Les Dawson

Les Dawson's daughter aims for Miss Manchester title

The daughter of comedy legend Les Dawson is hoping to represent the city he loved - by winning the title of Miss Manchester.

James Casey obituary

James Casey, who has died aged 88, was the son of the gravel-voiced comedian Jimmy James and produced the long-running radio comedy show The Clitheroe Kid; he also discovered the comic Les Dawson.

Are you sure you're Les Dawson's daughter?

When a girl boasts of looking like Les Dawson, modelling would not seem the most likely career option.

Mrs Brown's Boys isn't so much a sitcom as a full frontal assault on the senses. It is raucous, vulgar, sentimental, loud, infantile, audacious, irreverent, outrageous, inane, frequently frustrating and often hilarious. The jokes come thick and fast, with several circumventing quality control en route and at least one - a naked hand being described as "Sooty in the nude" - deserving a place in the annals of comedy history.

Star and writer Brendan O'Carroll dons drag for the title role - an Irish mammy forever interfering in her adult children's lives. He/she is on screen throughout and it's fair to describe the performance as all-embracing, leaving the supporting cast with little to do but stand, stare and sometimes suppress giggles.

There is an unapologetically old-fashioned, almost music hall, feel to proceedings, with O'Carroll embracing the proud cross-dressing traditions of Les Dawson, Old Mother Riley and the Two Ronnies, but with added profanity.

In another post-modern twist the show deliberately assumes all the conventions of the traditional studio-based TV sitcom, then takes great pleasure in subverting them. Mrs Brown crosses over sets, talks to the camera and even admonishes the live audience for rendering a sympathetic sigh ("It's a man in a dress, for feck's sake").

Episode one left me fully entertained but slightly shell-shocked, harbouring serious doubts that it can sustain such a high level of manic energy for an entire series. We shall just have to wait and see if Mrs Brown wins our hearts, or wears us out.

A cute kitten being pecked to death by a robin on a Christmas card would have been funnier than this jumble of a play by Andy Lynch (again), here assisted by Johnny Vegas. Vegas also played Les Dawson. The plot concerned Dawson being a surprise appointment to host the BBC's top Saturday evening attraction of yesteryear, Blankety Blank. The character action was between Dawson and a disapproving BBC executive, played by Nicholas Parsons. It sounded like a bundle of unwashed insecurities being laundered in public as well as a waste of the serious talents of Nicholas Parsons, the best straight man in the business.

Johnny Vegas used to be the ubiquitous clown of the moment but, having been promoted as the most unpredictable man in light entertainment, became slightly too unpredictable and now seems required to attempt reinvention as a character actor. The acute afternoon play he co-wrote, Chequebook and Pen, conjured up the ghost of Les Dawson, with Vegas doing an impassioned impression of the comedian in his awkward Blankety Blank days. Nicholas Parsons, who happily seems to have forgotten where self-parody lies, was the dame of the piece, playing himself as a devious game-show host rival.

Vegas's play discovered a moral of its own in the compromises Dawson was forced to make to become a prime-time star; in a bravura closing argument, he put the case that creativity had nothing to do with packaging or consumers but was all about "doing what you believe is right and doing it your way". Try telling that to Simon Cowell.

Does that title ring a bell? Can you hear Les Dawson saying it as he presented the humble prizes on Blankety Blank? This play, starring Johnny Vegas, co-written by him with Andrew Lynch, imagines how the BBC might have engaged the great Les (played by Vegas) back in the 1980s, to host the prime-time show. Nicholas Parsons plays Farson, embodiment of traditional forces at the BBC, opponent of all the comic subversion Les stood for, his nemesis. It's fiction. How I wish the late Mike Craig, comedy producer, were still around to discuss it on Front Row.

All Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan do in this series is tease each other over expensive lunches, bicker a bit and do silly voices. How hard can that be? But after a while you realise there's more to this banter than meets the eye. It's impossible to tell how much is improvised and how much scripted, but when they go off on one of their comic riffs, it hardly matters. Tonight's subjects under discussion include Abba song The Winner Takes It All, film roles they didn't get (or were cut out of) and Woody Allen versus Les Dawson.

We're almost at the end of this unique comedy creation, which serves up English countryside to the tune of top level bickering from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon over a series of very expensive lunches.

Part of the fun is working out how much of their not very polite and utterly random dinner party conversations have been thought out in advance, and how much is just flowing off the top of their heads as the food gets shovelled in.

Tonight, in the Nidderdale Valley, they're riffing on an Abba song, the comparative merits of Les Dawson and Woody Allen, and they learn more about limestone than they could possibly ever want to. Yes, it's all very moreish.

If, like me, you enjoy watching tributes to dead British comedians, you'll be familiar with their essential ingredients. The crème de la crème is a contribution from veteran comedy writer Barry Cryer, who knew and worked will all the greats and whose ubiquity demands the question: who will programme-makers turn to when Cryer passes on? Anecdotes about Les Dawson don't grow on trees, you know.

Other hardy perennials include promiscuous use of the word "consummate", usually in conjunction with "entertainer", "timing" or, in less guarded eulogies, "alcoholic" and explorations of private sadness behind the public mask. All were present and correct in The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse.

Featuring candid contributions from people who knew him, rather than the usual roster of quacking heads, this documentary offered a fair and balanced account of a man who polarised public opinion throughout his long career. To some he was merely a smarmy game-show host, the epitome of shiny showbiz insincerity, whereas others recognised him for the imperial comedy craftsman he was.

Though not without his faults Monkhouse emerged from this profile as a shy, sensitive, bright and introspective man who carefully delineated between his public and private personas.

More self-aware than many gave him credit for, Monkhouse was hurt by accusations of insincerity, arguing that his gushing over-enthusiasm, especially in the presence of fellow comedians, was caused by genuine admiration for their talent. Monkhouse was, to his credit, an unabashed comedy nerd, as evinced by his support of younger comedians, his sprawling personal archive of films and TV shows (curiously not mentioned in the programme) and his famous hand-written joke books, containing thousands of gags on almost every conceivable subject, which made headlines when they were stolen in 1995.

That Monkhouse was devastated by their theft and tearfully overjoyed when they were returned, tells you everything you need to know about his dedication to the craft. He took comedy seriously, as only someone who really understands it can. Cryer made the point that Monkhouse wasn't an instinctive comedian, but rather he trained himself to become one through voracious study of the art. Perhaps that's why many thought him lacking in natural charm.

Very much a brisk skip through his life and work, this was nevertheless a fitting tribute. Neither sycophantic nor hagiographic, it doubtless would've pleased the man himself.