Sir Kenneth Arthur Dodd, OBE (8 November 1927 – 11 March 2018) was an English comedian, singer-songwriter and actor, identified by his unruly hair and protruding teeth, his red, white and blue "tickling stick" and his upbeat greeting of "How tickled I am!" He also created the characters of the Diddy Men ("diddy" being an informal British word for "small"). In the 1960s his fame in the UK was such that he rivalled the Beatles as a household name. Dodd had many recording hits, charting on 19 occasions in the UK Top 40, including his first single "Love Is Like a Violin" (1960), produced on Decca Records by Alex Wharton, which charted at number 8 (UK), and his song "Tears" (Columbia), which topped the UK charts for five weeks in 1965, selling over a million copies. At the time it was the UK's biggest selling single by a solo artist, and remains one of the UK's biggest selling singles of all time. Dodd was selected to perform the song on A Jubilee Of Music on BBC One on 31 December 1976, a celebration of the key pop successes of the Queen's first 25 years as Britain's monarch. Dodd worked mainly in the music hall tradition, although he occasionally appeared in dramatic roles, including Malvolio in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night on stage in Liverpool in 1971; on television in the cameo role of 'The Tollmaster' in the 1987 Doctor Who story Delta and the Bannermen; and as Yorick (in silent flashback) in Kenneth Branagh's film version of Shakespeare's Hamlet in 1996. He was knig