"What’s all this ‘Mr Dodd’? Ken Dodd said, amused by my attempt to be respectful. “My name is Ken. I am proud of my name. It means leader of men and follower of women.”

With that the man whom T&A theatre critic the late Peter Holdsworth called the funniest man in Britain, was off to keep an appointment with his dentist.

Ken Dodd, who started his stage career in variety 54 years ago at the Nottingham Empire, is still making paying audiences laugh at the age of 85. The man from Liverpool’s Knotty Ash is on the road again with a tour that goes into November next year.

“There’s a reason for it: I am stage-struck; I love show business. I don’t think television will ever take the place of entertainment,” he said.

Ken Dodd has been a cultural feature of life in the UK ever since he made it big in the Sixties with radio and television shows and, over 20 years, eight Top Twenty hits including the million-selling Number One single Tears in September 1965.

Reportedly, he once told 1,500 jokes in three-and-a-half-hours. In every show he tries to include six to a dozen new gags. He likes to say that every show is different because every audience is different.

Humour hasn’t changed since the days of Aristophanes, he said. What has changed are the expectations of audiences. In 1954 they came to laugh, remembering variety’s good old days with performers such as Jimmy James and Sandy Powell.

“Today, the taboos are practically non-existent. Before, on Monday night, you would get the Watch Committee coming in. If they liked you they left you alone. If they didn’t, you had to change your act or you were off.

“That was censorship. Now you have freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility,” he said and referred to the recent royal hospital hoax by Australian radio hosts Mel Grieg and Michael Christian that went horribly and unexpectedly wrong. The worst that he remembers happening to him was when he was about to go on stage at the London Palladium and there was a bomb scare.

“The manager came round and said ‘When you go on stage ask everyone to look under their seat’. I got more laughs with that than anything, nobody took it seriously,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if I should take it seriously either. Ken Dodd, who has acted in Shakespeare, thinks of himself as a public jester.

“Jesters of old had a fool’s licence. They could say the things that everybody would like to say but were scared to say. They got away with it by saying, ‘I was only joking’,” he added.

Ken has had a soft spot for Bradford since starring in the longest ever Alhambra panto run, Jack And The Beanstalk, which stretched from Christmas 1959 to Easter 1960. The Ken Dodd Christmas Show will have musicians and singers and is likely to go on for a long time. Make sure you tuck away the odd jam butty before you go.

Ken Dodd is at St George’s Hall on Saturday, December 22, starting at 7.30pm. Call (01274)432000.