There isn’t a book which tells you How To Interview A Living Legend. But if there was it would probably say something like; ‘Ask him a question that he hasn’t been asked before’.

Nightmare! Ken Dodd has been giving interviews for more than 50 years now and, because he is gracious and garrulous and so unlike certain other Living Legends I could mention, I fear he may have said it all.

Turns out I needn’t have worried because, like his fabled shows (ending time at the Pavilion is ‘midnight approx’ but some have been known to go on to 2.30am) there’s no stopping him. “There are three questions for a lady journalist to ask Ken Dodd,” he says. “Has humour changed in the years you’ve been working, the second is when are you going to retire, and then about the new breed of comedians.”

Without pausing for breath he continues: “The answer to the second question is that I won’t retire while I can still do it. I’m what they call stage-struck and I just love being on the stage. I’m really looking forward to coming to Bournemouth again, it’s a wonderful place.”

He first played the town when Alma Cogan; ‘a very lovely lady with laughter in her voice’ topped the bill. “I looked upon it as my first trip abroad because I’d played Blackpool for four or five seasons; I’d started in 1954 and Bournemouth was my first summer season, the very first one I came out of my northern lair.

“I was really scared because Bournemouth was a posh place in the south.”

Actually, I wasn’t going to ask him any of this. Like his royal fan the Queen (they are the same age) Kenneth Arthur Dodd of Knotty Ash will never retire. And I know from reading other interviews that he believes that humour hasn’t changed but people have.

“People still laugh at the same things, there’s no such thing as an old joke, people are still laughing at the things they laughed at in Shakespeare’s time; men, women, money, children, power, politics... oh God,” he gives a comedy groan. “It’s just they wrap them up in different phrases.”

And he should know. Ken’s ‘Giggle Map’ of Britain is now considered the most authoritative guide to what tickles our national funny-bone.

According to Ken, Bournemouth and its environs probably have a better sense of humour because there are lots of retired people here and: “Your sense of humour goes better when you go older.”

And humour IS a sense, he says. “It’s a sense, like your hearing or sight, a sense of seeing things from a different point of view. It’s seeing things from a different angle, you get a concept, turn it upside down, sideways on; it’s juggling, it’s tickling the mind. A lot of it is ‘what is’ or ‘just suppose’ and so the residents of Bournemouth have a little bit more time to do that in this silly old world going round us. They are able to perceive the barmy things people do every day.”

Ken, of course, has always seen life sideways on. His is a world of diddy-men, jam-butty mines, tickling sticks and wonderful, made-up words such as ‘discomknocerated’ and ‘plumptiousness’. Words, rather than the reportage of, say, Peter Kay; ‘his humour comes from his ear for how people talk’, fire Ken’s enthusiasm. “I’m fascinated with words,” he says, likening them to ‘a container of what you’re trying to say or describe’.

But along with words there is something Ken Dodd is even more famous for and that is happiness.

“I’ve just been reading a book about emotions and healing and it was talking about happiness,” he says.

“It said one of the secrets of happiness is to always think happy thoughts and the author made an interesting point. Imagine your mind is a beautiful garden and you are surrounded by flowers and it’s lovely. Well, you wouldn’t want someone to come in and throw a load of toxic waste on it, would you? So why do we do that to ourselves?”

Not that he’s complacent, though.

“I realise that some people start off in life very badly,” he says.

“I think that if you had a nice mother and father you had the greatest foundation in the world; if you had a happy childhood and I did.”

Listening to him talk about his boyhood, spent at the Georgian farmhouse he was brought up in; ‘digging holes, lighting fires and falling out of trees’, you can see why. He still lives in the house and he loves the way you can feel ‘the different moods in the different rooms’.

As a conversationalist he is fantastic. As a comedian he is sublime: “We always used to say that ladies wore square-toed shoes so they could get nearer to the sink!” he chuckles and the sheer dottiness of it makes me laugh too.

At this point it’s probably customary for a ‘lady journalist’ to say how tickled she was to interview Ken Dodd.

But it’s more than that. In a world where some comics get their laughs by mocking disabled children, Ken Dodd is quite simply a colossus of his art.

As we finish he thanks me profusely for interviewing him.

Does he not understand that the privilege and the pleasure has been all mine?