Les Dawson (Leslie Dawson)

Leslie Dawson, known to generations simply as Les Dawson, was an English comedian, actor, writer, presenter and pianist whose deadpan face, curmudgeonly charm and gloriously bad piano playing made Britain laugh for four decades. Born in Collyhurst, Manchester, the only child of a bricklayer and an Irish-descent mother, Les tried his hand at the parcels department of the Manchester Co-op, journalism on the Bury Times and an electrician's apprenticeship before National Service with the 2nd Dragoon Guards in Germany. Restless for a writer's life, he moved to Paris — where, to survive, he played piano in a brothel. The laughs came when he began playing deliberately, magnificently badly: 'all the wrong notes in exactly the right order.' Behind the dour mask was a genuinely gifted concert-standard pianist — the joke only worked because he could really play. Disillusioned with show business at 36, he was saved by a single appearance on Opportunity Knocks in 1967. From there came Sez Les, Dawson's Weekly, The Les Dawson Show, Listen to Les on BBC Radio 2, and the panel-show sparkle of Jokers Wild — until a whole new generation met him as the wry, supercilious host of Blankety Blank from 1984 to 1990. With Roy Barraclough he created Cissie and Ada, two gossipy Lancashire ladies who became one of the best-loved double acts on television. He wrote novels, served as King Rat of the Grand Order of Water Rats in 1985, and told his second wife Tracy: 'Always remind them — I was a writer too.' He married Margaret Rose Plant in 1960 and lost her to cancer in 1986; his marriage to Tracy in 1989 brought him late, radiant happiness and his daughter Charlotte. He passed away suddenly in Whalley Range, Manchester, on 10 June 1993, aged 62 — just after a final television appearance singing 'I Got You Babe' with a delighted stranger on Surprise, Surprise. His resting place is at Lytham Park Cemetery and Crematorium, Lytham St Annes, where a bronze statue of him now sits grinning in the gardens. He is remembered for a lugubrious face that hid a warm heart, and for proving that the saddest-looking man in show business was having the time of his life.