Ken Dodd is such a pain in the backside

John’s bought tickets for the Ken Dodd Happiness Show at Darlington Civic Theatre on October 9 and, having then stumbled across a 2006 column on another of Doddy’s Darlo discombobulations, doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The fact of the matter is – how may this be put? – that the Nabob Of Knotty Ash, now 87, does tend to go on a bit. In 2006 the curtain finally came down at 12 50am, though it wasn’t as if he hadn’t warned them.

He’d said at the 7.30pm start that the show might last seven-and-a-half hours – “I’m not kidding, I have a reputation to keep up” – and that the audience might be eligible for attendance allowance.

Every seat was occupied, nonetheless – “a tribute to superglue,” said Doddy.

John’s still uncomfortable. “My cricket chum Kevin Mohan and I have been in training all summer, sitting on plastic seats for hours on end watching Durham at Chester-le-Street, but 12.50am is a bit of a worry. I thought our training programme was pretty good until I read your column. Do I need to take aspirins and wear flight socks, for example?”

Though the jokes were nearly as old as the indefatigable gentleman telling them – “When you get home, pour some ice cubes down your wife’s nightie, she always wanted a chest freezer” – the column had quite enjoyed the evening.

“If only,” we concluded, “sitting through the Ken Dodd Show wasn’t such a pain in the backside.”

Also at the Civic on October 8, Dodd’s billed as “a comedian of unrivalled legendary status, an icon and a national treasure.” A theatre spokesman is unable to say how ticket sales are going; Doddy himself is less reticent – though he denies that his shows overrun.

“I simply give value for money and when I’m enjoying myself on stage– as I always do in Darlington – then I know that the audience is enjoying itself, too.”

Mind, adds the plumptious one, John Maughan might be advised to bring a flask and a packed supper, too.

HEADED “War and Pease”, last week’s column told of Flying Officer Peter Pease’s death in the Battle of Britain and of Professor John Oakley’s attempts to commemorate him.

They included a bronze plaque in Middleton Tyas parish church, near Scotch Corner, where Pease’s funeral was held with full military honours on September 27, 1945.

Though ecclesiastical enactment had threatened to crash land the idea, a fitting home for the plaque has now been found.

John, a semi-retired law professor at the University of California, had a meeting last week with Adrian Speir, who owns much of the land around the church.

Mr Speir has not only offered to pay for the burnishing of Flying Officer Pease’s image on the plaque, but to build a stone wall, just yards from the church gates and from Pease’s last resting place, in which to put it.

“We are certain that we need not now bother the church with the burden of seeking its approval,” says Prof Oakley.

Peter Pease, just 22 when he died and tipped for very high office, was a member on one of the North-East’s great families. Last Sunday at noon, Prof Oakley and others laid flowers on his grave before he flew home to a wife, two daughters, a marmalade cat and to write a book on his heroes.

He’ll be back again for the unveiling of the memorial plaque – by which time, says John, they’ll also have spelt “honour” correctly.

IN order to raise a glass to that little victory, a village pub lunch with John Oakley elicits the further information that he was at law school at Yale with Hilary Roddam. Her future husband, William Jefferson Clinton, arrived a year later. Both remain his friends. “He’s a really genuine guy,” says Prof Oakley, “except in the zipper department, of course.”

BACK to the Shoulder of Mutton in Middleton Tyas on Friday evening to witness Charlie Albrighton, a smashing young lady, lose her luxuriant black hair in support of Macmillan Cancer’s “Brave the Shave” initiative.

Charlie, 26, is the pub’s trainee manager. She broke down in tears after topping £1,000, should finally have made £1,500 – a damsel without this tress.

Though several of her friends are fighting cancer – one on her third chemotherapy course simply in the hope of seeing her daughter through school – Charlie’s aim was clear. “It’s not for anybody, it’s for everybody,” she said.

She’d organised everything, asked for a few minutes to herself before the crucial cut – "just to say goodbye" – reckoned that she’d have a bob within a year and be back to shoulder-length sheen within three.

Boyfriends? “If they worry about my hair then the relationship isn’t worth it,” she said.

The only other concern is that the (very) amateur photographs taken in a pretty low-lit room won’t do the lass justice. “You still look gorgeous, Charlie,” someone told her and so, bless her, she did.

THE Peases, of course, were much involved in the coming of the railways – an association recalled at an event in Witton Park community centre on Sunday, 190 years to the sunblessed morning since wagons were rope-hauled from the pit out the back on the Stockton and Darlington’s epochal first journey.

Bolckow and Vaughan’s ironworks followed apace, quickly to become Europe’s biggest. The Boro burgeoned in their blast: Bolckow and Vaughan, said Sir Edward Pease, were Middlesbrough’s Romulus and Remus.

Formerly the fulcrum of County Durham’s Category D campaign, Witton Park is much changed and, still, much loved. There’s talk of a play about the village and a statue by the chap who created Tommy on Seaham sea front.

Sunday’s event marked the publication of Gerald Slack’s history of the S&D and, in particular, of the first five miles from Witton Park down to the Masons Arms crossing at Shildon, where Locomotion No 1 joined on and joined in. Though the book is itself called The First Five Miles, Gerald had a confession. “It’s actually 5.8 miles, but it didn’t scan as well.”

It was a very enjoyable occasion. Ten years hence, only the scale may be rather grander.

...AND finally, reference in last week’s column to the curious phrase “All my eye and Peggy Martin” – sometimes Betty Martin – prompts a note from Shirley Wilson in Brandon, near Durham.

Her uncle, she recalls, died on the Burma Railway though his family still believed him alive when, three months after his death, a plain postcard arrived with the message “I am well. Love, Tom.”

A great batch of cards had been delivered at the same time, it transpired, including one with the message “All my eye and Betty Martin” which alerted relatives to less comfortable realities.

Thinking it a reference to the poor chap’s girl friend, the Japanese censors let it through.