When I had supper with him and his mother, Louie, to whom he was devoted, he often told vivid stories about his friend Joe Orton, who had been murdered just down the road from where he lived. Orton had written the character of Inspector Truscott in his 1966 play Loot for him.
The hugely successful Carry On films that made him famous were packed with innuendo and smut. Yet when Kenny told me he was celibate, I believed him. He pretended to be very shocked when I talked about sex. ‘OOOooooh Stooopp!’ he would say with that famous snigger when it was plain that he was loving every salacious second.
I went to his surprise fiftieth birthday party which he hated. Some friends had thought it would be a good idea — how wrong they were! He opened the door, thinking he was going to a quiet dinner and suddenly fifty people were shouting ‘SURPRISE!’ His face wobbled. He whispered to me, ‘Oh God, Miriam, what a nightmare.’ But he bravely and politely continued the pretence of loving it until he could make an escape.
When Kenny died in 1988, an open verdict was recorded by the coroner. But I think the bleak last words written in his diary the day before were a giveaway: ‘Oh, what’s the bloody point?’ Kenny had the gift of shifting the clouds away for other people, but not for himself. I had recognised that pain in him from the beginning and so had Maggie Smith. She phoned me out of the blue — it was probably our first proper conversation — after seeing the tribute to Kenny I had done on a TV programme. ‘You were the only one who saw his sadness,’ she said. They were close friends, sharing the same dry, merciless wit and drawling delivery. When she later joked that her entire career had been an extended impression of him, I could almost hear Kenny bashfully responding ‘Stoooppp it.’
I continued in radio comedy with Marks in His Diary, in 1979, directed by the young Griff Rhys Jones. It was his first proper job. That’s where I met David Jason, a lovely man. Our star was Alfred Marks, who was one of the world’s best joke-tellers. But the jokes took all day to tell, thus curtailing our rehearsal time to a frightening degree. Alfred had a joke for all occasions and insisted on sharing them with us. He should have had a show to himself, he didn’t need us. His joke-telling is only outstripped by Barry Cryer. Now 86, he still rings me up every few months with a new joke. I adore Barry, he is a genius; I just wish I could remember the quips as he does.
In fact I only have two reliable jokes. When the lights failed at an Evening Standard Theatre Awards dinner a few years ago, I rushed to the microphone to fill the gap. Luckily my jokes stretched just long enough for the lights to come back on.
I also worked with another legendary comic Kenneth: Ken Dodd, on radio first and then on TV for years. His shows were divine, if nerve-wracking experiences. He liked to rewrite the script up to the last moment; often I had no idea how a sketch was going to end, when he would push a crumpled scrap of script into my hand as I approached the mike.
How you look doesn’t matter on radio of course, but Ken was the last of the great music hall stars and his hair on stalks, his toothy grin and mad clothes (my favourite was a maroon maxi coat allegedly made out of 28 moggies) definitely enhanced his comedy on TV. He was very loyal and the radio cast — Jo Manning Wilson, Michael McClain and Talfryn Thomas — were all brought over to White City for the even more terrifying television recordings in front of live studio audiences. He pulled you in front of the camera, saying ‘Tell this joke, Miriam’, and until I saw it unwinding on the autocue I had no idea of the punchline.
Ken’s work seemed spontaneous but was deeply calculated and crafted. Every joke and the reaction to it was scored and marked down offstage in the notebooks he kept his entire working life. He got into the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s longest joke-telling session in the 1960s: 1,500 in three and a half hours (that’s 7.14 jokes per minute). Every time he introduced himself — ‘Good evening, my name is Kenneth Arthur Dodd, singer, photographic playboy and failed accountant’ — he was sharing the joke of his own successful court battle. In 1989 Ken was accused of eighteen counts of tax evasion. But what HMRC hadn’t realised was that no Liverpool jury was ever going to convict their favourite comic, one who still lived in the Merseyside home he’d grown up in, and the case was dismissed.
Comics are special; the dangers of the job perhaps unrealised by most people. It is terrifying to be responsible for audience laughter, so perhaps my dislike of ‘comedy’ stems mainly from fear. Comedy isn’t just slapstick, of course, and I loved every second of being in Sue Limb’s wonderful literary radio creations. In The Wordsmiths of Gorsemere, I played Stinking Iris, William Wordsmith’s extremely chatty cleaning lady, in a somewhat unspecific north-eastern accent, Newcastle by way of Sunderland. Here she is, assuming the Wordsmith siblings are lovers: ‘My lips is sealed. Ye cunning pair of lovebirds! No wonder your good man do look pale and peakie. I heard say as this free love do take it out o’ ye.’ In Gloomsbury which ran for five series, I was Vera Sackcloth-Vest, chatelaine of Sizzlinghurst, while Alison Steadman played Ginny Fox, Nigel Planer was Lytton Scratchy and John Sessions was everyone from Llewd George to an extremely deep-voiced Gertrude Klein. Jonathan Coy was Henry Mickleton, my long-suffering husband based, of course, on bisexual Harold Nicolson. Jamie Rix was our director. In the studio John used to fall into a deep sleep except when required to act, which he did ferociously and immediately. We all played several characters: one of the joys of this kind of radio comedy is that, if you’re versatile enough, you can play with yourself (if you see what I mean) and be all the characters in a scene. Alison was particularly flexible at flicking between aggressive lesbian Ginny Fox and Mrs Gosling the housekeeper. I would have played Gloomsbury for ever if allowed.
My other comedy moments have included playing ‘Smelly Photocopying Lady’ in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; the Mother in The Comic Strip Presents. whose chicken soup recipe is desired by the Devil to serve at soirees in hell, and Right Eyeball in Family Guy. My editor was wildly excited to discover I had been in The Young Ones but then disappointed to discover that I couldn’t remember a thing about it. Sadly I still can’t. Lovely Rik Mayall was in it; at the time I thought it was frightfully silly and couldn’t quite understand the fuss. (My student days were more about F. R. Leavis and cock-sucking — though never together.) I’ve even asked Alexei Sayle and Nigel Planer to jog my memory but they can’t remember anything about my being in it either. If anyone out there does, please do let us know.
In 1982, when I got the call to be a part of Blackadder working alongside Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Tim McInnerny, Brian Blessed and Elspet Gray, my interest was piqued. When I heard that I’d be playing the ugly Spanish Infanta, and I’d be working with Jim Broadbent as Don Speekingleesh, an interpreter, I felt I’d been given a present, not just a job.
Blackadder was broadcast in early summer 1983. It was written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson. In my episode, ‘The Queen of Spain’s Beard’, the king (Brian Blessed) decides to cement an alliance between England and Spain, by marrying his second son Edmund Blackadder to the Spanish Infanta. Edmund is excited at the prospect until, that is, my entrance as the Infanta — a short, plump, sexually rampant princess with a monobrow and a hint of hirsutism around the upper lip and chin. I often describe myself as an ‘over-actress’, but I must say my appearance in Blackadder as the irrepressibly lascivious Spanish Infanta is one of the performances in my life which I can truly say is not understated. I delivered all my lines in voluble and babbling Spanish (which I don’t speak), all the while licking my lips and making eyes at a terrified Rowan Atkinson, with his skinny little insect legs in black hose and that awful Henry V bowl-cut hairdo.