Louis Barfe charts the life and extraordinarily long comedic career of a man who straddled the very tail end of variety and the golden age of television comedy, and who died a national treasure. Barfe argues that Dodd was the last of the great variety acts, a creator of superb absurd vulgarity who was at his best not on the small screen but on stage, where his act - 'a rolling boil of cumulative humour' that stretched into the wee small hours of the morning - delighted his audiences across seven decades.