He who downed the crown: The strange career of Dave King

Written by: Graham McCann
Published: Sunday 18th May 2025

Headscratcher careers. That's the only way to describe those careers that don't fit neatly into either the 'success' or the 'failure' category, but which bounce in and out of each on more than a few occasions, without ever finding the right place, or level, at which to rest. If one needs an illustration of such a career, then one should examine the one connected to Dave King.

King was one of those undeniably talented and versatile performers who perhaps delivered less than many expected, but still achieved more than many can conceive. He went from national to international fame, then back again, and then slipped down further to near obscurity. No one ever seemed to know quite what to make of him - including Dave King himself.

Born on 23rd June 1929 in Twickenham, Middlesex, the middle of three children (brother Syd was older, sister Margaret younger), he picked and mixed and missed his way through school ('Maths I hated, history I dreaded, chemistry I despised, football and swimming I yearned for'), and slipped away so frequently to lose himself at the nearest cinema that his teachers were almost impressed ('You must have something, King,' muttered one grudgingly. 'You can disappear more often and more successfully than any other boy in school').

It was only via the cinema that he learnt anything at all about performing. 'Nobody in our family ever had anything to do with show business,' he would recall. 'They didn't want to know. Even the local theatre was out of the question.'

Once free from school, he had no intention of surrendering to any other undesirable institution. 'They'd never met anyone,' he said of the people at his local Employment Exchange, 'who could get and lose a job with such speed.'

He went from plumber's mate to greengrocer's assistant, from trainee builder to apprentice baker. The only time he felt even vaguely creative was when he was given licence to ice his own cakes.

In his tea breaks, however, he started using a tin and a wooden spoon as a drum kit, and was soon joined by his mates Dougie Woods on a home-made upright bass, Ernie Woods on second-hand acoustic guitar and Tommy Fox on harmonica to form a skiffle group: Woody and his Western Splinters.

They entered talent contests at nearby cinemas at the weekends, always playing the same song: The Yellow Rose of Texas. They never won, but one Saturday they were spotted by another budding musician, Morton Fraser, who persuaded them to form the band he had been planning: Morton Fraser and his Harmonica Gang - an offbeat variety act modelled on the American vaudeville ensemble Borrah Minevitch's Harmonica Rascals.

Fraser's version would soon expand its line-up (Gordon Mills, the future music producer and manager, whose own harmonica solo can be heard on Gilbert O'Sullivan's 1970s hit song Clair, was one of these new recruits) and start touring the country. The experience, for the teenaged Dave King, was formative: 'It gave me a taste of greasepaint and backstage plumbing and draughty digs and I loved it to a frenzy'.

He left for his obligatory National Service in the Air Force, but, once that duty was completed, went straight back into the band. He had no burning ambitions; he simply wanted to keep on playing.

It would be Ernest Maxin - the future Morecambe & Wise producer/director, but who at the time was just starting out as a young programme-maker - who, in effect, 'discovered' Dave King. One evening in 1953, he went to see the Harmonica Gang play at the Chiswick Empire, and even though King was not, at that stage, doing any solo comedy, and was merely one of the men standing together in a line - Maxin could not take his eyes off him.

He later told me:

Ronnie Waldman, my boss [the Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC], he'd told all of us to 'go out and find new stars'. So I was on the look-out, all the time, and that night I saw Dave King. There was just something about him. He just had something - a look, a personality, that made me think I could make him into a star. So I went and told Ronnie, and he said, 'I'd like to see him'. So both of us went to see him the next night.

And they started their act, and Ronnie was staring at them, and looking around, saying, 'When's this kid coming on, then?' I said, 'He's there - that boy standing at the end of the line'. He said, 'You must be bloody mad! I don't want a mouth organ player. I want another comedian - now!

I said, 'I think he's got something, and I think I can make him a star'. Ronnie said, 'Oh, no, I don't have the time for this, I'm sorry, I'm going!' And he left. He got up and left. And I thought, 'Well, that's me finished before I've even started - I'm going to be fired!'

Maxin stayed, and, desperate to convince himself that he really hadn't made a terrible mistake, he went backstage after the performance and sought out the young man he felt could be a star.

Their first encounter, as Maxin later admitted to me, could hardly have been less encouraging:

I said to him, 'Tell me: do you sing?' He said, 'No'. So I said, 'Oh. Well, do you dance?' he said, 'No'. So I said, 'Ah. Well, then, do you do anything else?' He said, 'No. I play the mouth organ. I love playing the mouth organ. That's what I do. I might do a bit of comic business with the others sometimes, but that's all I do.' So I said, 'But...But...You've got such charisma! You look like a film star! There's just something about you!' And he's looking at me now as if I'm stark raving mad! He said, 'But I'm working here. And I'm playing the mouth organ. Every night. That's what I do.'

Maxin, however, would not be deterred. He feared that his job depended on proving that his hunch was justified. He kept talking:

'I can make you into an all-around entertainer,' I told him. 'I'll teach you to sing. I'll teach you to dance. How would you like to do that?' So he said, 'Well, we've got a month off after next week...' I said, 'Okay, right: you have three weeks with me. I've got a rehearsal room and a pianist, and we'll go through everything there'. He said, 'Well...Okay - on your own head be it.' I think he still believed I was crazy!

Anyway, Ronnie Waldman called me into his office the next day, after hearing about this. I really thought I was going to be fired! But he smiled and said, 'This plan of yours, it's so ridiculous that I'm going to let you give it a go. I think you're crazy, but I quite like having crazy people around me - let's see what happens'. You see, that was the kind of people you had in TV back then - completely different from today, where they'd just say, 'Nope, I'm the boss - don't do it!'

So Ronnie gave me my three weeks to work with Dave King. On the comedy side, I used old Jewel & Warriss scripts, playing straight man to his comic, teaching him the timing of the lines. And for singing, I told him to listen to Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Perry Como - not to copy them but to hear what they put into a song, how they acted-out a song, and then we worked on his own husky voice. And I taught him some dance steps - it turned out he had a natural ability for that, too.

Anyway, three weeks later, I said to Ronnie Waldman, 'Come and have a look at him now'. So he came to the rehearsal room, looked at what we'd been doing, and said it was 'amazing'. He said, 'Ernest, you've got yourself a proper entertainer'.

Elated, Maxin, urging on a more than somewhat dazed Dave King, then proceeded (after trying out his act in the local variety theatres) to ease him into his new medium with a debut appearance, on 17th April 1954, in a show called Music Hall. It went well; he enjoyed it, and he flourished.

They then prepared for their first proper project together. Entitled Show Case, it was an already-established series featuring up-and-coming talent new to television, with King (taking over from Benny Hill) as its new host.

Beginning in January 1955, it got him noticed, gave him invaluable experience, and impressed the watching executives sufficiently for Ronnie Waldman to award King, and Maxin, a brand-new Saturday night series. The Dave King Show, scheduled to start in October 1955, was going to make the young performer what his producer had always insisted he was destined to become: a star.

While King was still struggling to take it all in, Maxin was already firmly in his element. He was meticulous in dealing with every detail of the production, determined to make his protégé look as good as possible.

He wanted everything to appear, in those primitive days of television, just as bright and sleek and glamorous as 'an MGM musical'. He thus managed to persuade the set builders to fashion a small revolving stage for some of the musical numbers. He had all the floors made 'super-shiny' - later a Maxin trademark - getting them varnished 'so they looked like glass'. Regardless of whether it was gold or not - everything had to glitter.

Having previously performed himself as a dancer and musician, Maxin was able to shape every aspect of the show's contents. He arranged the orchestrations, he chose the singers, he choreographed the dance routines - he was obsessive and inspired in the way that he pieced all the elements together.

He worked even harder on ensuring that his star looked as big a star as possible. 'Dave wasn't that tall,' Maxin would later explain. 'So I decided to get shorter dancers around him to make him look taller, and have all the doorways in the sketches lowered so he looked bigger there, too.'

What both Maxin and King knew that they still needed, however, was the kind of distinctive comic material to make him stand out from the crowd. That need would soon be met by a budding writing partnership by the name of Hills & Green.

Dick Hills and Sid Green were not typical of the kind of writers then working in British comedy. Middle-class and unusually well-educated - both of them having attended Haberdasher's Aske's Hatcham grammar school in south-east London, and Hills having also taken a degree at Cambridge - they were hyper-confident characters, certain, in spite of early setbacks, that they could and would make an impact on their profession.

Having studied all the trade papers, scouring the pages for news of any possible opportunities, they knew of Dave King, and how highly the BBC seemed to think of him, and they quickly convinced themselves that they, and probably they alone, would be able to craft the kind of bespoke comic material to further enhance his appeal. They thus went backstage to see him after a performance in The Talk Of The Town at London's Adelphi Theatre (where, in another sign of how fast he was flying towards fame, he had been installed as the ailing Tony Hancock's replacement), informed him that they were 'very good writers' and gave him some samples of their scripts.

Initially merely amused by their cockiness, King, after looking through their routines, was subsequently sufficiently impressed by the quality of their writing to suggest them to Ernest Maxin. The producer, too, could see that they were not just good writers, but also good at writing for particular personalities, and so he signed them up for his star.

The Dave King Show proved a huge success. Thanks to Maxin it was unusually slick and stylish, and thanks to Hills & Green it was unusually funny, and thanks to Dave King himself, it had a star who charmed viewers and critics alike.

'He looks good, has an infectious grin and laugh, and a mop of black hair to ruffle,' wrote one reviewer of the performer, while another called him a 'likeable hunk' and said of the programme as a whole that it was 'one of the best revue-musicals ever presented by BBC-TV [...] that set a new top standard for tele-revue'. It was, in short, 'a triumph for all concerned,' as one paper put it, and the series went on not only to be one of the BBC's most popular entertainment productions so far in its history, but also serve as a timely ratings boost to the Corporation just when it was commencing a new era of competition with its emerging commercial rivals.

Suddenly, Dave King seemed to be everywhere. Ernest Maxin capitalised on his TV success by producing a record for him - a version of Memories Are Made of This - which promptly shot up the UK charts. He was also in demand for a wide range of guest appearances on radio and TV, newspaper and magazine profiles, talk show spots and countless celebrity endorsements.

A second BBC TV series had to be postponed towards the end of 1956 when King was hospitalised with appendicitis, but he was by now so inundated with offers from all kinds of media companies at home and abroad that any remaining gaps in his diary were fast disappearing. Once he had recovered, he started taking up the various invitations he had been receiving to perform in the US, and proved so popular there that articles began appearing back in England pondering whether he might settle in the States permanently.

The answer to that seemed to arrive when, in 1959, King was hired by NBC (on a five-year contract) to be the first British entertainer to star in his own weekly peak-time series in the US. Taking Hills & Green with him as his regular writers (Maxin, as producer, was otherwise engaged in the UK), while accepting additional material from the likes of Mel Brooks, he travelled over there full of confidence, determined to take his big chance.

The Americans loved him, and he, much to their delight, made it clear that he loved them and their country just as much. Profiles of him noted that his two young daughters were called Cheyenne and Kiowa, his two dogs were named Cochise and Geronimo, and his old house in Sussex had been packed with Wild West memorabilia and bore a sign saying 'The Reservation'. He also won respect as well as admiration for the intensive way that he now studied American traits and tastes and adapted his humour accordingly, more or less immediately confounding any doubts as to how well a foreigner could fit in.

'He's a star, they tell us,' said one critic of the pre-publicity. 'So we sit back and say, all right, prove it. And I think he will.' 'To that crying question, "Where are TV's new faces coming from?," a tousled, very amiable chap named Dave King suggests a likely answer,' commented another. 'From jolly old England, that's where.'

'This summer suddenly seems like it's getting better,' declared a critic following his debut (which was seen by an estimated 15.1 million) at the end of May 1955. 'His arrival,' claimed another, had 'brought a breath of fresh air to the comedy business.' A third rated him 'the brightest new comedy discovery in years'. A fourth judged that he not only encompassed most of the diverse skills and appeal of such US stars as 'Bob Hope, Sid Caesar, George Gobel, Milton Berle and Perry Como, bunching them together in a cozy [sic] package,' but also 'added an unusual ingredient, sex'.

Thrilled with this exceptionally positive reception, King would spend the next few years working more or less ceaselessly on that side of the Atlantic, performing both in his own shows and also as a guest in such other high-profile programmes as The Perry Como Show, The Bing Crosby Show, The Nat King Cole Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and The Hollywood Palace. He was also signed to a £250,000 contract for movies, and given a prominent role in a colourful swashbuckler called Pirates Of Tortuga (1961), as well as booked for several glamorous cabaret residencies.

There would just be enough time for the odd quick trip home, where he would make an appearance on a top TV show - such as Sunday Night At The London Palladium in 1960 - or even star in a film - Go To Blazes in 1962 - but otherwise the US networks kept squeezing him like a sponge. 'He's doing us proud,' purred the British press; 'over the pond they can't get enough of our Dave!'

Once his NBC contract had ended, however, and he next returned back to this side of the pond, he found that much of his old appeal had sunk like a stone. Suddenly, everything about him that had once made him seem so fashionable now made him seem out of date.

The burgeoning era of Beatlemania meant that both his looks and his style of singing appeared like a Fifties tribute act. The freshness and invention of his old comedy routines had been so influential that they had long since been imitated and advanced upon to the point where his own act now appeared lazily unoriginal. Even his age - he was in his mid-thirties - now counted against him in a culture that had come to crave youth.

There was also a certain amount of resentment among the more pettily parochial of those British journalists who had formerly been so keen to champion his talents, with some of them now preferring to depict 'our Dave' as a prickly and demanding performer who had grown 'too big for his boots', and had 'abandoned' his home country for the 'shallower' celebrity afforded by the States. Rather than hailing the return of the conquering hero, therefore, the more common attitude was: let's quickly cut him back down to size.

King knew that, with the fickle US networks already distracted by their search for the next novelty, he would have to be quick to carve out another niche for himself in the UK, but it was also clear that, if he was to do so, it would have to be done without his old team. Hills & Green, though always ready in principle to supply him with material, were now two of the busiest comedy writers in the business, not only working closely with Morecambe & Wise on all of their projects but also providing many other TV stars with their own tailor-made material. Ernest Maxin, his former mentor, was now similarly in-demand producing multiple shows at ITV as well as the BBC.

The absence of these old colleagues was unsettling. King had never hidden his sense of indebtedness to all three of them.

He had said of Maxin, 'Most viewers don't notice who produces; they should. In many cases the producer makes the show - particularly in my case. Ernie can talk me into doing things that nobody else can.' He had said of Hills & Green: 'They understand me - they know exactly how to get the best out of me.' Now he was trying hard not to feel lost without any of them.

Commercial television, in the form of Lew Grade's ATV, stepped in to offer King a new start, with a Francis Essex-produced show called Dave's Kingdom. Beginning in October of 1964, the six-part series (which was secretly adapted from unused scripts - written mainly by John Warren and John Singer - intended originally for Roy Kinnear) was a sitcom featuring King as a 'carefree bachelor' day-dreaming his way (assisted by Victor Maddern and Jack Douglas, amongst others) through a succession of unlikely occurrences.

Billed as a 'comeback', as if he had been struggling in obscurity for the past few years rather than being lauded in New York and Los Angeles, the critics were clearly in no mood to be kind. Several dismissed the show as 'corny' or 'boring', while its star was, at best, described as 'subdued'.

It started well enough in the ratings, drawing in as many as 11 million British fans who had been waiting a long time to resume watching him, but the bad reviews each week drove more and more away. When it came to an end, there was barely any mention of the show, or King, so swift and certain had been its critical dismissal.

Things went rapidly downhill for him after that. He arrived in Nairobi, early in 1965, for a lucrative cabaret engagement, only to walk out after finding the musicians 'not accomplished [enough] for their money'. Back in Britain, he found himself reduced to beginning a tour of the provincial halls, with no new television projects in sight.

His fortunes appeared to have picked up in July 1965, when King replaced Frankie Howerd in the starring role of Pseudolus in the hit West End musical-comedy A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. He won plenty of praise for his first night performance, even if the plaudits, in the case of some reviewers, seemed to be more grudging than glowing. 'It is no easy job to take over from a brilliant and famous comedian, even if you are a popular comedian yourself,' observed one critic, making his distinction between the two stars very noticeable. Another, with a similar lack of subtlety, sneered that 'the Americans like this cocky Cockney even more than we do'.

Only a week into the run, however, it was reported that King had been rushed into hospital with a 'mystery' ailment, and, with no assurances forthcoming as to the speed of his recovery, and no available time to find and rehearse any suitable replacement, it was decided to shut the production down for good at the end of the month. King had made only nine appearances.

He did join the subsequent touring version of the show (lightly directed by Kenneth Connor) later in the year, but it was a frustrating experience for a star trying so hard to regain some momentum. Supported by such eccentric personalities as Charles Hawtrey (who was grieving for his late mother and often drunk) and Eddie Gray (who was frequently playing pranks on everyone else), King had to struggle to hold together a production that was always threatening to collapse into chaos - a task which he often felt left him too drained and distracted to deliver his own best performance.

He went straight from this into another touring vehicle, this time a farce called Flat Spin, playing a harassed husband alongside Diane Hart as his model wife and Eddie Molloy as a camp advertising man. Once again, it proved a disappointment for the lead performer.

'This is not the sort of role in which Dave King is at his best', wrote one reviewer. 'For star comedian Dave King,' remarked another, 'it must have been a frustrating experience to stand by, in a part for which he was eminently unsuited, and watch Eddie Molloy stealing all the biggest laughs.'

The remainder of the 1960s saw King try to cope with much of the same: short provincial tours of unexciting plays, a few low-key cabaret dates and the odd TV appearance. It all seemed such a long way from the heady days of his early international success, and the sense of rejection certainly hurt him, and hurt him deeply, even though he tried to hide it, keep his head down and struggle on.

He had so many talents, but, then, so did Anthony Newley and Jim Dale, two other British show business Swiss Army knives, and an industry increasingly fixated on formulaic TV seemed clueless as to how best (if at all) to use them, too. With younger and more pliant performers proving far easier to start revolving within one particular groove, converting someone like King, it seemed, was now deemed more trouble than it was worth.

At the end of 1969, however, there was, once again, some hope. His old writers, Hills & Green, having suddenly ended their long association with Morecambe & Wise in favour of signing an exclusive production contract with ATV, devised for their old friend a new series.

This particular iteration of The Dave King Show was designed to remind viewers of his various gifts as an all-round entertainer. It was set in his penthouse flat, with him performing stand-up, sketches, dance routines and songs, as well as welcoming each week a new set of guests.

Almost inevitably, given King's recent bad luck, the project was undermined at an early stage by a strain on the commitments of ATV's new Paradise Centre studio in Birmingham, which was meant to be making a whole raft of the channel's first colour programmes, and, as a consequence, the show had to be abruptly relocated to Elstree. That delay, in turn, caused some of the intended guests to drop out due to diary conflicts, and several rather less stellar alternatives had to be booked instead.

The series, once it finally reached the screen, fared rather well without ever threatening to restore its star to anywhere close to his old lofty status. 'Modest in format, good in production but no so hot in comedy' was one critic's verdict, and there were many more in the same vein.

It left King feeling defeated. Back in 1956, when he was racing ('too fast for comfort') his way right up to the top of the show business tower, he had vowed: 'If the world of entertainment ever starts ignoring me, this King will abdicate'. Now, as a new decade began, that is basically what he did.

He decided, from this point on, to stop trying to compete as a comedian - or, indeed, a singer or a dancer - and concentrate instead on acting. He thus took the very next theatre job going - a role in the Ted Willis adaptation of Richard Gordon's comic novel Doctor In The House - explaining to reporters: 'For the past six years I've been working more and more as an actor. Anyway, where is there to work as a comedian?'

He added: 'I'll play any theatre and what I do doesn't matter. I've forgotten that big international star ambition. All I want from the future is to be allowed to work quietly and continuously wherever the offers come.'

That, for the rest of his career, would indeed essentially be what Dave King tried to do. He moved from one play to the next, not caring too much about the standard of either the script or the venue so long as it kept him busy. He also popped up on television in countless one-off parts in popular dramas, including The Sweeney, Minder, Bergerac, The Professionals, Shoestring, Heartbeat and Rumpole Of The Bailey, as well as in supporting roles in the occasional movie, such as The Long Good Friday (1980) and Revolution (1985).

One of his few remaining high-profile ventures as a major player came in 1981 when he was enlisted for a Kenneth Williams-directed revival of the Joe Orton black comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. He was to play Ed, with Barbara Windsor as his sister Kath. Glyn Grimstead was signed for the role of the young criminal Sloane, to whom both Ed and Kath are attracted.

Once the rehearsals began in a nearby church hall, Williams was initially full of admiration for King ('looks & sounds dead right for the part'; 'delighted to have got him in the role'; 'wonderfully helpful'), but he gradually grew intimidated by the actor's sense of independence. '[King] is trying to direct the thing himself,' Williams complained in a diary entry less than a month later, 'and is losing his own role in the process.'

The production, when it opened on 18th March, had a nervy sort of start - Barbara Windsor (already drained after enduring months of controversy about her gangster husband Ronnie Knight, and anxious about returning to the stage after almost eight years away) fainted a few minutes into one performance, causing that night's show to be cancelled, while Kenneth Williams was so desperate to do justice both to his old friend's play and his own potential as a director that he oscillated wildly between supplying supportive advice and starting disruptive arguments - but once it settled it was judged a success.

Williams was not impressed when he sat in on one performance - King, he felt, was 'all tricks and self-indulgence' - but most critics thought otherwise. 'Dave King catches the character's ambivalence perfectly,' wrote one. 'Mr King has become an acting talent to be reckoned with and valued,' said another reviewer in The Times.

'When he appears on stage,' the critic added, 'the focus shifts to him just as though he had tilted the floor. Without cracking a smile, he suddenly has the air ringing with laughter.' In stark contrast to Williams's muttered critique, the writer went on to remark of an actor 'masterful in his creation of a character': 'What he does, he does with restraint and a comprehension that communicates itself directly'.

Rather than seek to ride this wave of praise, however, King simply moved on to the next job. He was content to remain, by this stage, an unobtrusively peripheral figure in show business. Occasionally he would be asked to respond to a 'whatever happened to...'-style article, but he always refused.

'It's years [since] I've talked to anyone from the press,' he told one hopeful local reporter as he turned down yet another invitation. 'I don't really want to start now. I've had bad experiences with them in the past , and I resolved that that was that - no more.'

He was actually not that keen, in those days, on any publicity at all. It was as if he was in remission from addiction to it, and now, for his mental health's sake, wanted to keep it as far from temptation as possible.

It showed itself in what offers he accepted. If it was a modest tour of a minor play, he was likely to grab at it. It also showed itself in the ones he rejected. If it was a peak time television show, he was more likely than not to turn it down.

In 1983, for example, he passed on the chance to star in a fairly prominent new ITV sitcom called Good Night And God Bless. Written by Joe McGrath and Donald Churchill, it focused on a fictional comedian and quiz show host called Ronnie Kemp, whose off-screen behaviour was so selfish and cynical that all of his colleagues and family absolutely loathed him.

McGrath, as the show's director, really wanted King to take it on. King, however, was having none of it: 'Oh no, no, no, no!' he exclaimed. 'I don't get a lot of work these days, and I'd get even less with this!' Donald Churchill ended up having to play the part himself, and King, without the slightest regret, kept flying on under the radar.

In a way, he was lucky. Unlike so many comedians, when they fall out of fashion and favour, he had an attitude that enabled him to overcome the sense of rejection, as well as the ability to move on and succeed at something else.

Dave King died, aged seventy-two, on 15th April 2002. The passing of one of Britain's biggest comedy stars of the late 1950s - and, in a way, one of its biggest international stars of any era - was marked in a remarkably low-key manner.

Who was he? If there was any explanation at the time, it was just that he was a 'character actor'. What did he do? Again, if any answer came, it was simply to say that he'd kept himself busy.

Dave King deserved so much more than that, but he would have welcomed even less. Few comedians soared so high, fell so low, and then continued on with their lives. It made others scratch their heads, but it just seemed to give him a wry smile.

As for the comedy, he appeared to have treated it, in spite of being so good at it, as just a silly phase he once went through. 'Some nights, when I hear the audience laugh, the bug begins to bite me again,' he admitted, late on in life. 'I feel as though I should get out there and really play it up. And I have to say to myself: "Come on, Dave, get back. Remember, you're an actor now..."'