Sez Les

Les Dawson was one of that very small band of comedians – now, I think, totally extinct – who were naturally funny. Jimmy James, Robb Wilton, Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper… and Les. They didn’t need to speak to make you laugh: their entire skeletons were made of funny bone.
He had done a TV sketch, a monologue delivered in character as a lavatory attendant in Burnley, and had invented a name for him that would have been something like Latrine Shufflebotham. The plot was about the queer goings-on in the cubicles, and the punch-line was “when anybody comes in here to use the lavatory, it’s like a breath of fresh air for me.”
Granada TV received a letter from an employee of the Parks Cemeteries and Sanitation Department of Burnley Borough Council complaining that he had a name remarkably similar to Dawson’s character and was therefore being lowered in the esteem of right-thinking members of the community. It sounded to me like Granada’s publicist was experiencing a slack day, but I was also having a slack day so went to interview him at Tyne Tees TV, where he was appearing.
I ambushed him in the foyer and conducted the interview, at his insistence, with him standing on the fourth step of the staircase and me still at ground level so we could, as he put it, see eye to eye. There wasn’t much he could say about the obviously invented name, so we went across the road for a drink, and he told me that he had more or less started his career in the working men’s clubs of Tyneside.
In those days the club Concert Secretary ran the entire evening entertainment.
Les remembered sharing the bill at a club in County Durham with a young singer who had appeared on Top Of The Pops. When he noticed that some members of the audience were talking during her performance, the Secretary had switched on his own stage-side microphone and called: “Order! Can we have order round the room, purleeze… Give the little cow a chance… Carry on, pet.”
Shirley Bassey had been presented at a club in Yorkshire with the words: “She’s a bit on the dark side, as you’ll likely notice. But she sings none the worse, for that.”
A famous American quarter was introduced as being “not particularly to my liking, personally, but I was out-voted in committee so give them a big hand.”
The Concert Secretaries’ pomposity and their power was frightening, said Les. He had appeared one night at Felling [on Tyneside], and done his story-telling routine - he didn’t tell “jokes”, as such, but actually composed literature, like: “I was sitting alone last night, deep in contemplation. In awe I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebon void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought...I really must fix the roof on this lavatory.”
But, at Felling, nobody in the audience had laughed.
“In fact, I thought I heard somebody clapping, but it was just a bald man, slapping his head to keep awake,” said Les.
He suspected that the lack of appreciation might not have been unrelated to the fact that the introduction to his act had gone like this:
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, PLEASE. Now, before we start tonight’s entertainment, I know that some of you have noticed that you are eating your pies with plastic spoons. There is a very simple explanation for this. Last night, when the steward counted the cutlery, five spoons were missing.
"Now, spoons do not go missing on their own! Somebody has those spoons.
"And the situation is that, well, if you are going to behave like children, you must expect to be treated like children. I would like to see those spoons returned, please! And now, without further ado, your entertainment for tonight, Mr Les Dawson!”
After his performance, thoroughly humbled, Les had climbed up onto a bar stool and waited for the Concert Secretary to bring the brown envelope that would contain his fee.
“Well, Leslie... we didn’t go down very well tonight, did we?”
“No, Mr Concert Secretary, sir, I am afraid we didn’t.”
“Well, Leslie, I have had them all here, you know. Jewell and Warris, Ted Ray, Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin, Archie Andrews AND Peter Brough. And I wonder, Leslie... you are a young man... are you the sort that might appreciate a little constructive criticism from an old hand in the entertainment business?”
“I am, Mr Concert Secretary, sir. Not only am I that sort of man, I am indeed that very man. Any pearls of wisdom that you might bestow upon me will be treasured by me for life.”
“Well, Leslie,” the great impresario told him. “Your act’s crap.”
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