Les still shakes off the knocks

Jun 27 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Actor and comedian Les Dennis takes a look at Liverpool in its cultural year, but it’s not all laughs, reports Peter Elson

LES DENNIS walked down memory lane to pay a homage to his old Garston home where he grew up, for a new television series about the city celebrating this cultural year.

He couldn’t resist knocking on the front door, but, in the nature of cold calls, he received the cold shoulder.

“A man answered and said, ‘Oh, it’s you. You’ve come at a bad time, actually’, which served me right, I suppose!” chuckles Les.

Whether this brief encounter will make it onto the screen in the four-part series, Les Dennis’s Liverpool, which begins tonight at 8pm (after Coronation Street), is unconfirmed.

Following hot on the heels of Alexei Sayle’s slightly more cerebral rant for BBC2 about Liverpool, we now have the unashamedly showbiz ITV version, courtesy of Les and interviewees like Alison Steadman, Roger McGough and Ken Dodd.

Or do we?

Aged 54, and one of the youngest of the old troupers in the business, in conversation Les comes across as far more thoughtful, brighter and likeable than any of his tabloid incarnations, or as the long-time host of Family Fortunes.

And what a time he’s had at the hands of the red tops, who for years saw circulation surges whenever he hit the headlines.

The spectacular breakdown of his marriage to actress Amanda Holden, after she indulged in extra unscheduled romantic scenes with her co-star Neil Morrissey, of Men Behaving Badly fame, provided the ultimate tabloid tailor-made tortured love triangle.

Les compounded his cuckolded trauma by sinking into full-on fruitcake mode by next appearing on Celebrity Big Brother and opening his heart – to the chickens kept on set.

Once released from BB, the popular prints kept a daily tally of how long it took him and Holden to meet up again. When they eventually did, it was to split.

“I did have this reflex habit of whenever something dreadful happened of going on with the show,” he says.

“I did this when I suddenly lost my parents and my comedy partner, Dustin Gee. I now realise it would have been much better to take a break and work through my grief or upset. It’s a damaging way of behaving.

“It was an obsession that the show must go on. I went on stage the night my mum died. When my dad died, I was out of contact, working, and didn’t know he was on his deathbed.

“When Dustin died, I went on stage the next day with Jim Bowen in Dustin’s costumes. This is not good for your emotional health.”

Les’s nickname, “Bronco” – because he would never cut his act in working men’s clubs, no matter how badly he was received – indicates a steely doggedness behind the blonde boyish good looks.

A workaholic who sacrificed his first marriage to a fellow Quarrybank pupil, Lynne, through his determination to put career and himself first, he appears to have stabilised with his third wife Claire and new daughter (he has a son from his first marriage).

Tonight’s show is as much about Les’s personal journey as it is about the city’s passage through the stormy decades to reach the present cultural landfall.

“It’s the Liverpool of my beginnings in entertainment and theatre. In the first show, we look at the art and culture of the city and go to the Bluecoat Arts Centre and Chambré Hardman photographs, which are absolutely fascinating.

“I’ve got an excellent producer, Ged Clark, who read my autobiography as a guide to my roots, and it’s been a labour of love between us and the cameraman, Ian.

“The second show looks at theatre as, when I was 16-17-years-old, I went to Alan Dosser’s Everyman Theatre productions, and found them absolutely brilliant.

“They filmed me doing the press call for Cinderella at the Empire, so it ends appropriately on the note of pantomime.”

The third programme is about music and football. Les’s father, although an Evertonian, played for Liverpool FC in the 1930s. The new great hope for the family is Nathan Peat, Les’s nine-year-old great-nephew, who has signed for Everton.

In the midst of recording, Les’s wife gave birth to their baby daughter, which he attended – very much a change from his past behaviour.

“All the way through filming, I kept asking people what is it that makes Liverpool unique and everyone generally replies it’s about the melting pot of the city.

“We’ve lived though a lot of darker times in the 1980s, and I think we lost our confidence as a city and when that happens we use self-deprecating humour. Now we have a new confidence.

“That’s what I have in common with Liverpool. Much in my life has gone down, and I’ve bounced back in the face of adversity with a comic spin.

“If someone asked what was my greatest achievement, I’d reply that it’s still being around in a changing business, as a lot of my contemporaries aren’t.”

He describes a BBC lunch where the comic old guard and the new alternatives glared at each over the table, and says: “I was part of the end of variety in summer seasons with Jimmy Tarbuck, Frankie Howerd and Arthur Askey.

“This was real traditional entertainment that we don’t have any more. But I hope I have used those skills that they taught me to negotiate the ever-changing, precarious pathway through showbusiness.”

There was never any hesitation in choosing an entertainment career, other than art school, which he doesn’t think he was good enough to have done.

“When I told my careers officer, he said, ‘Hmm, wouldn’t you be better off in the Navy?’,” laughs Les. Instead, he plugged away at the clubs, honing his act.

“It was the world of the Wheel Tappers & Shunters’ Social, or as seen on Phoenix Nights. I stayed on to ensure I got my money.

“I’ll never forget doing a noonday show at the White House Club, in Washington, Sunderland. I walked on to the sound of my own footsteps while they read their papers.

“People threw pennies on the stage, I quipped that I needed VAT as well. At the end, I got a round of applause just for surviving.

“They were good training grounds, but you would come out a bit aggressive as I found when I went into theatre. There the audience come simply for an evening’s show and you don’t have to take them by force within 12 minutes.”

The third of five children, the family matriarch is his sister, Marg, who is seven years older. He says: “When I was having the hard time recently, I couldn’t have got through without chats with her.

“My elder brother Roddy died when he was 14 months old, before I was born, and when I came along I think my mum Winnie thought she’d been given Roddy again.

“I always felt that I was his double and felt that I had to be my mum’s good boy and strive hard. My mother was into entertainment and, through sheer cheek and determination, had auditioned at the Empire.

“She ran all the way home to Garston to tell her mum, who replied that she was starting at the bobbins’ works the next day. So she stopped her achieving her ambition, but she passed it to me.

“When I went back to Quarrybank School and watched some of the kids perform, one was like the new Billy Elliott. A teacher said, there you go, you might end up rich and famous like Mr Dennis.

“I said ‘Please don’t want to be rich and famous, you should want to be fulfilled’. You’ve got to work very hard for anything that lasts.”

And, on the above evidence, Les has certainly paid his dues.

LES DENNIS’S Liverpool is on ITV tonight, at 8pm

peter.elson