The Tale of Dickie Jones, Part 1

Somehow even in those circumstances little Dickie was born with a gift for entertaining people. Making them laugh. Or maybe he managed to pick it up someplace — got him out of that house, see?, when he started going around to schools and churches and fairs. And eventually he ended up in the music halls. Cities. Cardiff, Swan-something, even across the border into England itself.

After a while he settled into a routine, kind of. Edgar Bergen had Charlie McCarthy. Bud Abbott had Lou Costello, right? With Dickie it was that polecat. Cocky-Poo.

Or maybe it should be Poos, plural. Just like Charlie McCarthy wasn’t one dummy but a whole lot of them, spread over the years. That was Cocky-Poo. The first few of them weren’t called Cocky-Poo, by the way, but strange things like Fitch, and there was one called Foul Bart — maybe because they forgot to yank the scent glands on that one, ha ha. The way I understood it, once Dickie handed over his career to professional agents, managers I guess, they were okay sticking with the trained polecat but said it had to have a cuter name. Cocky-Poo. Doesn’t mean a darned thing. Just sounds cute.

By the time the Diwrnach Wyddel thing came along, Dickie’d been all around the music-hall circuit. He’d tried his hand at radio but it didn’t work out. Cocky-Poo, see? Polecats don’t have much of a voice. They just squeak and chatter, and on radio any decent sound man could do that with or without a polecat. And it wouldn’t be as funny. You had to see Cocky-Poo for the effect. That black fur, the white patch like goggles around his eyes and wrapping around his head.

And he was big for a polecat, they told me — what do I know about polecats? — and a good thing for Diwrnach Wyddel, too, because that’s what allowed him to get that face in the mug. They, polecats I mean — they only live five years or so, so we went through four or five of them during the ad’s run, and some of the later ones weren’t quite long enough to reach so we had to build little platforms for them to stand on, behind the flagon itself.

But anyhow, when TV came along, it was like Dickie’d been reborn. Especially in the early days. They’d just set up a camera in front of a stage, and the performers would do their acts.

Not really much different from the music halls back then, especially when producers caught on to the idea of putting a real audience there in the studio. They’d clap and laugh just like the real thing. Even better than a music hall, in fact, because on TV everybody could see Dickie, and everybody could see Cocky-Poo, exactly the same way. No balcony. No whatchamacallits, loges on the walls, didn’t need to use opera glasses to see what the folks in Row 1 were laughing at.

Which was mostly Cocky-Poo. Dickie Jones had his patter down pretty good by then — he’d been practicing it for decades, and it was cute and folksy in its own way. But it really was like background music for the darned animal in the foreground. Especially its facial expressions — something the two of them could’ve never done in a music hall, because no one in the audience could’ve seen them. Big curious eyes. Nose and whiskers twitching. And that grin, oh, that grin. When they’d go on talk shows, the camera almost never showed Dickie Jones, just focused on Cocky-Poo. Dickie’d be in the chair alongside the host’s desk, often talking about something quite serious — Welsh history or patriotism or something — but the camera would be following Cocky-Poo. Wandering around on Dickie Jones’s lap. Up on the desk. Down Dickie Jones’s leg, around the chair, up his back, perching on his shoulder.

So Dickie Jones and his clever polecat were starting to be some sort of minor celebrities by the mid-’50s. The catch: in England. Well, back in Wales too of course — people still remembered him there. But there wasn’t much in the way of Welsh TV at the time; all being done in England itself.

And Dickie was probably getting a little impatient to break out to a larger audience. After all, by now he was in his 50s. Maybe you, Larry — maybe somebody like you can push retirement off indefinitely. Not easy for an entertainer to do the same thing though. Even if they can’t keep their looks, they’ve got to hang onto their spark, their life. And Dickie of course couldn’t know how long he had, any more than most of us. So he was ready for something to cap his career with. A mark he could make.

He’d already tried to take his act in the other direction, across the Channel, but no luck there. I don’t know what the problem was. The French certainly have a soft spot for clowns, you’d think he’d fit right in. Maybe the language barrier was too big. Or maybe they were laughing at all the wrong bits. I don’t know.

I do know he’d been on American TV a couple of times in the very early years. The Sullivan show in 1950, and a couple of little local programs in Philly and Chicago.  Milton Berle’s Texaco, he auditioned for that but never got on camera. Apparently he went around bragging to some of his friends that Jack Benny wanted him for a regular role, a silly neighbor, but I don’t know if there was any truth to that. I’d have liked to see Cocky-Poo and Benny onstage together, I’ll tell you that much.

So when the Diwrnach Wyddel advertising people latched onto Dickie Jones, he jumped at the chance. It wouldn’t be what he really wanted, which was probably just to be free of the darned polecat. But it would get him on this side of the Atlantic, and I guess he figured America, land of opportunity, once he got here the sky’s the limit, right? Not that it actually worked out that way. He managed to get called onto the Carson show but at the last minute they brought in that fellow from the zoo, and he was showing weasels that night, so that pretty much killed Dickie Jones’s chance there. Still couldn’t get away from Cocky-Poo.

But the ads at least were a big hit. I know you remember the shtick, Lar: Dickie standing behind a table, rattling on with a straight face about life in Wales, the beautiful mountains, the waterfalls, sometimes a map on the wall behind him, little joke now and then, but all the real attention being drawn to the polecat. Cocky-Poo. Sniffing around the table, always finding some trouble to get into. Like the ad with the blackboard, Dickie sketching in a map or street scene and putting the chalk down, Cocky-Poo grabbing the chalk off the table and swallowing it. You knew it wasn’t a real piece of chalk he ate, probably just a little sausage or something painted with the right food color. But then they’d cut to a close-up and the grin would be there, with the fur turned just a little dusty yellow around the mouth.

And finally the big moment. The climax of every one of the ads. The flagon lid would already be open of course, so Dickie could pour the ale in, and the head would come up to just the right level. Dickie would go into his spiel about the purity of the water, the hops, the hazelnuts, the bottles, aging, all that, and Cocky-Poo would get up on his hind legs and stick his face into the mouth of the flagon. Pulls his head out, there’s the grin, and this time it’s outlined with foam. Dickie Jones would sort of squeak right then, “Cocky-Poo…!”

Voiceover, “Diwrnach Wyddel, the best of Britain… no matter what your species.”

And that was it.

Fabulously successful ad. We knew it was a hit when Carson did a take-off on it during one of his Matinee-Movie skits, with a Bassett hound instead of a polecat, but naturally Dickie Jones didn’t think it was funny. Especially since he’d already missed a shot at the show himself.

They sent him around the country a few times, appearing at county fairs, doing his little pattering routine at Octoberfests, that sort of thing. But the ads were his real bread-and-butter; must have done forty or more of the things over the course of what, fifteen, twenty years?

So imagine what it must’ve been like for Dickie Jones by the time they decided the ads had run their course, in the late ’70s.

By then he’d started to lose his edge. His hands would shake on-camera, his voice would falter. They’d always had to reshoot segments of the commercials because he kept ad-libbing and the crew would crack up. Now they were having to cover for his slip-ups too. He had to know by the time they invited him to New York for that special occasion, they meant to make it the last commercial in the series…