Perhaps surprisingly, though, for a man who mined laughs from a pit of pessimism, he acknowledged the silver lining of his professional cloud: that his declining fortunes as a performer would give him more time to write, one of his great passions. Also, drama directors were beginning to recognize his qualities as a straight actor. Dawson was more than just a gag machine, and undoubtedly would have used his considerable intelligence to continue his career of creativity one way or another, even if his days as a top-flight comic were numbered.

Which, of course, they weren’t. Had Dawson survived even another decade, he would have undergone a renaissance similar to that of Bob Monkhouse – panel games, the Edinburgh Festival, younger comedians queuing up to drop his name as an influence. He shared one important quality with Monkhouse: a generosity of spirit, born from a lack of professional insecurity. Like Monkhouse, Dawson knew how good he was, and he also realized that if a show got a laugh, it reflected well on everyone involved. Morecambe and Wise had the same attitude. While many top-line performers look after number one to the exclusion of all else, and ensure that the pole they clambered up is well greased to prevent others joining them, Dawson always had time for everyone and didn’t try to keep all of the best lines for himself. Had he lived, he would have been 80 in 2011, the proud father of four children, with the youngest still only in her late teens. It’s impossible not to conclude that he went far, far too soon.

Although his shows are rarely repeated, there remains a surprisingly high level of awareness of his work, alongside an unsurprisingly immense reserve of public love and goodwill towards this great performer and indisputably genuine man. People barely old enough to remember his TV career refer to pulling ‘a Les Dawson face’. Situations are still described as ‘like something out of a Les Dawson monologue’. Standing only five feet six inches when alive, in the afterlife he casts a long, benign shadow over the nation.

Looking at Dawson’s life, what becomes apparent are the contradictions. His carefulness with money was balanced by a great generosity when it came to giving his time. When at home with his family, he favoured tea by the gallon. Away from home, faced with the temptations of the touring life, he could drink anyone under the table. Even though he was always coming up with new comic ideas and material, he had a tendency to fall back on old standbys. Physically fearless and willing to do anything in pursuit of a laugh, he could be a coward when faced with confrontation in his professional life. In short, he was human, and that’s why audiences loved him and continue to love him.

What follows is the story of a comedian who, perhaps more than any other, spoke for the phlegmatic, resigned, sarcastic, glorious British attitude to life.

While all this was going on, 203 miles north of Brixton, at 246 Thornton Street, Collyhurst, in the Blackley sub-district of Manchester North, a boy was born to Julia Dawson, formerly Nolan, and her bricklayer husband Leslie, after whom the child was named. The two-up, two-down house was home not only to the Dawsons, but also to Julia’s parents, David and Ellen Nolan, and her brother, Tom. In other words, as a result of financial strictures, Leslie Dawson senior was forced to live with his in-laws. Leslie junior never had a middle initial and would never use a professional pseudonym, being proud to take his father’s name to the top of the bill at the London Palladium. He would save the fancy stuff for the comic characters he would go on to play, among them the myopic lecher Cosmo Smallpiece, a down-at-heel actor known variously as Quentin Sadsack and Rathbone Mole, drunken conjuror Zebediah Twine, and gurning housewife Ada Shufflebotham.

In later life, Dawson made light of the environment in which he grew up. ‘Manchester in the thirties . . . was a depressed decade and most of the people who lived in our area were decayed,’ he wrote in 1983.² He wasn’t exaggerating for comic effect. Writing about a nostalgic programme Dawson made in 1982, Guardian TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith observed that Dawson’s Mancunian accent had rendered the place of his origin as ‘Colliers’, leading her to wonder if he had been ‘perhaps lacking a home of his own – as W.C. Fields had, when a boy, lived in a hole in the ground’.³ Collyhurst and the ‘cramped room lit by sickly gas’⁴ where Dawson entered the world were better than a hole in the ground, but it was a deeply deprived neighbourhood.

On the day that Dawson was born, the Manchester Guardian’s front page advertised a free lecture by the Reverend H. Allen Job, FRGS, FZS, at Platt Hall Branch Gallery and Museum on ‘The Treasure Island of Tasmania’, while the works of L. S. Lowry were on show at the Salon Gallery in Oxford Road. The adult Dawson would devour lectures and trips to art galleries, but the item of greatest interest to Collyhurst residents in February 1931 would have been the masthead advertisement for Wood Street Mission, asking for ‘food, clothing and footwear’ to pass on to ‘needy children’.⁵

In the mid-thirties, Collyhurst was, according to The Times, ‘the largest single area for slum clearance in any clearance area in the country’.⁶ Today, there is still a th...