Les Dennis

“Maybe the show goes on, but that doesn’t mean you have to go on with it,” suggests the Liverpool-born entertainer over lunch in a South London restaurant, “but what I was writing about in the book, it seems, was my experience of losing people – my parents and Dustin [Gee, his comedy partner].”

So is there more to life than performing? We'll come to that later, but loss seems to have been a defining feature in Dennis's life. The public have seen him lose Gee (to a heart attack), his marriage to Amanda Holden and indeed his grasp on reality when he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother.

Certainly, when he speaks about Gee, with whom he teamed up in 1984 on The Laughter Show, a sadness still descends, some 30 years on. “As a rookie comic I was lucky to be in a double act with someone who was already established,” he admits. “And I was taken aback when Dustin suggested we team up together.”

He was even more taken aback by Gee’s generosity. Actors are more likely to sell their children into slavery than to surrender top billing or salary. Gee did both. “We were in panto together, in Bradford, and we had an impressions spot. We realised there was something that worked. But on the bill it was Dustin Gee in huge letters and Les Dennis in tiny letters. Dustin went to my manager and told him about the billing and said, ‘I’m on £800 a week and Les is on £400. And we’re doing the same job. So let’s make it £600 each.’”

Dennis reveals, however, that he knew his partner wouldn’t live long enough to appear in The Sunshine Boys. “Dustin was living on borrowed time,” he says.

When Gee died in January 1986 Dennis was truly lost. “I knew we had been together for just three years, and I’d had a career before we formed, but the public didn’t see it that way. They saw us as a double act. To make it worse, Eric Morecambe had just died, and you could see how that affected Ernie [Ball], who was entrenched in that double act.”

After Gee's death Dennis got back on stage, in a variety show in Birmingham with the Krankies, and proved the doom merchants wrong. Family Fortunes came along soon after, though following in the footsteps of Bob Monkouse proved scarier than Morticia Addams first thing in the morning. “I look back at the early shows and think, ‘Thank God I had the time to grow into it.’ I made the mistake of trying to do what Bob did, which was a joke for every person and question. But I wasn’t a gag man, like him, and they fell flat. The jokes, for me, had to come organically.”

Leslie Heseltine, to use his birth name, learned to be funny from an early age. His mother was a frustrated actress and when her shy son showed real talent for impressions and telling jokes he was encouraged to enter Butlins’ tiny talent competitions, which he won. The teenager went on to work solidly in the northern club circuit. “The Beatles were huge,” he says of the Liverpool scene, “but I wanted to be Jimmy Tarbuck, the fifth Beatle.”

But Dennis harboured secret desires. He hung around with an arty set at school and became part of a theatre group which included Lynne, who would become his first wife. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do,’ but I’d already started doing the clubs.”

Family Fortunes, which was filmed over short periods, afforded Dennis the luxury of a parallel life, to go off and become the actor he’d hoped to be. “I’d do a play for £200 a week,” he recalls, smiling. But there certainly was – and still is – a prejudice against comedians infiltrating the world of legit theatre. “Yes, it took a long time to be accepted.”

He persisted. The small plays became larger. Dennis landed the likes of Art, alongside Christopher Cazenove and John Duttine. He was now seen as a safe pair of hands. But has he taken on turkeys in his time? “I did a play that I didn’t understand when I read it, a Finnish existentialist comedy,” he says. “The reason I wanted to do it was because Janet Suzman was in it, and I reckoned she was great and knew what she was doing. It was only when we got to rehearsals she admitted, ‘I don’t know what this play is about, but f*** it, I love a challenge.’”

Dennis wanted it all, it seems – the light entertainment crown and the kudos that comes with serious theatre. But along the way was his head turned? He acknowledges he neglected his first wife, with whom he had a son, Philip (now an actor), and conducted an affair with Doctor Who actress Sophie Aldred.

“I got a little bit pleased with myself,” he says of the fame surge. “I didn’t buy a Rolls-Royce or anything like that but I didn’t see my biological family for a while. I was getting a bit self-important and they told me. They dragged me back.”

He was certainly a lost boy during the slow, excruciatingly public break-up of his marriage to Amanda Holden. “You can’t factor it in,” he says of the trauma. “If you knew what would happen you would run a million miles.”

It’s not unusual for someone whose partner has had an affair (in Holden's case with the actor Neil Morrissey) to hit the wall of despair. What is unusual is for the drama to be played out on television. But the public had no idea of the pre-appearance build-up to the second series of Celebrity Big Brother. Before entering the house, Dennis had a final goodbye with family and friends but Holden joked she’d keep his name on speed dial, and try to keep him in the house as long as possible. It was as funny as a relative’s coffin.

Dennis’s agent tried to deflect the comment by saying the producers were adding an extra housemate at the last minute. "Wow!" interrupted Holden. "Wouldn’t it be amazing if it was Neil? You two in the house. That would be fascinating." It would have been cruelty.

Dennis wrote in his autobiography that those assembled looked like the movie audience from the scene in The Producers when Springtime for Hitler echoed through the theatre. “Jaws had to be picked up as I quickly said my goodbyes. When Amanda and I hugged, I whispered: ‘Why the f*** did you say that?’ ‘Oh, darling, it’s only a joke. Lighten up.’”

It’s little wonder he had a meltdown on national television. Does he regret agreeing to Big Brother? “Well, we did it for charity.” Sure, Les, but did you need to go into that TV asylum? Was it fear of being forgotten by the public? He thinks for a moment and says, “My favourite line from The Go-Between is: ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ It suggests you have to move forward, to pick yourself up and move on. I’ve done that all my life.”

He moved on. He did a comedy tour more or less straight afterwards. “The Daily Mail came to bury me. The tabloids loved the 'Les Miserables' headline. But The Guardian decided it would be a We Love Les tour, reckoning I’d been a whipping boy for long enough.”

Dennis followed this with an appearance on Ricky Gervais’s Extras. “Friends were concerned that Ricky was taking the p***.” No kidding, Les. Gervais wanted Dennis to play "a twisted, demented version of himself, the dark, desperate version". But Dennis was reassured when Gervais said, "Think Curb Your Enthusiasm." Dennis took the chance and it paid off. But again it was a risk, and perhaps an inability to say no to an offer of national TV.

“Andrew Lippa, who wrote the music for The Addams Family, came out with a great quote the other day. He said, ‘The cave that is the darkest and the scariest is that which yields the biggest treasures.'”

After Coronation Street, the next big offer arrived in the form of the Broadway hit based on the 1960s TV series. “I had to audition," says Dennis. "The producers are American. They’d never heard of me. Rehearsals were tough.”

Dennis’s personal life is now great, he says. He is married to Claire, a life coach, and they have two young children. So why take on Fester? Indeed, what took him back on stage the night Tommy Cooper took ill on live television in 1984 and subsequently died? What made him appear in Jigsy, in the role of a fading comic at the Edinburgh Festival, five years ago? He must have been all-too aware critics could parallel this with a Les Dennis on the slide? “Yes, I was aware, but it was such a good part.”

But there are easier roles, I tell him. Dennis is certainly sensitive and aware, though he has a tough side. “I think it was Robin Williams who said a comedian auditions every night. It’s true. And to go up there goes against my shy personality.

“I can remember going to the north-east clubs and having the hardest time of my life on stage and saying to myself, ‘I’m not coming off.’ And I would go through an hour’s material in 20 minutes. In fact, the other comedians called me Bronco, because I stayed on. Though if you came off you didn’t get paid.”

Dennis is an open, trusting person who wears his heart on both sleeves. He’s also an optimist. “If I go out to a house and it’s half empty I prefer to think it’s half full. And I trust people. Even if it all goes wrong you go again.” He adds, laughing, “It’s like marriage.”

Yet there’s money in the bank, Les. Why push aside the pain of loss, of parents, or lovers, or partners, and keep pushing yourself, whether in a stage musical or going back to the Edinburgh Festival, as he’s planning to do?

“Sometimes you wonder why you do it. But then I remember the words of Richard Briers when once asked ‘How do you become successful?’ He said, ‘It’s not enough to want it, you have to need it.’"

Les Dennis needs it – the approval, the love, the challenge. Even if the spotlight bulbs are in his mouth.

The Addams Family is at Edinburgh Festival Theatre until April 29