"It's a number written for me by Jo-Hann Strauss"

Alongside a raft of "names" including HM The Queen Victoria, Patti LaBelle, Jim Broadbent, Lilli Palmer, Kristin Scott Thomas, Gene Anthony Ray, Bob Dylan, Alfred Molina, Jean-Paul Marat, Prince Buster, Priscilla Presley, Eric Cantona, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, Mai Zetterling, Jan Smuts, Rosanne Cash, Steven Norris and - opportunely, given the heatwave in London - Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, inventor of the Fahrenheit scale...

...today marks the centenary of the birth of the fantabulosa Stanley Baxter [who only died last year]!

By way of a respite from the (officially-designated) heatwave [even I - "part-man, part-lizard", who loves basking in the sun - needed to get out of it mid-afternoon], here's another couple of classic sketches from the great man himself:

Stanley Baxter - Miss Chop Suey

Stanley Baxter - Liberace

He was great, and is greatly missed!

Stanley Livingstone Baxter (24th May 1926 – 11th December 2025)

Pure comedy gold

Hot on the heels of the news that a new Wallace & Gromit is to grace our screens over the festering season comes news of the return of none other than Stanley Baxter!

Read more about the programme Stanley Baxter Now and Then

Probably even more so than Morecambe & Wise and Top of The Pops, the Stanley Baxter Show was the one show we would always look forward to at Xmas! You could rely upon Stanley - with his Hollywood pastiches and endless cross-dressing musical numbers - to provide the right balance of clever and hilarious comedy with glitz and sparkle.

Stanley Baxter learned his trade as part of the Combined Services Entertainment unit during National Service, alongside Kenneth Williams, John Schlesinger, Gordon Jackson and Peter Nichols. What a pedigree!

Never a great looker, he nevertheless transformed himself into these magnificent "ladies" before our eyes far more convincingly than, say, Danny LaRue (who was a bit too "me, me, me") or The Two Ronnies (who dragged up purely for the laughs). And not forgetting his brilliantly camp takes on Upstairs Downstairs and even HM The Queen...

As a child I loved him! (Says a lot in hindsight, really.)

Towering Quake

Upstage, Downstage

The Duchess of Brendagh

Stanley Baxter biography

A classic of our gay history

We are currently in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History Month.

I hope to pop along to a couple of the events - this Sunday I plan to be at Central Station in Kings Cross where DJ Ray Reynolds will present a feast of great moments from our gay history caught on television & film including Phil Starr, Dockyard Doris, Mrs Shufflewick, Les Dawson, Larry Grayson and Kenneth Williams.

And talking of great drag artists of television history, the wonderful Stanley Baxter is often overlooked when we come to recall such things. But his shows were so spectacular, so clever, and so well observed that they deserve a particularly special place in any history of the genre:

Stanley Baxter - Upstage Downstage

LGBT History Month February 2008