30 Greatest Moments

A celebration of the comedian's career, featuring shaggy dog stories, classic sketches and his collaborations with stars such as John Cleese, Shirley Bassey and Roy Barraclough. The programme reveals how he came to play the piano badly and the childhood incident that enabled him to pull such miraculous faces, and the show also has his earliest surviving TV appearance on The Cilla Black Show from 1968 and posthumous programme Les Dawson: An Audience With That Never Was. Featuring classic archive and contributions from family and friends, including his wife Tracy and daughter Charlotte, along with Brian Conley, Syd Little, Roy Walker, Gloria Hunniford, Vicki Michelle, Anita Harris, Linda Lusardi, Jon Culshaw and Rufus Jones.

He was embraced by the emerging television age, while always keeping the old-school comedy of the music hall alive. He was most in his element bounding onto the stage at smaller theatres — not the arenas he could so easily have filled — where he became the Scouse Bruce Springsteen of live comedy, often putting on intimate one-man shows lasting up to five hours. Proving there was no end to his talents, he also starred in an episode of Doctor Who, and played Malvolio in a televised adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Through his amazing routines, interviews and one-liners, we examine the career of this genuine student of comedy, who was also a highly successful recording artist. He even had the third best-selling single of the 1960s and was big muckers with The Beatles. We explore Ken's life-long love affair with his home town of Liverpool — in particular his Knotty Ash home patch — where he conceived the fanciful ‘jam-butty mines', where his Diddymen creations ‘worked'. We celebrate his 1965 residency at the London Palladium, where he had a recordbreaking 42-week run. We see personal highlights, such as the much-deserved statue of Ken (with tickling stick) unveiled in 2009, which proudly stands at Liverpool's Lime Street Station. And we celebrate the longoverdue knighthood he received in 2017. A large cast of friends, colleagues and fans from down the years give their personal insights, including Anita Harris, Scouse poet Roger McGough, and genuine super-fans and fellow Scousers Ricky Tomlinson and David Morrissey.

A celebration of the survival challenge, looking at memorable Bushtucker Trials, conversations, bust-ups and moments of underhand trickery and extreme cowardice. Featuring the antics of contestants down the years, including the screams of Paul Burrell and Dean Gaffney, the fainting fakery of Gillian McKeith, Joey Essex learning how to tell the time, Kim Woodburn's meltdowns at a flatulent Brian Harvey, and Katie Price and Peter Andre getting together.