WASN’T Doddy just about the most popular comedian in the country? Well, OK, his visual act, all that tattifilarious nonsense should have been taken to the end of a pier, placed in a holdall and drowned 50 years ago. As was the case with many of his gags; “Tonight when you get home, put a handful of ice cubes down your wife’s nightie and say ‘There’s the chest freezer you always wanted’.”

But there’s something about Sir Ken Dodd we all should bear in mind regardless of his denticle disaster, his finger-in-socket hairstyle and his propensity for overblown silliness. Dodd was a role model.

Sure, there was a period in 1989 when he was a little lax with his tax affairs (“I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny because I lived near the seaside.”) but Ken Dodd was defined by his determination to work. His point of existence was to produce laughs, to perform the work he loved. Comedy fulfilled his goals in the same way particle behaviour gave Professor Stephen Hawking a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

However, Dodd’s departure underlines a stark, scary terror in our lives. Young people aren’t being allowed to have dreams. They are being forced to play out their lives in giant warehouse spaces the size of six football pitches – with no goals at either end.

James Bloodworth has written a new book, Hired, in which the young writer surreptitiously covers the length of the country working for zero hours companies. The writer sets out to explore what it’s like to work for firms such as Amazon and Uber. He discovers a world dressed up to pretend that it cares.

When Ken Dodd was a young man he had countless opportunities to progress in life; he was a cub reporter for a while before joining his father’s coal business and making his way into showbiz. When I left school, it wasn’t easy to land the job of your dreams, but there were options. There was possibility ahead if you put your mind to a career such as journalism. And for some upper-working class families, there was the option of university.

Nowadays, the chances of young people choosing a career are slight. Trades have disappeared, apprenticeships abandoned and work places brightly designed and dressed up as fun, activity centres.

But they’re not. Bloodworth’s supervisors told him he should not call the warehouse “a warehouse”. It was a “fulfilment centre”. And no one he met lasted the nine months required for Amazon to give them a full-time job. “Like worn-out machines, they were scrapped after six.” Of course, the management did not sack them. They “released” them.

So much of what is being promised by the likes of Amazon, Carewatch UK, the car insurers Admiral and Uber, is illusion, found Bloodworth – the carapace of zero hours arrangements which “encourages free-wheeling bohemians,” far from being beaten down by grinding insecurity.

However, the reality, the writer uncovered, was living in overcrowded, cockroach-filthy lodgings alongside workers who need to eat junk food and get drunk to anaesthetise their minds to the prospect of the day ahead, bullied by middle managers or facing the “deathless boredom” of the insurance call centre.

And when he worked for the care company, the writer discovered the pressure workers were under to do as little for old people as possible.

Bloodworth, the son of a single parent mother, counts himself incredibly lucky to have “escaped to university” otherwise he’d still be working in the battery hen environment of the warehouse – sorry fulfilment centre – carrying around a device all day long which recorded his every step.

But we’re lucky he has written this book because when you overlay it with the experience of Ken Dodd’s life it reveals a powerful message. It’s saying we need to be allowed to think about happiness in work. It has to be the new politics. We need to make sure governments can’t be allowed to fake sell us concepts such as fields full of warehouses which, in many ways, are little but open prisons.

Bloodworth says he has no time for identity politics; the responsibility for the incredible divide in society is a collective one.

And we need to take cognisance of that. Baby boomers like me don’t have to worry about topping up the power card every week. There’s a nice car in the garage, a nice restaurant on the corner, all set in a nice postal code. But what of the future?

We should look to and admire the young people who get on their bikes and work for the likes of Deliveroo. We should take our hats off to their commitment to jobs that don’t offer holiday pay or any security. But we shouldn’t take them for granted at all. “A burgeoning consumer class may believe it is entitled to permanently draw upon an army of drudges, however there is no guarantee that the servitors will themselves be forever willing to play their allotted role,” says Bloodworth.

And that’s right. We need to think about the next generation. We need them to be Doddys. Not diddies.