Farewell, Kitty

Oh, dear - it appears that my cryptic "out-of-office" message on Thursday caused consternation and concern amongst my viewing public (tee-hee!).

In summary: Mother was supposed to have a cataract op back in August [and I went down to stay in an apartment just around the corner from her house in Portsmouth in case she needed some help and support afterwards]. To her annoyance, they couldn't complete the job back then, and it was rescheduled to this week - thus I ended up back down there again. Thankfully, the op went ahead this time - so hopefully once the soreness goes down, she will notice a difference.

My message was merely a quick "holding page", as I knew that I would be on my work laptop both days and tending to Her Ladyship in between dealing with work stuff, so it was not going to be feasible to post to Blogger.

I had in the back of my mind that I might "play catch-up" on my return to London yesterday, but no! Some selfish bastard decided to throw him/herself onto the rails just outside Wimbledon - one of the busiest spots on the South Western network, where all the lines from Hampshire, Surrey and the West Country converge on their way into London Waterloo - and all trains had to be taken out of service. At Woking. The middle of fucking nowhere.

The station was absolutely heaving, as several full trainloads of disgruntled passengers were crowded on to the platforms. I got out for a fag (of course), and started weighing up the options. I could have gone into the - ahem - metropolis of Woking, found a pub and waited it out. That did not seem like a good idea. I could have stood outside in the rain waiting for information. Nope. I could have got a taxi to London, but I'm not that rich! Then I spotted that there was a coach connection from out the back of the station to Heathrow Airport, and the Piccadilly Line runs from there all the way home to Wood Green - so, understandably I took that option!

Having left Portsmouth Harbour station at 2.15pm, I finally arrived home at 7 o'clock... Oh, what larks.

Sigh.

---

Meanwhile...

We are in absolute mourning here at Dolores Delargo Towers, as one of our favourite actresses and Patron Saint Dame Patricia Routledge has departed for Fabulon, to knock some sense into the place, no doubt, at the venerable age of 96.

I have paid homage to the great lady many times - not least here, here and here [and we went to see her in conversation back in 2011] - and needless to say, the tributes are pouring in across the media, from friends, co-stars and from the numerous organisations of which she was a patron and supporter.

Most people have focussed in on her long and lauded theatrical career, her readings for Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, and the TV roles for which she was (understandably) most recognised, "Hyacinth Bucket" in Keeping Up Appearances and the eponymous Hetty Wainthropp Investigates - however, it was for one particular character on Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV that we first fell in love with her:

Patricia Routledge - Kitty

And, then there's this - possibly the last time we ever saw her on our screens:

Dame Patricia Routledge - I Went to a Marvellous Party [Noël Coward]

How very appropriate.

RIP, Dame Katherine Patricia Routledge (17th February 1929 – 3rd October 2025)

That's the colour of our Margaret's shower curtains - them varicose veins over there

Just because...

...It is a Sunday...
...The weather's turned horrid again, so it's been too cold to potter in the garden...
...I've had enough of lumping around with this broken foot, but know I still have weeks to go before I can remove the "big boot"...
...The world needs some cheering up...

Here's some more of the much-missed Miss Victoria Wood!

Victoria Wood and Juie Walters - Turkish Bath

Victoria Wood - In the Supermarket

Victoria Wood - A Fairly Ordinary Man [starring Jim Broadbent]

Victoria Wood - Ena, Martha and Minnie ("Coronation Street")

Victoria Wood - Kitty 3 [Patricia Routledge]

And finally, of course...

Victoria Wood - Ballad of Barry and Freda

Everybody loved "Barry and Freda", it seems - and everybody loved Victoria Wood.

• "I've got a degree; does that mean I have to spend my life with intellectuals? I've also got a life-saving certificate, but I don't spend my evenings diving for a rubber brick with my pyjamas on."
• "Foreplay is like beefburgers – three minutes on each side."
• "I haven't got a waist. I've just got a sort of place, a bit like an unmarked level crossing."
• "A man is designed to walk three miles in the rain to phone for help when the car breaks down, and a woman is designed to say, ‘You took your time’ when he comes back dripping wet."
• "I once went to one of those parties where everyone throws their car keys into the middle of the room. I don’t know who got my moped but I’ve been driving that Peugeot for years."
• "Sexual harassment at work... is it a problem for the self-employed?"
• "She said 'Victoria, I see you in a beige Kaftan' I said, 'well I see you in an oxygen tent' and put the 'phone down."
• "I looked up the symptoms of pregnancy ... moody, irritable, big bosoms ... I've obviously been pregnant for thirty-six years."
• "My boyfriend had a sex manual but he was dyslexic. I was lying there and he was looking for my vinegar."
• "Everyone's a national treasure these days; you can't move for them. But there should only ever be one at a time. For years, it was Dame Thora Hird. After she died, it was going to be Judi Dench, but then Joanna Lumley saved the Gurkhas so she got the gig."
• "Life’s not fair, is it? Some of us drink champagne in the fast lane, and some of us eat our sandwiches by the loose chippings on the A597."

I mean to change my name Bloggs to Bloggini

Just because...

...we played it this afternoon, as part of our esoteric musical soiree to welcome Al and Mark as guests to the extensive gardens here at Dolores Delargo Towers - it's our beloved Patricia Routledge, in an unexpected "audition":

Patricia Routledge - I Want to Sing in Opera

I'm getting so tired of these comedy songs
I want to sing something divine
I'm sure that I'm certain to shine
As a star in the opera line
I simply love Wagner, Mozart, Puccini
Their music is really tip-top
So I mean to change my name Bloggs to Bloggini
And see if I can't get a ‘shop'.

I want to sing in Opera
I've got that kind of voice
I'd always sing in Opera
If I could have my choice
Signor Caruso
Told me I ought to do so
That's why I want to sing in op'ra
Sing in op-pop-pop-popera Hurrah.

I want to play Carmen I just love the part
The music's so awfully sweet
And all prima donnas I beat
If in Faust I played fair Marguerite
I'd warble and trill like a human canary
In recitative or duet
But managers seem to be just a bit wary
My chance hasn't happened as yet.

I want to sing in Opera
I've got that kind of voice
I'd always sing in Opera
If I could have my choice
Signor Caruso
Told me I ought to do so
That's why I want to sing in op'ra
Sing in op-pop-pop-popera Hurrah.

I think she's in, don't you?

Very big in Botswana

Patricia Routledge and Edward Seckerson. Photo by Matt Thomas.

Our gang went along to a very special occasion last night - an audience with one of our all-time fave entertainers, the supremely talented Patricia Routledge - Facing the Music.

More widely known nowadays for her role as Hyacinth Bucket, a worldwide smash hit - “I'm very big in Botswana”, she says - the evening instead focused on her largely forgotten career as a fine singer and musical actress. In the capable hands of interviewer Edward Seckerson, formerly the presenter of Radio 3's (late, lamented) programme Sight and Sound, Miss Routledge was every bit as charming and candid as we would have hoped of such a "national treasure". Interspersing anecdotes with many of her recordings, this was a sublime evening indeed...

Tracing her life right back to middle-brow Birkenhead (the opposite end of the Mersey Tunnel to Mr Seckerson's more humble Bootle roots), her enchantment with the theatre began at an early age thanks to her father (a 'high class tailor' - "Every shop called itself 'high class' in those days!") and his deals with the local theatre, which got the family free tickets every week. Yet her youthful ambition was to be “an avant-garde headmistress with a red sports car who had affairs all over Europe. What went wrong?”

She managed eventually to get into theatre school and onward to the hard slog of a real-life stage career - a career that was unfortunately dogged by a succession of well-respected but commercially disastrous productions.

She appeared in such flops as Sheridan's operetta The Duenna, the Victoriana musical Follow That Girl (from which we were treated to her duet with James Cairncross, Waiting For Our Daughter, which was hilarious), and the first musical for which she was leading lady, a pastiche of American operetta called Little Mary Sunshine - complete with its OTT chorus of singing Mounties (very Monty Python!).

America beckoned (in the form of Jule Styne, who asked her to audition after seeing her in pantomime!) and in 1968 she appeared on Broadway in the musical Darling Of The Day alongside a woefully miscast Vincent Price. It closed after only 32 showings, but she scooped a Tony award for a performance that was hailed in The New York Times as "the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country." Miss Routledge liked that bit.

From that show, here's Miss Routledge's "eleven o'clock song" (the show-stopper near the end of a musical) Not On Your Nellie:

Patricia Routledge - Not On Your Nellie

However, the biggest and most spectacular flop was to come when she was hand-picked to star in the ill-fated collaboration between theatrical giants Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in which she portrayed every First Lady of America. As she said, however, "It was four hours long. Lenny was trying to write an opera. Alan was writing a musical. It didn't work." Speaking of the opening night she said, "The warmth and good will of the audience lasted until roughly the interval”. The show played for seven performances.

She managed a little more success in the tribute revue Cowardy Custard (for which The Master himself chose the name) - and her version of Mr Coward's A Marvellous Party was probably the highlight of the evening's music for me!

Among her other notable accolades was her part as "the old lady with one buttock" in Candide which won her a Laurence Olivier Award, and the famous production of The Pirates of Penzance co-starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt in New York's Central Park (in the middle of a heatwave, apparently). She also had a modicum of commercial success with a studio recording of The Sound of Music, on which she sang Mother Superior's classic Climb Ev'ry Mountain:

Patricia Routledge - Climb Ev'ry Mountain

Concluding at the crossover period between her life as a theatrical performer, her collaboration with Alan Bennett and her whirlwind success on television, Mr Seckerson himself chose one of Miss Routledge's beautiful ballads from Darling of the Day to close - That Something Extra Special.

Visit the Sound of Vincent Price website to hear that song, and the rest of the Darling of the Day score.

An appropriate end to a fascinating evening!

"My maisonette backs onto a cake factory, so I’m dusting my knick-knacks all the day long"

Happy 80th birthday today to the magnificent and multi-talented Patricia Routledge, one of my favourite actresses, and "national treasure".

Born in Birkenhead, Ms Routledge made her stage debut in 1952, and went on to a long and illustrious career in the West End and international theatre, appearing in productions of plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Wilde and Sheridan, among many others. She demonstrated a brilliant singing voice in such musicals and operettas as The Beggars Opera, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Candide and The Pirates of Penzance.

Such a prestigious talent also transferred her to the big screen, mainly in character roles, until mainstream success came in the 1980s when she made such a huge comedic impact as the fabulous "Kitty" on the Victoria Wood show - one of my favourite comedy characters of all time...

• "She chomps down the last of me Bourbons, and says 'Kitty - I'm leaving Bill. We're not compatible.' They never were - he loves opera, and she can't follow the plot of the 'Teddy Bears' Picnic'. She only married him because he was pally with a man who made chocolate mis-shapes."
• "If I were Prime Minister... and thank goodness I'm not because I've been the length and breadth of Downing Street and never spotted a decent wool shop!..."
• "She said 'I'm a radical post-feminist lesbian!'. And I thought; 'What would the Queen Mum do?' so I just smiled and said; 'We shall have fog by tea-time!' She said 'are you intimidated by my sexual preferences?', I said; 'No, and I'm not too struck with your donkey jacket either!'"

From this success she was massively in demand, and portrayed such diverse screen roles as Hildegard of Bingen and Queen Victoria, made hit radio series such as Ladies of Letters with Prunella Scales, and was lauded for her appearances in three episodes of Alan Bennett's brilliant Talking Heads. It is of course for her role as uber-snob Hyacinth Buckett in Keeping up Appearances that she became a household name, and this series is still incredibly popular across the globe to this day. Here are just a few examples of the sheer diversity of the wonderful talents of Patricia Routledge:

Patricia Routledge - The Beggar's Opera

Patricia Routledge - Kitty 1

Patricia Routledge - Keeping Up Appearances

Patricia Routledge - Talking Heads - A Lady of Letters

Patricia Routledge CBE (born 17th February 1929)