On an atypically sweltering Blackpool afternoon, Vengaboys are belting out the tinny gospel of Europop. “Happiness is just around the corner,” they promise.

While the timeless lyric to We Like To Party was first recorded almost 30 years ago, its prophesy has been fulfilled this very day, as, barely the heat-weary flap of an indolent seagull away on Bank Hey Street, Showtown is throwing its exhibition doors wide to a very particular kind of Happiness!

Happiness! in this instance is an exhibition which seeks to encapsulate the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of Ken Dodd, the celebrated Liverpudlian stand-up (and sometime pop star) whose centenary it will be next year.

Dodd and the resort, currently vying to be crowned as the next City of Culture, are inextricably intertwined. A proud resident of Knotty Ash, the suburb of Liverpool to which he remained rooted throughout his life, he would nonetheless declare that “Blackpool is my favourite town, it’s the showbiz temple of the UK”. Indeed, across the decades, Dodd played more than 2,000 shows in its piers and theatres. More to the point, the notoriously frugal comedian put his money where his mouth was, lending the full force of his oversized personality in support of the successful campaign to save the beautiful Frank Matcham-designed Grand Theatre in the 1970s.

The exhibition illustrates not only his involvement with The Friends of The Grand, but other pivotal dates in his long love affair with the Golden Mile. Dodd was the celebrity corralled into flicking the switch of the town’s illuminations in 1966, and was even afforded a star of his own in their changeable firmament. More recently, in 2011, he metaphorically rolled out the resort’s Comedy Carpet, a kind of Bayeux Tapestry of stand-up, hewn in concrete and granite.

Just as Dodd and Blackpool are almost inseparable, so, too, were he and his long-time partner, the now Lady Dodd. Echoing Max Brod‘s disregard of Franz Kafka’s wishes for literary immolation before her, she showed a measure of far-sightedness in overruling her husband’s wishes for a bonfire of his private papers. If not for her, his closely-observed comedy notebooks, analysing the reception of his jokes at every stop on what he referred to as his “window cleaning round” of regional venues, might well have been long consigned to ashes, rather than safely preserved under glass.

Also preserved under glass is the most recognisable member of Dodd’s whimsical Diddymen – anarchic spirits that manifested either as puppets, or, especially in summer season, stage-struck children – the roguish Dicky Mint. Mint shows remarkably few signs of wear, or indeed the emotional scars of the incident in which he was stolen from Dodd’s car, unwisely parked-up in the darkest days of Liverpool’s city centre when crimes of necessity and desperation plumbed the depths of its then decline.

Although he recorded comedy ditties in conjunction with the Diddymen, in the 1960s, perhaps uniquely as a comedian, Dodd carved out a parallel career as a singer of non-novelty pop. Usurping the hegemony of his Liverpudlian neighbours, Tears managed the rare feat of outselling The Beatles. LP covers from this flip side to Dodd form a sober contrast to the vivid excesses of his so-called ‘moggy coat’, accessorised in the colours of the Union Flag like Geri Halliwell wrapped up against the coldest fronts of a close season Irish Sea.

Amid such abundance, for me the most telling absence in the exhibition was a sense of Dodd the performer. To use an inexact comparison, like the Springsteen of stand-up it was purportedly during his marathon sets that Dodd came alive. A series of lift-the-flap feed-lines and punchlines convey a sense of his material, but not his inimitable delivery. It’s hard, therefore, to imagine how the Dodd neophyte will be moved from intrigue to conversion. Still, for the faithful – from the slap of his make-up to the tickle of his stick – there is much to evoke a nostalgic smile. Or even tears of laughter.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Anne, Lady Dodd, Sir Ken Dodd lifesize waxwork from Madame Tussauds Blackpool, and comedian Mick Miller. Credit Martin Bostock Photography.

          

Happiness! The Ken Dodd Exhibition is at Showtown, Blackpool until January 3, 2027. For more information, click here.