Des O'Connor said he was one of the funniest comics in the country; Bob Monkhouse called him a national treasure.

Johnnie Casson was grateful but bemused. Yorkshiremen, he says, aren't used to receiving compliments.

The night he appeared on Des's show, someone phoned him at home in Brighouse - not to praise his performance but to complain about his hairstyle. "They can't give you a compliment here without giving you a back-hander at the same time," he complains.

Fashion critics apart, Casson has little cause to moan just now. The seeds of a lifetime in showbusiness have finally started to bear fruit - and he begins 1999 a celebrated and sought-after performer.

At 55, Casson is perhaps the last of the great northern stand-up comedians - battling back a tide of alternative talent to maintain a wisecracking tradition that began in the music halls and matured on TV in the days before someone invented political correctness.

His recent screen exposure awoke many to a vein of working men's club, mother-in-law humour we were in danger of losing through neglect.

"Maybe I'm the last of the line," Casson reflects. "But whatever I've got, I've got by listening to my elders, and learning.

"Young comics, you see, they're not allowed to develop. They go on Channel 4 or Channel 5, they swear and they get their own series. Then they're stars trying to become performers. In my day, it was the other way around."

Casson's own route to the "featured comic" spot was via a Bradford showband called The Cresters, a rock outfit who turned to comedy after the death of their lead singer in 1968.

Appearances on Opportunity Knocks and The Comedians ensued. But it was his sit-down performance on Des's sofa, and his convulsing of the host, that elevated him to the big time.

"I got Des's show twice last year, and it advances your career like you wouldn't believe," he says.

He was invited to perform at Bruce Forsyth's televised 70th birthday celebration at the London Palladium. And Des's producer recorded him in concert, for a Christmas video release.

Yet grateful though he is for the exposure, Casson's soul is still in the traditional, down-at-heel showbusiness venues of the summer season and the pantomime.

Last year, he was booked into the North Pier, Blackpool, with Joe Longthorne. ("One of the premier venues in the country, that.") Ever since 1964, when he appeared there with The Cresters, he had promised himself that one day he would return.

Fate, however, decreed that good fortune must be tempered by a little ill luck - and on what should have been his opening night, he found himself in Blackpool's Victoria Hospital awaiting a double heart by-pass.

"What a sickener," he says now. "I lost six weeks work.

"But I thought, at least I got a warning. Les Dawson would have loved to be sitting there waiting for his operation. That thought put it in perspective."

His doctors told him to take exercise and watch his diet, which he claims always to have done anyway. Then, as we talk - in between performances of Cinderella in Rotherham - he asks: "Hang on a minute while I woof my burger down."

He ruminates on his time away from work, the first such period in his career. "A hiccup, that's all it was. But really, £47 a week on the sick - what on earth can you do with that? I've spent that on three cigars before today."

This summer he'll be back in Blackpool, he hopes, headlining with Cannon and Ball at the Grand Theatre.

"If you can get the North Pier or the Grand or the Opera House in Blackpool," he says, "you've achieved something in life.

"The South Pier theatre's gone now; Michael Grade knocked it down, and his ambition was to knock the North Pier down, too, because he said variety was over.

"But it's only over because the theatre companies like his don't put it on any more. They think that everyone's under 25 and living in bedsits.

"It's the same on television. But there must be 20 million people out there of my age and older with nothing to watch. And no shows to go to."

There is, he says, a hidden agenda among today's generation of TV producers. "Older people are allowed to watch telly, but not appear on it.

"People like Des and Bob Monkhouse are the exceptions - they can't ignore them. And Bob is the benchmark for the likes of me. He's a master comedian. Put him on Have I Got News For You and he wipes the younger ones away."

Blackpool apart, he's not sure yet what the new year will bring. "Keep waking up, that's what the doctor advised last summer.

"And I'm experimenting with the theory of eternal life. So far it's working..."

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