Some ticklish Shropshire facts about Doddy
We can't let Doddy disappear to that great laughter factory in the sky without tickling up some Shropshire memories of him.
Of course he appeared in the county more times than you can shake a tickling stick at. So we'll have to be highly selective in taking a dip into our archives and coming up with one or two Shropshire links to Ken Dodd that may be new to you.
In a 1976 interview he told of his love for the county and how he was hoping to move into a new home in Shropshire in the near future.
"It will be somewhere to relax and rest. I am so proud to own that little bit of England," he said.
However, he famously never moved from Knotty Ash. And his "Shropshire home" near Whitchurch - at Wirswall, so actually on the Shropshire-Cheshire border - lay deserted and overgrown, and nobody ever saw him there.
In fact, at the time of Sir Ken's famous tax fraud trial in 1989, his counsel told the court that the electricity had never been connected and it had never been lived in.
Doddy had probably acquired it around 1973 when he was reported to be negotiating for some property in Shropshire "only for investment purposes."
That rambling country house was bought by him for £26,500 and by the time of his trial was worth £250,000.
Doddy was also, very briefly, a Shropshire schoolboy when he was evacuated to the county town along with thousands of other Liverpool children at the start of the war.
"I was in Shrewsbury. I can't remember the name of the people, it was such a long time ago, but I went to the Priory School for a couple of months.
"I love Shropshire. It's a beautiful county. My uncle lived in Grinshill," he said in a 1982 interview.
He also had an aunt who lived in Shrewsbury who died in the 1970s.
Of all his Shropshire visits and shows, let's pick out just one - when the joke was on him.
In September 1980 he came to Telford to open the new traffic-free centre of Dawley. But Telford's roundabouts and road signs did their job, and he became hopelessly lost.
"Everywhere we went, we made for Telford," he explained to the large crowd after arriving 45 minutes late.
"We went on a tour of Telford. We thought it was one place - it's a dozen places. We've been to about five different Telfords this morning."
Opening the newly traffic-free Dawley High Street he said: "Good luck to all who sell in her."
