2/2/31 - this day in history

[Guy Profumo]

Birth of Les Dawson

[Snake Plissken]

A genuinely hilarious man. ITV3 often repeats a rather odd "Audience with..." with Les as a hologram doing The Gags and I occasionally sit down and watch a master at work. Also the first person I remember completely subverting the slick game show host trope during his Blankety Blank run.

There is a great biography of the man by Louis Barfe https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...s-barfe-review - and the second comment on that link is glorious.

We were so poor, one Xmas me dad gave me an empty box. He told me it was an Action Man deserter.

[Southport Zeb]

At Lime Street station in Liverpool there is a statue of Ken Dodd. Next to it there is another statue, which for some time I thought was Les Dawson in his Ada persona. Eventually I saw the plaque on the statue and discovered it was actually former MP Bessie Braddock.

[Kevin S]

[Kevin S]

Though possibly more like Dawson than the actual Dawson statue.

[Nefertiti2]

with Shirley Bassey

[Sits]

Les on the piano was and still is one of life's joys.

[Gerontophile]

"Nothing but love"

[Snake Plissken]

with Shirley Bassey

I've woken up in a slightly grumpy mood, clicked that link and by the end tears were streaming down my face.

[treibeis]

When I was at primary school, a trainee teacher once sent a group of us to the headmistress's office because we kept pulling Les Dawson faces.

"Why are you here, you ghastly little boys?"
"Miss Taylor sent us to get done, Miss, because ... because ... because, Miss, we kept doing Les Dawson faces, Miss."
"What do you mean, 'You kept doing Les Dawson faces'?"

All of us then pulled a Les Dawson face. The headmistress then pissed herself laughing.

The cow still gave us lines, though. "I must not pull Les Dawson faces in Miss Taylor's lessons", a hundred times each.

[Sits]

[Various Artist]

Thanks for starting the thread Guy, and to Nef for linking that video:

with Shirley Bassey

One of the first comedians I remember watching and loving on TV, but alas he died when I was only just about 14. Like Snake, I've seen that An Audience With... with the hologrammatic Les a couple of times, which is really quite a startling thing (there's an audible gasp from the audience of famous faces, so many of them friends and admirers of his, when 'he' first appears) – and it's sometimes paired in the schedules with a programme The Many Faces of Les Dawson, which first made me realise just what a combination of talents he had. It wasn't just the deadpan delivery, or the timing, or the brilliant bad piano, or even Cissie & Ada, but he had a really dextrous way with words too. There's a fantastic bid in the middle of that video where he lets you see it for just a moment, then of course undercuts it ruthlessly a moment later:

I went to see my parents the other week; it was the neighbourhood I used to play as a kid. Grimy warehouses severing the skyline with dissipated profiles. Narrow, sup-bearded[?] tenements gazing eyeless onto litter-pitted streets. Nuns going round in twos mugging everybody."

What a joy he was, indeed.