Two giants on the world stage have gone: Ken Dodd and Stephen Hawking.
Whatever your particular taste in comedy, Ken Dodd certainly entertained. I remember going to see him in Rhyl, in Wales, with my mum and the children years ago and he was on stage for hours! He just wouldn’t stop! There was no swearing, no smuttiness, plenty of wry, quick fire observations, bags of daftness and the whole performance just crackled with pace and verve. The children still quote from it and laugh about it. My mum loved his sense of humour, too, and he appealed to all ages. The song ‘tears’ was up there with the Beatles in the mid-sixties and he wasn’t even known for being a singer.
He was simply a master of variety entertainment. Whether you liked the diddymen and the jam butty mines doesn’t matter, he was an enormous talent and was admired and loved by many and his loss is keenly felt.
Where do we start with Stephen Hawking? A giant of a man! His breadth of scientific vision, of seeing the whole universe was immense. He was simply a magnificent mind. He became the man in the street’s physicist and popularised science without ever talking it down. He made not just possible, but necessary, to look beyond the physical and for that he must be remembered. He was a passionate advocate for science and his refusal of the offer of a knighthood spoke volumes.
He was a non-Nobel Prize winner, but that’s because no-one else can prove that he was right. A once-in-a-generation talent.
But Ken Dodd and Stephen Hawking are united in many people’s minds as simply representations of a period in time. They’ve just ‘sort of been there’, for most of many people’s lives. They have been part of the collective, British scenery for ages. Now they’re not, and it’s a bit dislocating.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how you just get used to things being the way they are. It’s only when there is a profound shift that we sit up and pay attention. It’s a bit of a shame that often we only really remark on people when they pass away and they are so missed. Artists are never famous in their own lifetimes, it is frequently lamented, and I suppose it is true that the qualities which we admire are only missed when they aren’t there to admire any more.
I suppose if we should learn something from this it is that we really ought to make it more obvious that we really do value the people, pets, things, whatever that we value. Now, every day!
Go on, tell your wife or husband that you love them (always assuming that you do, of course!). Do it now, and every day. It’s too late when they’ve gone, isn’t it?
Walk the dog today, and every day. Relish the view, enjoy the breeze on your face, run your fingers through the grass and dance like nobody’s watching.
It’ll be too late when you can’t!