MEET THE CURATOR

A laughter-filled exhibition, celebrating one of the UK’s best-loved and most influential comedians, Sir Ken Dodd, opens at the Museum of Liverpool on 9 September

Karen O’Rourke, curator of sport, music and performance at National Museums Liverpool, takes us behind the scenes of Happiness! ahead of next month’s big launch 

How did the idea for this new exhibition first come about?

When we were putting together the Museum of Liverpool, we consulted with about 10,000 people, and quite a few of those were people like Ken and other high-level Liverpool people.

From 2011 onwards, we worked closely with Ken and talked to him about different things. We did an exhibition with him in 2013 called By Jove, which was a photographic exhibition in partnership with the photographer Steven Shakeshaft. There was talk of doing another object-based exhibition with Ken before he passed away. That conversation transferred to Ken’s widow, Lady Anne.

I was brought in once there was a concept and it was my job to make the concept work for the space that we’ve got. I was given a list of the sorts of stories that we wanted to tell and then it was up to me to break that down. The first thing I had to do is identify all of the objects.

At one point, we had about 250 potential objects that we could use. That was never going to happen because we don’t have the space, so I had to work through them and figure out which ones would illustrate a great story. We are at around 150 objects for the exhibition now, and that ranges from Ken’s huge red coat right down to tickets people kept after seeing him either on stage or TV. A lot of it belonged to Ken or comes from his private collection, but some of it is already with the Museum of Liverpool.

How did you decide what you wanted the exhibition to show about Ken and his life – both on and off stage?

We need to make sure each of our exhibitions has a different kind of twist to them. With Ken, there’s a lot out there in the public space; there are books, photographs and plenty of footage… I’ve watched an awful lot of it!

We wanted to tell some of those more private stories but we are a national and international museum, so of course, we have to tell that bigger story too. We’ve divided the exhibition between his public persona and behind-the-scenes stuff. We’ve looked a little bit at his faith, his relationship with Anne and his charity work, which he was doing right from day one. We’ve also examined the relationship he had with his fans and the merchandising side of things, which was never meant to be a money-making scheme, it was always seen by Ken and Anne as a way of enhancing the experience of seeing a show.

Picture by Gareth Jones

On the flip side of that, we’ve got some letters from fans who travelled around the country to see him, including one from a lady whose mother passed away and Ken immediately responded to say what a lovely lady she was. We’re trying to capture that public side of Ken but also what his ethos was and where it
came from.

I recently had a few pages of Ken’s notebook spread out on a table and someone said to me: ‘What’s that?’, and I was like: ‘It’s the inside of Ken Dodd’s head!’. I guess part of the exhibition is just trying to do a little bit of that – pull a bit of the inside of Ken’s head out. But also, the most important thing is we’ve got to bring the funny! It won’t work if it’s not funny.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Happiness! is the inclusion of snippets from those notebooks, which he kept throughout his career. I understand Lady Anne was conflicted over whether to allow them into the exhibition?

Ken was a very, very private man. He’d been advised by Arthur Askey that whatever you do out in public life, as soon as you close your front door, you close your front door and keep your private life private.

The earliest notebook that Anne has found so far is from the 1950s. He started writing them very early on [in his career] and they have all sorts in them. There’s lots of in-depth soul searching; formulas of how his stagecraft would work best and pages where he’s working out a gag, what’s the best line, what’s the best punch line. On other pages there are things like shopping lists, so he used these notebooks for everything.

It’s estimated that Anne has found about 1,000 [notebooks], but there were more. He was incredibly prolific. Anne didn’t open the notebooks during his lifetime unless he specifically gave her one and said: “Type up that bit”. They were his private thoughts.

They were never meant to be public. So Anne has this really difficult relationship with them. Should they be shared with the public? On top of that, in the last years of his life, Ken made Anne promise that she would burn the notebooks when he passed away. She’s really struggled with what to do with them because she wants to abide by Ken’s wishes, but she’s also completely aware of how culturally important they are.

Anne has done a series of interviews recently for a film about Ken which will be coming out around the same time as the exhibition. These interviews are with people who had an interest in Ken; the likes of Miriam Margolyes, Ian McKellen, Lee Mack and Paul O’Grady. Little snippets of the interviews will appear in the exhibition and in those she talks about the notebooks and the heart-wrenching choice she had to make. Anne has kept the notebooks but they won’t be readily available and they won’t ever be published as a whole.

Do you have a favourite piece from the exhibition?

I think it has to be Dicky Mint. Another curator and I were with two conservators at the cottages when Anne took him out of his suitcase. He turned and looked at us and all four of us just melted in front of this puppet! I can’t explain it but there is just something very special about Dicky Mint.

Happiness! runs from 9 Sep 2023—3 Mar 2024 at the Museum of Liverpool. Tickets are on sale now from liverpoolmuseums.org.uk

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