Les Dawson wrote secret romantic novel

Les Dawson secretly wrote a romantic thriller novel under a female nom de plume, it has been revealed.

Video: Bill Bailey: My Comedy Hero... Les Dawson

Bill Bailey reveals that Morecambe & Wise, The Two Ronnies and Billy Connolly had a lasting impact on him growing up, but adds that one of his earliest comedy memories was watching Les Dawson with his parents.

It takes talent to be a successful anti-comic

It all goes back to Les Dawson playing the piano badly I suppose. First, to do this takes skill, admittedly, but, second, to get away with it takes some kind of warmth and humanity.

Why we're watching: Lucy Beaumont

The 29-year-old comedian from Hull on being the new 'Les Dawson'.

A tribute to Les and alter-ego Ada

Twenty years after the death of Les Dawson, Blackpool's Grand theatre is gearing up to stage a play about two of the comedian's most-loved characters.

Les Dawson's funniest faces

Iconic British comedian Les Dawson passed away twenty years ago today - let's celebrate by laughing at some of his best work.

'The thought of Les Dawson coming back as a hologram fries my tiny mind,' was probably the weirdest sentence I heard on TV all weekend. It arrived courtesy of Russell Kane, standing in as a rented talking head on Les Dawson - An Audience With That Never Was (ITV).

I had to check that this wasn't one of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror futuristic dramas because there, on the screen, was the hologrammed Dawson cracking gags as if he was still alive - he died 20 years ago at the age of 62 - while the camera kept cutting, in time-honoured Audience style, to chortling minor celebs in the present day. Debbie McGee, Lorraine Chase, you get the drift.

It was deeply odd. Dawson had been two weeks away from filming his Audience show when he died and this was a well-intentioned way of paying tribute to an old-school comedy great.

But the long-shot hologram sequences of Dawson in action felt uneasily like you were watching him cracking jokes at his own funeral. The Q&A was a belter, mind.

Comedy gold - Les Dawson

Behind the gurning game-show host and mother-in-law jokes was a complex comic with an unexpected past, who captured the hearts of the British TV-watching public.

Britain lost one of its most cherished talents when Les Dawson died of a heart attack in 1993, aged just 62. He had been due to record An Audience with... two weeks later; now, thanks to the wonders of technology, a version of Dawson will at last "present" the show after 20 years.

ITV promises a television first: a "staggeringly realistic" 3D holographic projection of the comic. Friends Bruce Forsyth, Terry Wogan and Ken Dodd recall their memories and, courtesy of Dawson's widow Tracy, there's treasured family-video footage of Dawson with his daughter Charlotte, who was only eight months old when her father died.

We've always assumed that, since entering the kingdom of heaven, Les Dawson and Tupac Shakur have become firm friends. But now they have even more in common than they already did. Tupac famously performed, in hologram form, at the 2012 Coachella Festival.

We suspect that a hologrammatic representation of Les Dawson will never be asked to headline a major music festival. But that doesn't mean that the technology can't be applied to the nation's foremost purveyor of mother-in-law jokes. Les was booked to appear on An Audience With... back in 1993. Sadly, he passed away just weeks before recording.

But that hasn't stopped the wilder creative brains at ITV from coming up with this utterly barmy scheme which will see a Dawson hologram bantering with stars including Bruce Forsyth, Cilla Black and Terry Wogan. We are not making this up. To our intense disappointment, no previews were available. But this surely has every chance of being 2013's strangest hour of television.