Les Dawson

Campaign launched to land Les Dawson a posthumous OBE

Les Dawson's friends and family are battling to win him a posthumous OBE. The late comedian's protégé Johnny Vegas is behind a Facebook campaign after it emerged Les was twice shortlisted for an honour but rejected.

Did Les Dawson's love life cost him an OBE?

He was one of the nation's best-loved comics - but although Les Dawson was shortlisted twice for an OBE, he was snubbed both times.

Les Dawson wrote secret romantic novel

Les Dawson secretly wrote a romantic thriller novel under a female nom de plume, it has been revealed.

Video: Bill Bailey: My Comedy Hero... Les Dawson

Bill Bailey reveals that Morecambe & Wise, The Two Ronnies and Billy Connolly had a lasting impact on him growing up, but adds that one of his earliest comedy memories was watching Les Dawson with his parents.

It takes talent to be a successful anti-comic

It all goes back to Les Dawson playing the piano badly I suppose. First, to do this takes skill, admittedly, but, second, to get away with it takes some kind of warmth and humanity.

Why we're watching: Lucy Beaumont

The 29-year-old comedian from Hull on being the new 'Les Dawson'.

A tribute to Les and alter-ego Ada

Twenty years after the death of Les Dawson, Blackpool's Grand theatre is gearing up to stage a play about two of the comedian's most-loved characters.

Les Dawson's funniest faces

Iconic British comedian Les Dawson passed away twenty years ago today - let's celebrate by laughing at some of his best work.

'The thought of Les Dawson coming back as a hologram fries my tiny mind,' was probably the weirdest sentence I heard on TV all weekend. It arrived courtesy of Russell Kane, standing in as a rented talking head on Les Dawson - An Audience With That Never Was (ITV).

I had to check that this wasn't one of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror futuristic dramas because there, on the screen, was the hologrammed Dawson cracking gags as if he was still alive - he died 20 years ago at the age of 62 - while the camera kept cutting, in time-honoured Audience style, to chortling minor celebs in the present day. Debbie McGee, Lorraine Chase, you get the drift.

It was deeply odd. Dawson had been two weeks away from filming his Audience show when he died and this was a well-intentioned way of paying tribute to an old-school comedy great.

But the long-shot hologram sequences of Dawson in action felt uneasily like you were watching him cracking jokes at his own funeral. The Q&A was a belter, mind.

Comedy gold - Les Dawson

Behind the gurning game-show host and mother-in-law jokes was a complex comic with an unexpected past, who captured the hearts of the British TV-watching public.