“He was a devoted father,” Appel says but adds: “He used to talk about Charlotte far more than his other children. JUST as Tracy had become Dawson’s constant companion so the comedian was determined not to be an absentee father this time. Their daughter Charlotte, his fourth child, was born on October 3, 1992. Tracy favoured a quiet occasion but he insisted on a proper big affair, even agreeing to wear white tie and tails, despite looking “like a beached sperm whale in it”. “Meg was old-fashioned and when they got married he was nothing,” says Stanley Appel, producer of Blankety Blank which Dawson hosted in the later part of his career. Whereas Meg had been a stay-athome wife, disinclined to join her husband in the showbusiness social whirl, Tracy was to be Dawson’s constant companion on and off duty, both as partner and personal assistant. There was one key difference between Meg and Tracy however. Once the intention to marry had been announced the story withered. The report claimed Roper had suspected Tracy of having an affair for six months before the split, alleging that it would not have been the fi rst time and that: “She kept coming home at four and fi ve in the morning… Often she was drunk.” On September 23 she was named as Tracy Roper and her estranged husband Richard Roper had begun talking to the newspapers suggesting that Les Dawson had been the cause of his marriage break-up. On September 22 she was merely a “mystery blonde”.

The fi rst public inkling that there was a new woman in his life came after a ball in September 1987 at Manchester’s Piccadilly Hotel.

“The girl had a personality that kept me spellbound,” Dawson said, “but she was another man’s wife.”Īt fi rst Dawson was far from frank with his three children about the matter, admitting to “a certain cowardice” and noted that when he did tell Julie, Stuart and Pamela – then in their late teens and early 20s – about Tracy they “remained more than a little wary of her… it was to take the children a long time to come to grips with their father falling for another woman”.

Tracy dawson let me be frank