DEAN

Ken Dodd was the biggest comedian in Britain, and he told the taxman he lived on £3,500 a year. Investigators found £336,000 in cash in his attic, his wardrobes and under the stairs. He was acquitted, and it still cost him about £2 million. In the video below, Dodd has just been cleared. Asked what happens now, he says he has "only ever wanted to be a comedian" and will "go on trying to do that." Then the clip cuts to him on stage, joking about income tax. In 1965 he played the London Palladium for 42 weeks, the longest comedy run the theatre had ever seen. He liked being paid in cash. He said it was so he could pay his support acts. Some of that cash went into suitcases and onto planes to Jersey and the Isle of Man. The prosecution said he deposited £406,000 offshore, and with interest it grew to £777,453. In 1989 he went on trial in Liverpool on eight charges of tax fraud covering 15 years. He treated the witness box like a stage. "I'm a comedian, not a book-keeper," he told the court. When he blamed part of his trouble on his accountant's death, the prosecutor asked if that really mattered. "Well, it mattered to him." His barrister told the jury: "Some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants." The jury acquitted him. But he had promised to pay around £825,000 in tax whatever the verdict. With legal fees, the bill came to an estimated £2 million. A Channel 4 documentary later said the trial left him virtually bankrupt. He went straight back to the Palladium and opened his act with: "Good evening, my name is Kenneth Arthur Dodd; singer, photographic playboy and failed accountant!" I think the jury believed the simplest thing he said about himself: he was a comedian, not a book-keeper. Being hopeless with money got him acquitted. It didn't get him a refund. He died in 2018 at 90, two days after marrying his partner of 40 years. He left her £27.5 million, and as his wife she paid no inheritance tax on it. Was Ken Dodd an honest man who was hopeless with money, or did Britain's best comedian talk his way past the taxman? I post one old money story every day, told simply.