TV review: Les Dawson: An Audience With That Never Was

The An Audience With . . . series of shows provides the kind of accolade only the very best entertainers, at the top of their game, achieve, as artists or acts appear on stage in front of hundreds of their peers in the world of showbiz.

So it seemed only natural that after many decades of entertaining us on the box, the curtains were due to open on Les Dawson's time to shine in a show of his own.

But in a cruel twist of fate, just two weeks before recording the show, Les died at just 59 and left an audience of celebrities wondering what might have been.

Move forward to the digital age and now, quite literally, 'gentleman, we can rebuild him, we have the technology' as Oscar Goldman might have put it in the Six Million Dollar Man.

From watching the show, which was quite extensively billed as the chance to see Les performing in front of the audience (with Lionel Blair's reaction to the spectacle, just a little over the top) it was quite obvious that only about 15 minutes' worth of material with Les actually performing were in the can.

So we had to endure a plethora of sycophantic celebs gushing at how he will never be replaced, with his timeless comedy, a national treasure, etc, which, to be honest, we all knew anyway. Mind you, it was nice to see some classic clips of his performances down the years.

Particular highlights were the Cissie and Ada duologues, featuring effortless comic timing from both Les and Roy Barraclough.

It all felt a bit second division though, compared to the, albeit 20-year-old, new material that holographic Les had for us. And those few minutes we had, with him shining in an electric blue suit, with a sometimes shaky outline and even shakier sounding voice, were lovely to witness.

In one of the final 'screenings' and remembering that he would have been rehearsing it perhaps in front of cameras, with just a crew as an audience, he still allowed himself a stifled chuckle of recognition, sat down at the piano, knowing that he would have been getting a big laugh after one of his brilliant pieces of finely-crafted prose.

And that was Les, he knew his audience and his audience knew him. He was up there with the rest of them, Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper and Peter Cook, and we were left in no doubt from the tributes of his fellow entertainers, old and young.

One of the surprising aspects of the show was to see his daughter Charlotte, who is now a model, and was only a few months old when Les died. It was quite moving to watch Les's widow Tracy with Charlotte.

As for the jokes, well, perhaps they weren't completely new material, but they felt new. He started off with a ramble about family and growing up, how the midwife had to slap his mother when he was born to stop her screaming. Then there was mention of his japester Dad, who was one for playing games, although he didn't always enjoy the one where his Dad made him wear antlers and told him to run through the forest.

Fans of Les will never get tired of hearing jokes or lines he has repeated many times over, because, as Frank Carson used to say, 'it's the way he tells 'em'.

The technical achievement of having Les in front of us once again did seem quite seamless until a close-up for the end section, when every now and again, his face would distort slightly. It would be interesting to know what they had to do in order to put this all together. Perhaps that could have been used to fill time in the programme, instead of the clips and endless celebs.

All in all though, it was nice to welcome an old friend back into my living room and the success of the show may now have producers of other programmes from years ago rooting through to see what may not have seen the light of day – Terry and June, the out-takes? No, maybe not . . .

Graeme Andrew