Chat with Lady Dodd as new Ken Dodd film set to be screened in Blackpool, 'his second home'

The Real Ken Dodd – The Man I Loved is a feature documentary film which reveals for the first time the private man behind Britain’s greatest comic genius, Ken Dodd.

Narrated by Miriam Margolyes and starring Harry Hill, Lee Mack, Paul O’Grady, Johnny Vegas and Sir Ian McKellen features never-before-seen home videos, stage performances and extracts from the thousands of Ken’s diary notebooks which he’d asked Anne to burn after his death. 

The Real Ken Dodd is being screened at the Blackpool Grand Theatre twice this Saturday, a venue that Lady Anne Dodd, who will introduce the documentary and hold a Q&A afterwards, says was extremely close to her husband’s heart - he even helped save it back in the 70s.

Ahead of the screenings- which you can buy tickets for here- we spoke to Lady Dodd about her husband, the film and about how Blackpool ties in to it all:

Can you describe what the film’s about?

“Originally it was going to be all about how you open a museum exhibition but then COVID came along and everything closed. The producer, the director, the film people, said ‘look we’ve done six months work and we've not got a commission to go on television because they're not working’ so we decided to carry on and make it a film that included all the things I was doing with his legacy and it became a story.

“Last week, I was at Showtime and Freddie Davis, who’d seen it elsewhere, said “it's a love story” and I've never thought of it like that, but I suppose it is in a way. It embraces all sorts of subjects connected with Ken.”

The film features never before seen extracts from Ken’s diaries, why have you released them now?

“Because of the exhibition, the archivists came here and it made us do a lot of sorting all over the house and we found at least 1000 notepads because he never stopped writing. After every show, he would write how it went -I now know because I never looked at his notebooks then, they were like diaries. He also wrote a lot of his creative ideas in there but he wasn't a big head, that’s why he said ‘you have to get rid of them, I don't want people to see it, it's nothing important’ but of course they were terribly important when I did start looking at them. Absolutely fascinating but I found it difficult at first because it was like looking into someone's brain, and you don't go into people's diaries.”

How are you feeling about the film getting screened in Blackpool?

“I'm so looking forward to it because… every year of his life, or his working life, he worked somewhere in Blackpool. In the 50s, he started on the North Pier and in the 60s and 70s, he was in the biggest theatre in Europe,  the Opera House, which is still standing - 3000 people twice nightly. But those were the days when Blackpool was full of people, absolutely packed [in the] summer seasons because there was no way people couldn't go abroad. It would be very, very expensive in those days to fly. Things changed in the 80s because people could go abroad but he really played… even into the 80s, these massive shows at the Opera House.  Then in the late 80s and into the 90s, the last 25 years, he played at the Grand. He loved the Grand, it's a beautiful Matcham theatre, it's really glorious. 

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“But even the circus! That's incredible. I'll tell you one little story, [Ken] was asked by Norman Barrett, the ringmasterr… iif he'd do this appearance in this Tower Circus. It was for BBC television and they filmed him with Jim Chubb, the trainer of tigers. It was in the 80s, about 1985, when they did still have animals and [Jim] said “I'll take you into the cage and show you how I train them.” I have pictures of Ken [in the cage], it's on my phone, I only found those pictures a few years ago, after he died.  I was there and he was went in this cage with the trainer and half dozen tigers. One started moving and he trainer said “Ken, you keep your hand on my shoulder and you'll become part of me and the Tiger won’t do anything.” But the tiger started getting off the perch and [Jim] said “stick tight”, [Ken] said “I'm glued to you!” Anyway, the tiger sort of moved a bit and they finished the interview and they got Ken out. I was outside the cage going “oh my god, is he alright? I think the tiger was more curious than anything!

“And Showtown. They very kindly said they'd got that inspiration from Ken because he used to say this is the showtown of Britain, the showtown of the North -  Blackpool. Their museum exhibition is wonderful, I went there when they opened it, it was lovely.”

Did you ever go to Blackpool for just leisure, or was it always work?

“Oh, yes, we would combine the two! We did have nice holidays and breaks. One of the things I remember most was the Comedy Carpet which is an enormous granite space filled with all these words. It mentions so many artists who've appeared in Blackpool over the years, and the whole of the words to ‘Happiness’ this song that Ken sang that was almost like his signature song. Every single letter is three inches deep in Granite so it'll last for centuries. It is an amazing achievement what they put there and Ken opened that on a terribly rainy, wet day a few years ago.” 

In the documentary, you explore the fact that Ken wanted to create a comedy museum, is it nice to see the completion of Showtown which is very similar to his goal?

“It's lovely that Showtime has now completed because they were talking about the museum, before Ken passed away and he said ‘Well, that sounds good, because that's what Blackpool needs, it's got such a wonderful history.’ The way they have laid their museum out is quite amazing, it's very inclusive of so much and it tells a story. I think that's what our film does, it tells the story of Ken's life, the background things you don't always see and his legacy as well from the Ken Dodd Charitable Foundation, which is what I'm administering now with his nephew and a lawyer. The film talks about that but not, I hope, in a boring way, I think it's just part of the story.”

Some of the items that feature in the documentary are going to be loaned to Showtown, can you tell us what they are?

“There'll be things like Dickie Mint, who was Ken's main puppet because he started off as a ventriloquist, you see. Since he was about seven or eight, he had a ‘dummy’ as he would say that he made a character called Charlie Brown but Dickie Mint was his main one which is why there’s the statute, which we unveiled a couple years ago in an alcove in the Grand. I'm really proud of that, it's lovely and he'd love that, to think it's there.”

How has the documentary been received so far?

“I've shown it three or four times now and then at the end, we do a Q&A but there haven’t been questions as such, it’s been people recalling something that they then link to a question, so they recall meeting him or the things he said.

“And they're not all older people, a lot of them are younger, because people brought their children and then they started going to shows so it goes through the generations. 

“A lot of the reaction has also been ‘well, I didn't know that about him, I didn't know this, I didn’t know that’.”

Can you share an example of something the documentary reveals about Ken that most didn’t know?

“That he was quite serious, and that he had a faith. Of course, over the years, he's always been filmed for entertainment but there are little snippets of holidays we did, captured with little handheld cameras.”

Does it feel strange to see your private memories on a big screen for thousands to watch?

“Yes, it is strange. But there was one television program that was made the year after he died called ‘How tickled we were’ and I was involved in that so I got used to doing things. I started myself on stage a long time ago, in the 60s, and then in Ken’s shows, I used to do an act with a guitar, flute and piano so I love being part of it.”

And why should people grab tickets for the screening if they haven’t already?

“For people who have seen him onstage, it will revive memories, that is what people have said to me, and they also think that it's very tasteful. 

“But the film is fun, there are a lot of laughs, there's lots of clips of Ken on stage and it's not just a documentary, it tells a story.

“I had a beautiful letter of about four or five pages from someone who had seen it … let me just read the last paragraph to you: ‘We thank you for the most wonderful trip back into Doddie lane, as close as we'll ever get again, and state our ongoing support for his legacy, for whatever that may be worth. With us all so his memory continues to live. Congratulations to you and everyone you work with.’”