Ken Bruce

In this, the first serious biographical assessment of Ken Dodd since the death of the feather duster-wielding Liverpudlian in spring 2018, respected historian of British light entertainment Louis Barfe charts the life and extraordinarily long comedic career of a man whose career straddled the very tail end of variety and the golden age of television comedy. When Dodd died, social media divided into two camps: those who wondered what all the fuss was about, and those who had seen him in live performance. Barfe argues that Dodd was the last of the great variety acts, a creator of superb absurd vulgarity who was at his best not on the small screen but on stage, where his act—"a rolling boil of cumulative humour"—delighted his audiences across seven decades. This is the definitive life of the man called "the last great music-hall entertainer," and a true British eccentric, who beat his audiences into submission with stand-up shows that stretched into the wee small hours of the morning.