Forget The Beatles. Forget The Mersey Sound. Liverpool’s biggest star during the 1960s was the comedian Ken Dodd. Oh, yes!. So great was Doddy’s fame that his only rival was The Beatles.

Dodd was a box-office smash at clubs and theaters across the country, had hit TV shows (including the brilliant kids series Ken Dodd and The Diddymen, and had a recording career that saw him out-selling most pop bands, achieving nineteen hit singles, with his hit track “Tears” becoming the biggest-selling single in the U.K. for 1965. Indeed, after The Beatles, Dodd is Britain’s biggest-selling pop star of the 1960s.

Ken Dodd was born in the Liverpool district of Knotty Ash in November 1927. He started his career (rather nervously) as a Music Hall comedian in 1954. By the early sixties, Dodd was the biggest comic in the country. With his electric-shock hairstyle, buck teeth and tickling sticks, having Doddy on any bill guaranteed a truly “tattifelarius” evening, which would leave the audience “absolutely discumknockerated.”

In 1964, Dodd had an unprecedented and record-breaking 42-week sell-out season at the London Palladium. It was also during the Swinging Sixties that Doddy earned his place in the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s longest ever joke-telling session, where he told 1,500 jokes in three-and-a-half hours (which works out at 7.14 jokes per minute), at a performance in Liverpool.

While The Beatles split, and the pop world went Punk, Disco, Acid and Grunge, Doddy continued his exuberant comic career, with sell-out tours, and long summer seasons at the seaside resort of Blackpool.

Now, incredibly, 86-years-of-age, Doddy still tours with his (Happiness Shows), which can still last up to five hours.

In 1976, Ken Dodd gave presenter Michael Barratt a personal tour of his hometown Liverpool for the magazine programme Nationwide. It’s a delightful snapshot of one of the U.K. most loved comedians.
 

Bonus: Ken Dodd and The Beatles, November 1963.
 
A bonus selection of some of Ken Dodd’s best selling records.
 

 

 

 

 
With thanks to NellyM.