MEET THE CURATOR

Karen O’Rourke is curator of sport, music and performance at National Museums Liverpool

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. 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 who’s 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, 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

This month in words and pictures

On 12 August 1960, a day before The Beatles’ first trip to Germany, Paul McCartney invited drummer Pete Best to join the band. Best, who George Harrison had seen performing with the Black Jacks in The Casbah Coffee Club, was known at the time as being ‘mean, moody, and magnificent’ by his female fans. Five days after Best joined, the new Beatles line-up played Hamburg’s Indra Club – kicking off a gruelling 48 night run at the Große Freiheit street venue.

Best’s tenure as The Beatles’ drummer came to an abrupt end on 16 August 1962 when Brian Epstein informed him he was to be replaced by Ringo Starr. Later that very week, with Ringo now on drums, television cameras captured the band for the first time as they made their 126th appearance at the Cavern Club.

Within three years, The Beatles had become global megastars and toured North America twice. It was during the August 1964 and ’65 tours that three of the Hollywood Bowl performances were recorded and in 1977, The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl was released. Featuring songs compiled from these shows, it captured the hysteria of Beatlemania in full effect.

Just four years on from the formative Hamburg trip, The Beatles expanded the boundaries of pop music with the release of Revolver on 5 August 1966. Advancing pioneering record producer Joe Meek’s strategy of employing the studio as a musical instrument, the band spent over 220 hours recording the album – compared with less than 80 hours for their previous LP, Rubber Soul. In 35 revolutionary minutes, Revolver inspired the development of psychedelic rock, electronica, progressive rock and world music. Today the album is hailed by many as the group’s creative summit and arguably pop’s greatest achievement. Even the record sleeve itself is acclaimed as one of the finest pop artworks. During the recording of Revolver, John

Lennon approached artist and friend Klaus Voorman from Hamburg and said: ‘Got any ideas for our new album cover?’. Created on a kitchen table in an attic, it won the 1967 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, for which Klaus was paid £50 – the absolute limit for a record sleeve at the time. Brian Epstein, fearing the band’s new material was not going to be accepted by their fans, felt the cover was just what was needed to build that bridge.

Due to the technologically advanced nature of their recording, no songs from Revolver were performed by the band on their final tour of North America in 1966. At the end of August, the band played their last live concert at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, in front of an audience of 25,000.

Knowing it would be their final concert, John and Paul brought a camera on stage to record the momentous occasion. Following the show, the band were taken to the airport in an armoured car. As they flew home, George was relieved that their days of touring were finally over. August 1966 was clearly the end of an era, no longer would they be a bow-at-the-waist, aim-to-please touring band.

Fast-forward to the present day and The Casbah Coffee Club is promising a real treat for Fab Four fans this August Bank Holiday as The Pete Best Band perform at the place where it truly all began. Pete will be playing tracks from his Beatles’ days, but you will have to be quick as there are only a handful of tickets left. Also during the long weekend, the Liverpool Beatles Museum on Mathew Street presents ‘An Audience With Tony Bramwell’ – the band’s former road manager and ‘The Authority’ on all things Beatles... a splendid time is guaranteed for all!