A new family fortune for Les

Published:

Les Dennis with his second wife, actress Amanda Holden

THERE are some celebrities who bounce back whatever life throws at them. Les Dennis is one of them.

First, just as his career was reaching an all-time high in the 1980s, his comedy partner, Dustin Gee, died from a heart attack and it looked as if Dennis’s star might fade into oblivion.

Then his second wife, the actress, Amanda Holden, 17 years his junior, had a very public affair with Men Behaving Badly star Neil Morrissey. Cynics branded Dennis a spineless wimp for taking her back.

Two years later, when the marriage was crumbling, he suffered a nervous breakdown in front of millions of viewers who saw him talking to the chickens on Celebrity Big Brother.

Meeting him today, he has gained a little weight but still has that youthful, cheeky-chappie look which stood him in good stead for the 16 years he hosted popular TV game show Family Fortunes.

His life has entered another new phase. His career has been revived thanks to a self-mocking cameo in Ricky Gervais’s hit series, Extras, and he says he has never been busier, although there’s still a vulnerability about him.

He is also to become a father for the second time, as his fiancee, life coach and businesswoman Claire Nicholson, is expecting their first baby at the end of April.

Dennis already has a grown-up son, Philip, from his first marriage but, at 54, is looking forward to becoming a father second time around.

“I’m really thrilled about it. I think that, being an older dad, I can give so much more this time.”

He left his first wife, Lynne, to whom he was married for 16 years, and Philip, who was 10 at the time, after several affairs, the most prominent being with former Dr Who girl Sophie Aldred.

He is philosophical about bad choices he may have made to retain his celebrity status, particularly that fateful Celebrity Big Brother, when psychologically he was in meltdown.

“I hoped Celebrity Big Brother would reboot my career. It didn’t. In fact, it was nearly my death knell, but then Extras did reboot my career. The irony is that if I hadn’t done Big Brother I wouldn’t have got Extras.”

Today, he is here to discuss his autobiography, Must The Show Go On?, which details his life from his working-class roots in Liverpool to his days on the northern club circuit, his break into television with New Faces and comedy partnership with Dustin Gee.

Tabloids will feast upon the chapters involving Amanda Holden’s affair with Neil Morrissey and the collapse of their marriage.

Dennis writes about his devastation at seeing the tabloid photos of Holden and Morrissey on a romantic country walk and returning to the cottage they had rented for the weekend. Yet, when she rang up in tears about the reports, he went to comfort her near the film set where she was working.

She then proceeded to tell him the sordid details, “as if she was having coffee with one of her girlfriends”, and even admitted to buying new underwear for the weekend, he says.

He says now that it was divine retribution that she treated him as she did, a punishment perhaps for how he treated his first wife.

“When I had first achieved my success in the 1980s, I had treated Lynne appallingly and had felt invincible. I could see parallels in what was happening to Amanda.”

Must The Show Go On?, by Les Dennis, is published by Orion, priced £18.99.