Leslie Dawson (2 February 1931 – 10 June 1993) was an English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and pianist. He was known for his deadpan style, curmudgeonly persona, musical routines, and jokes about his mother-in-law and wife.
Early life
Les Dawson was born in Collyhurst, Manchester, on 2 February 1931,[2] the only child of bricklayer Leslie Dawson (2 August 1905 - 10 April 1970) and Julia Nolan (14 January 1908 - 29 September 1957) who was of Irish descent.[3] His first job was in the parcels department of the Manchester Co-op.[4] He worked briefly as a journalist on the Bury Times.[4]
Career
Early in life, Dawson wrote poetry and kept it secret. It was not expected that someone of his working class background would have literary ambitions. In a BBC Television documentary, he spoke of his love for canonical figures in English literature, in particular the 19th-century essayist Charles Lamb, whose florid style influenced Dawson's. He did, moreover, appear with The Nelson Players in Nelson, Lancashire as Mr. Justice Wainwright and Carter, chief clerk to Sir Wilfrid Robarts Q.C. in Agatha Christie's play Witness for the Prosecution in December 1956.
Dawson wrote in his autobiography that he had a job as a pianist in a Parisian brothel.[5] Making a living as a pianist evolved into comedy when he got laughs from deliberately bad piano-playing by playing "all the wrong notes in exactly the right order"[6] and complaining to the audience. He made his television debut on the talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1967 and worked as a comic on British television for the rest of his life.
Television series in which he appeared included the panel gameJokers Wild (1969–73) hosted by Barry Cryer, Sez Les (1969–76) and Dawson's Weekly (1975), all for Yorkshire Television. After joining the BBC, his TV projects were The Dawson Watch (1979–80), written by Andy Hamilton and Terry Ravenscroft, The Les Dawson Show (1978–89), written by Terry Ravenscroft, and the quiz show Blankety Blank, which he presented from 1984 until its cancellation in 1990. Dawson starred in Listen to Les on BBC Radio 2 in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1991, Dawson starred in the BBC television production of Nona, an adaptation of the 1977 play La Nona ("Grandma") by Roberto Cossa for the Performance series. Performing in drag, he was cast as a 100-year old, compulsive eater in a Buenos Aires household.[8]
Dawson was the subject of This Is Your Life on two occasions, in December 1971 when Eamonn Andrews surprised him on Opportunity Knocks,[citation needed] and again 21 years later, in what would be one of his last television appearances, when he was surprised by Michael Aspel on stage at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, at the curtain call of the pantomime Dick Whittington in December 1992.[citation needed] His final TV appearance was on the LWT series Surprise, Surprise hosted by Cilla Black, in which he sang a comic rendition of "I Got You Babe" with a woman from the audience who wanted to sing with him. The episode was aired shortly after his death.
Dawson was a heavy smoker and drinker. When not working he would often drink a bottle of whisky and smoke 50 cigarettes a day.[9] Dawson was initiated into the famous show business fraternity, the Grand Order of Water Rats and served as that order's "King Rat" in 1985.[citation needed]
Dawson also wrote novels.[10] He told his second wife, Tracy, "Always remind them – I was a writer too."[11]
Routines and image
His characteristic routines featured Roy Barraclough and Dawson as elderly women, Cissie Braithwaite and Ada Shufflebotham. Barraclough's character Cissie had pretensions of refinement and corrected Ada's malapropisms or vulgar expressions.[12] As authentic characters of their day, they spoke some words aloud but mouthed others, particularly those pertaining to bodily functions and sex. The characters were based on those Les Dawson knew in real life. He explained that this mouthing of words (or "mee-mawing") was a habit of Lancashiremillworkers communicating over the loud noise of looms, then resorted to in daily life for indelicate subjects. To further portray the reality of northern, working-class women, Cissie and Ada would sit with folded arms, occasionally adjusting their bosoms by a hoist of the forearms. Many Cissie and Ada sketches were written by Terry Ravenscroft. This was also typical of pantomime dame style, an act copied from his hero, Norman Evans and his act Over the Garden Wall. Les Dawson was portly and often dressed in John Bull costume. He introduced to his BBC television shows a dancing group of fat ladies called the Roly Polys. Dawson's style as a comic was world-weary, lugubrious and earthy.
He was a talented pianist but developed a gag in which he played a familiar piece such as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and then introduced hideously wrong notes (yet not destroying the tune) without appearing to realise, smiling unctuously and relishing the accuracy and soul of his own performance.
Having broken his jaw in a boxing match, he could pull grotesque faces by pulling his jaw over his upper lip. This is described in the first volume of Dawson's autobiography A Clown Too Many.[13]
Personal life and death
Dawson was married to his first wife, Margaret, from 25 June 1960 until her death on 15 April 1986 from cancer. They had three children: Julie, Pamela and Stuart.
Dawson nearly died in February 1985 from a failing prostate gland, complicated by blood poisoning.[14] On 3 September 1988, he suffered a heart attack in Blackpool and spent nine days in hospital.[15]
He married his second wife, Tracy Roper, on 6 May 1989; she was 17 years younger.[3][16] They had a daughter, Charlotte, who was born on 3 October 1992.[17]
He died suddenly, aged 62, on 10 June 1993 from a heart attack during treatment for a heart complaint at St Joseph's Hospital in Manchester.[3]
Legacy
On 23 October 2008, 15 years after his death, a bronze statue by Graham Ibbeson was unveiled by his widow Tracy and daughter Charlotte in the ornamental gardens next to the pier in St Anne's-on-Sea, Lancashire, where Dawson lived for many years.[18]
In the Comedians' Comedian, a three-hour programme on UK's Channel 4 on 1 January 2005, Dawson was 37th in the top 50 comedians of all time, voted by fellow comedians and business insiders.[19]
The BBC broadcast, on BBC Two, The Many Faces of Les Dawson, a retrospective, on Christmas Eve 2011.
On 1 June 2013 ITV broadcast Les Dawson: An Audience with That Never Was. The programme featured a Pepper's ghost projection of Dawson, presenting content for a 1993 edition of An Audience with... to be hosted by Dawson but unused due to his death two weeks before recording.[20] The show served as a tribute and featured celebrities including Bruce Forsyth, Cilla Black, Terry Wogan and Ken Dodd.[21] Also among the audience were Dawson's widow Tracy and daughter Charlotte.
On 10 February 2014, the BBC reported that Dawson's daughter Charlotte had found a 110-page "unpublished story of love and mystery, titled An Echo of Shadows, [that] was written under the name Maria Brett-Cooper…".[22]
In 2020, Les Dawson's early years in Paris were portrayed in Sky Arts' series Urban Myths in the episode Les Dawson's Parisienne Adventure, with Mark Addy as the older Les and John Bradley as young Les.[23]
In 2022, Jon Culshaw portrayed Dawson as part of The Edinburgh Assembly’s Fringe programme.[24]
Books
Fiction:
Card for the Clubs (1974)
The Spy Who Came... (1976)
Cosmo Smallpiece Guide to Male Liberation (1979)
The Amy Pluckett Letters (1982) / Hitler Was My Mother-in-Law (1984)*
