are ticked off in the Domesday Book . . . I had a puncture last night and as I took the tyre off to mend it, a car drew up and a fellow opened my bonnet. I said what the hell are you doing? He said if you’re having the tyres, I’m having the battery . . .” “All the bitterness and frustration spilled out on a froth of ale,” Dawson recalls, “and they started laughing. I woke up next morning with a blinding migraine and the germ of an act.”
The sardonic style became his trademark and won him a big following on the then booming northern club circuit. Appearances on Opportunity Knocks and Blackpool Night Out introduced him to television, and he starred in a long-running series, Sez Les, made by Yorkshire TV. By the mid-1970s everything seemed possible, but the failure of The Loner and the Galton and Simpson series stalled his career and sent him back to the safe and always lucrative pastures of light entertainment.
He took over from Terry Wogan as frontman on Blankety Blank and the ratings leapt: the public loved it and even the critics thought the dismissive, deadpan style a glorious send-up of game shows. He believes the show only started to fail when the prizes became worth winning, and fondly recalls the days when contestants used to leave their trophies – ornamental birdcages and exotic rugs – in the foyer at the BBC.
The success of Blankety Blank contrasts with the failure of his recent game show, Fast Friends, where US-style hysteria overwhelmed Dawson’s very British style. A ghastly triumph of hype over experience, it was an expensive way for the BBC to prove that Les Dawson is not Bob Monkhouse. Dawson is tersely honest about the failures, and recognises that much of his appeal depends on self-deprecation. “The greatest attribute of British humour is that we laugh at ourselves. Other countries don’t. That was our strength, but over the last 20 years or so we have stopped laughing at ourselves. We’ve taken ourselves too seriously.”
Aggression is also important. His delivery is fast, and his squat bouncer’s frame and crumpled face can make him look furious. The success of Blankety Blank owed a good deal to his putdowns of guests and “celebrities” alike – to one of the latter, “I’ve got your picture on the mantelpiece; it keeps the kids away from the fire.” Many comics do it, of course, but with Dawson you feel he might just mean it. Even on Wogan, that most mundane of chat shows, he injects an element of confrontation, a welcome ambivalence – he plugs and then, by attacking the programme’s format, threatens to pull the plug.
His aggression is, however, markedly different from that of comedians such as Bernard Manning who play to the prejudices of their audience. Dawson attacks “the wife” and “the mother-in-law” but would claim not to be anti-women and he steers clear of ethnic and religious jokes. (His attitude to homosexuality, though, is ambiguous: he doesn’t make jokes about gays but his books suggest he is not sympathetic.)
He describes his act as “wholesome” – vulgar yes, dirty no – and says his material draws on the eternal subjects of comedy: “Whatever I do, I talk about family life: death, marriage, children, wife, mother-in-law. They are the basis of all humour, and everything I do is done with affection. Most people condemn things they actually like.” Dawson contrasts his style with the more visceral approach of Manning: “He draws his own people and they flock to see him, but it’s not my cup of tea. I would sooner play to half an audience who like the turn of a phrase than play to a packed house of gum-chewing morons who’ve got tattoos.”
The “turn of a phrase”, in fact, means everything to Dawson: the use of language to create character and atmosphere. He believes the best comedians build “word pictures” that have far more resonance than mere gags. One typically baroque Dawson tale starts “I was vouchsafed this message from the gin-sodden lips of a pock-marked Lascar in the arms of a frump in a Huddersfield bordello,” winding on to a vague sort of conclusion many convolutions later. The humour is not in the punchline but in the accumulation of words and images.
He admires the comedians who came to prominence in the eighties – Fry and Laurie, Ben Elton, Rowan Atkinson and others who made the “alternative” mainstream. “I like their work. It’s different and tends to make us look a bit old-fashioned. We do character comedy; they put across a social message, sometimes pushing the point a little to far. But I hope what they do doesn’t mean we’ll be seen as dinosaurs.” His great hero is W C Fields, admired for his “beautiful use of language and strange waywardness”. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Jack Benny, Rob Wilton, Max Wall and Tommy Cooper form the pantheon: clowns rather than comics, men who didn’t really tell jokes but seemed to produce an almost accidental humour.
Love of language is the thread running through much of Dawson’s work. He was briefly a reporter on the Bury Times, but fell out with the editor over a slightly overwritten piece covering the funeral of a local alderman – “On a rainswept plateau the mourners huddled together as the cold, grey mist embraced them in its clammy shroud . . .” Dawson didn’t appreciate the subbing or the subservience he was expected to show and promptly left to pursue his career as a Great Writer in Paris, where he got a job playing piano in a brothel. Realising that he was not employed to entertain but to dissuade customers from lingering, he returned home, figuring that Tetley’s offered more consolation than the Tuileries.
The love of literature and the passion to write that took him to Paris still burn: he is a voracious reader and punctuates his discourse with quotations. Beckett, Wilde, Asimov, Wodehouse, Trollope, Leonard Woolf . . . oh, and Lieutenant-General Garfield Jarvis, author of Jottings from an Active Life, an engaging “blueprint of how to lose an empire”. Dawson’s range of references is nothing if not eclectic. He has written 12 books (most, he admits, sank without trace), has just produced a Raymond Chandler pastiche called Well Fared My Lovely, is working on a play set in the boardroom of a company that makes joke-shop novelties, and still harbours ambitions to establish himself as an essayist. The productivity is astonishing, even if the style is sometimes on the level of the rain-lashed plateau in Bury.
His most ambitious book is A Time Before Genesis, a rambling novel set in a future England threatened by a satanic cult. Published in 1986, it was laughed at by some – The Observer thought it “would have benefited from what John Betjeman once described as the ‘gentle mockery of good friends’.” But others treated it more kindly: the Guardian called the heady brew of sex, satanism and science fiction “an ambitious piece of work worthy of serious consideration”. He has complete faith in his writing, and says proudly that he still receives letters about A Time Before Genesis. He pulls sheaves of neatly typed essays out of the top drawer of the desk behind which he is almost hidden, each one a labour of love. But why does he do it, why endure the late nights and the headaches he says always come with writing? “A desire to keep . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence, preferring to read out part of one of the essays instead.
To keep what? Working? That certainly: the three-month panto seasons and summers in Scarborough and contemporaneous TV shows surely testify to workaholism. (He complains about the mortgage, income tax, the fact that his children and their friends are always on the phone to Australia, but that’s all part of the act, isn’t it?) But thinking, too. He needs the stimulus of ideas, needs something that a diet of gags alone would never provide.
He says A Time Before Genesis became overloaded with ideas, that he couldn’t control the torrent provoked by his initial premise of asking where the mysterious figures who changed the world – Rasputin, the Serbian student whose shot started the first world war, Martin Bormann – actually came from and why we know so little about them. That unwillingness to be confined expresses itself in all his work: Nona is unclassifiable in part because he is unclassifiable, the comedian who writes dystopian fables. Did Orwell ever play the Wakefield Empire?
The future could hold anything or nothing. Panto, as usual, this Christmas – Dick Whittington for two months in Wimbledon. Falstaff in an adaptation based loosely on an idea by William Shakespeare, possibly. More TV when the dust settles after the great franchise furore; a programme about Fields perhaps. The writing, of course. A one-man show à la Ustinov if he gets the chance. And a sitcom – he’d love to do a sitcom. But not just any old sitcom – “Something with a bit of a difference. I’m working on some ideas myself. I like doing shows where people say: ‘Did you see that last night?’ I don’t mind people not liking a thing as long as they’ve seen it, as long as they talk about it.” Indifference is the enemy, not contempt.
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