Sunday 30 December 2018

June Whitfield RIP

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Dame June Whitfield obituary
Comic actor whose career ranged from Take It from Here on the radio to Terry and June and Absolutely Fabulous on TV

Stephen Dixon
The Guardian
Sat 29 Dec 2018

June Whitfield, who has died aged 93, was the most extraordinarily ordinary of comic performers. Efficient, amenable and ultra-professional, she unselfishly supported star comedians for seven decades, often slyly outshining them. Yet buried deep in the screen image of sensible housewife or mum there was a wonderfully wild streak.

On radio, she was Eth to Dick Bentley’s Ron in radio’s Take It from Here in the 1950s; partnered Roy Hudd in The News Huddlines on Radio 2 (1984-2000); and was Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple for Radio 4 (1993-2001). She partnered Arthur Askey on television for six years and played Terry Scott’s wife in Happy Ever After, then in Terry and June, for an astonishing 13 years. And she captivated a new generation as Jennifer Saunders’s vague but sometimes acerbic mother in Absolutely Fabulous.

The success of her partnership with Scott – she had worked with him before Happy Ever After in the TV series Scott On… – gives a clue to her enduring comic appeal. At the time – 1974 to 1987 – Terry and June was derided by critics and the younger, more abrasive comedians as the epitome of cosy, middle-class BBC sitcom, but from today’s perspective it looks positively surreal. Scott, who previously toured a “naughty schoolboy” act in variety for years, essentially played a wilful child, and Whitfield seemed more like a patient mother than a wife. However, in most episodes there was a point at which she surrendered herself and wholeheartedly joined in whatever anarchic plan Scott had hatched, usually to save him from disaster. When this happened, the pair became quietly deranged, and the comic dynamic far from the conventional whimsy sniffed at by the critics.

At various times over the years Whitfield played wife or girlfriend to Benny Hill, Frankie Howerd, Dick Emery, Tony Hancock, Jimmy Edwards, Sid James, Ted Ray, Leslie Phillips, Stanley Baxter, Bob Monkhouse, Harry H Corbett, Tommy Cooper, Terry Thomas, Leslie Crowther and Ronnie Barker. The writer Barry Took said that she had supported more actors than the Department of Health and Social Security.

June Whitfield was born in Streatham, south London. Her father, Jack, was managing director of Dictograph Internal Telephones and her mother, Bertha, an incurably stagestruck woman who channelled her energies into amateur theatre and then into her daughter’s career. At the age of three June attended the Robinson School of Dancing, Elocution, Pianoforte and Singing, and when she was 12, her performance as Moth in an amateur production of Love’s Labours Lost elicited a favourable review in The Star newspaper. In 1942 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and after leaving in 1944, she was almost never out of work for the rest of her life.

Whitfield always claimed that lack of confidence in her looks made her decide to concentrate on comedy: “I believed that, since the audience was going to laugh at me anyway, I might as well be in things that were meant to be laughed at.”

In the mid-1940s she toured Britain in several plays, and in 1945 worked with the Yorkshire comic actor and radio quizmaster Wilfred Pickles. Pickles taught her about timing; on her first night on tour in the comedy The Cure For Love there was a scene where she sat on his knee, gabbling her lines as Pickles hissed at her out of the corner of his mouth: “Wait for the laugh. Wait for the laugh.”

In 1950 she caught the eye of Noel Coward, who cast her in his unsuccessful revue Ace of Clubs. She asked Coward if she could wear a fringe in the show, and her doubts about her appearance were hardly allayed when he replied: “Good idea. It’ll hide that vast expanse of forehead.”

Whitfield understudied Mary Martin in South Pacific at Drury Lane in 1951 and went on to a bigger part in Daddy Long Legs at the Saville. While she was appearing in Love For Judy in 1953, she received a call from Frank Muir and Denis Norden, writers of the hit radio show Take It From Here, inviting her to audition for the part vacated by Joy Nichols. She got the job, and joined the cast just as Muir and Norden were trying out a new series of sketches involving the unpleasant and indolent Glum Family. For Eth, Ron Glum’s earnest and worried fiancee, Whitfield “borrowed” the whining voice of her mother’s daily help, who never suspected that she was being immortalised on radio. Whitfield’s breathy anxiety perfectly complemented Dick Bentley’s flat, Australian monotone in exchanges such as:

Eth: “Ooh, Ron, It’s not natural for hot-blooded people like you and me to remain unmarried indefinitely. Oh, dear heart, if only you knew how much I yearn!”

Ron: “I do, Eth, and it’s not enough for both of us to live on.”

The show made Whitfield a household name. When she married surveyor Tim Aitchison in 1955 one newspaper headline read “Ooh, Ron! Look what’s happened to Eth!” The marriage, regarded as one of the happiest in British showbusiness, endured until Aitchison’s death in 2001. Their daughter, Suzy, is also an actor.

She became a regular on Arthur Askey’s Before Your Very Eyes in 1956, then played his wife in the Arthur Askey Show in 1961. She also appeared in the Tony Hancock Show, the comic’s first series for ITV, and when he moved back to the BBC in 1961 she went with him.

Whitfield was a regular fixture in comedy films and television shows through the 1960s, and first appeared with Terry Scott in 1968. After the success of Scott on… it was suggested that they team up in a situation comedy, and Happy Ever After, written by John Chapman and Eric Merriman, was introduced in 1974. It was an immediate success, but after five series Chapman thought the formula was exhausted and quit; the BBC wanted to persevere, however, and because of a dispute over rights, the names of the characters changed and the title became Terry and June, mostly written by John Kane. Over both series, Scott and Whitfield notched up a staggering 107 episodes, and became so identified as a couple that some viewers thought they were married in real life.

Offscreen, however, the discreet and fastidious Whitfield and the opinionated Scott had little in common. On the set she was content to acknowledge that her main function was to “drift the laughter towards Terry’s lines”.

Because of Whitfield’s cosy image, the idea of casting her as Jennifer Saunders’s mother in Absolutely Fabulous in 1992 was a comedy masterstroke. Whitfield and Julia Sawalha (as granddaughter, Saffron) provided the calm centre of this blisteringly funny series about two vodka-swilling, drug-addled friends – Saunders as PR agent Edina Monsoon and Joanna Lumley as magazine editor Patsy. Mother, slightly senile and preoccupied with her puzzle books, and Saffy represented traditional virtues of consideration and respect for others. The show ran for five series, plus specials and a 2016 film, and is ranked as 17th in the greatest British TV shows of all time by the British Film Institute. In recent years Whitfield appeared in episodes of Dr Who, Last of the Summer Wine, EastEnders (in 2015-16, as a nun with a secret) and Coronation Street.

Whitfield was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1994 British Comedy Awards and inducted into the Royal Television Society’s Hall of Fame in 1999. In 1985 she was made an OBE, in 1998 a CBE, and in 2017 a dame. In her autobiography (2000), she summed up her life: “Not a rags-to-riches story, or one bursting with revelations; there isn’t even an unhappy childhood, only a life full of love, affection and laughter, of gigs, gags and a couple of gongs.”

• June Rosemary Whitfield, comedy actor, born 11 November 1926; died 28 December 2018

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