Ken Dodd

With his goofy teeth, wild hair, tickling stick and Diddymen friends, Ken Dodd was the last entertainer in the great British  musical hall tradition.

He was born in 1927 in the house he lived in all his life in Liverpool’s Knotty Ash - and area often mentioned in his act with its mythical jam butty mines.

He caught the showbiz bug early - as a schoolboy he bought a mail order book on how to become a ventriloquist, His dad bought him a dummy and his first act was born.

After first combining club work with his job as a salesmen, he turned professional age of 26 -starting out on a career that was to last more than 60 years.

He appeared frequently on tv and radio, but his first love was theatre and he became legendary for his marathon performances - five hours wasn’t unusual, with his carefully-prepared one-liners interspersed with his hit songs - in a parallel singing career he had 18 top 40 hits, including a number one with Tears and his signature song Happiness.

There was a brief moment of darkness in his life when he was charged with tax evasion in 1989, but he was acquitted after a three week trial.

Doddy threw himself back into his work - with a season at the London Palladium that lasted from Easter to Christmas.

With his career still going at full throttle he was knighted at the age of 89, a year before his death, for services and entertainment and charity.

His passing in 2018 brought fulsome tributes: his fellow-comic Jimmy Tarbuck said he was the greatest stage comedian this country has ever seen.