Why there’s nothing like THIS Dame!
Newly honoured, June Whitfield’s utterly irrepressible at 91. Here she lets rip at the Twitterati and Love Island – and reveals the Queen does a wicked impression of her
THERE couldn’t be a more deserving recipient. June Whitfield is a Dame at last! The nation has lobbied, letterwritten, cajoled, and finally its collective effort is rewarded: our longest-serving comedy actress, having entertained us royally for seven decades, is elevated to DBE.
Dame June (as she will doubtless never insist on being called) is 91: petite, elegant and immaculately turned out, she wears neat black jeans, a lace top with pink camisole and coordinating costume pearls. Her diction is crisp; her asides, still comically dry.
‘I was absolutely knocked out when I got an OBE,’ she says. ‘I thought: “Good heavens, how fantastic!” And now I’ve been “Damed”!
‘It was a surprise because I never really thought I’d get it. It’s marvellous; such a great honour. When I got my OBE [in 1985], I decided it stood for “Old but Energetic”, then the CBE [in 1998] was, “Caught before Expiry”. I haven’t thought of one for DBE yet,’ she muses.
Are her friends genuflecting and curtseying? I wonder. ‘Good heavens, no!’ she cries. ‘Most of them are so old they’d never get up again.’
She wonders if it is too much to hope that the Queen herself — almost her exact contemporary — will invest her when she goes to the Palace later this year to accept her honour.
For the fact is that she knows that Her Majesty does a great impression of one of her early comic characters. In the Fifties, when sitcom was in its infancy, Dame June was the long-suffering Eth, cajoling her dopey fiancé Ron Glum towards the altar in BBC Radio’s Take It From Here.
Eth’s constant refrain, delivered in a quavering falsetto, was: ‘Oooooh, Ron.’
On one of her past visits to the Palace, June was confiding to the Queen that her voice had dropped an octave since she played Eth, and Her Majesty chimed in with: ‘Oooooh, Ron!’ ‘She did it better than I did. Fantastic!’ marvels June.
She has co- starred with so many comic actors over the decades that her friend, comedian Roy Hudd, affectionately calls her ‘the comics’ tart’.
Tony Hancock, Jimmy Edwards, Peter Sellers, Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd, Ronnie Barker — June was foil to them all, and more besides.
In the Seventies and Eighties she famously teamed with Terry Scott in the archetypal suburban sitcom Terry And June. He played an overgrown schoolboy whose pomposity she was constantly pricking — much as she did (gently) in real life.
She says: ‘People actually thought we were married. And Terry would say: “There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for each other. I do nothing for her and she does nothing for me.”
‘He could be quite bossy. I would defuse the tricky moments. He’d say: “I think you should do it this way” and I’d say: “Yes, I think you’re right,” and I wouldn’t change a thing. Then he’d say: “That’s so much better.” ’ Ah, the cleverness of such self-effacing diplomacy.
Among June’s comedy collaborators were a fair share of mercurial depressives, drunks and giant egos, all of whom she managed with her dextrous mix of tact and brisk humour.
‘I was sitting with Tony Hancock and we were waiting for our cue when he started musing about the meaning of life, saying: “I don’t know. What’s it all about, eh?” And I replied: “I don’t know either, dear, but we’re on in two minutes.”
‘The trick was to get on their wavelength. They had an awful lot of responsibility resting on their shoulders, to be better than they were the week before. Me? I’d just hang about.’
Such modesty is engrained, which makes it easy to underestimate the deftness of her talent, and her capacity for reinvention. In the Nineties, for the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, she was Mother, the ostensibly sweet-natured mum to Edina (Jennifer Saunders), a role she reprised, last year, in the film.
Mother, it emerged, was a kleptomaniac with an acerbic line in putdowns. (Edina: ‘Inside me, there’s a thin person just screaming to get out.’ Mother: ‘Just the one dear?’)
The show supplied a moment of farce so hilarious it prompted her worst ever fit of giggles. Puzzled by the female condoms she tried to wear on her hands to wash up, she lamented: ‘They don’t put fingers in these gloves any more.’ How did she combat such corpsing?
‘You clench your bottom my dear.’ She smiles wickedly.
Although never averse to sauciness, she has always deplored crude humour and has distanced herself from smut or innuendo by assuming a position of innocence.
Typical was the way she played auntie to comedian Julian Clary, master of cheeky double entendre, in his All Rise For Julian Clary.
She has huge affection for him — a card from him is among the 80 or so congratulating her on her DBE — but deplores the sniggering puerility of other comedians, what she calls ‘behind the bike shed’ humour.
‘Some have never grown up,’ she says, declining to name the worst offenders. ‘I don’t know why smut is appealing. I don’t consider it entertainment.
‘If I deplore it, I don’t watch it. Simple. I want to be entertained.
‘I don’t watch EastEnders either,’ she admits, although she had a small part as a nun in an episode last year. She says there’s no comedy in it any more.
She thought that Barbara Windsor joining the cast would introduce some fun but it remained bleak. ‘Now it’s either sex or murder. Where’s the fun gone?’
As for ITV’s Love Island, she is bemused. ‘Couples having sex? I can’t see what it’s supposed to be for. We all know it happens. I’m oldfashioned, I suppose, but I don’t really understand it, any more than I do when people tweet about the fact that they’ve just brushed their teeth. Who cares?’
Such resolutely moral values make her question why she needs a taxpayer-funded winter fuel allowance. Indeed, she has always donated hers to charity.
That attitude means she supported the Tory election manifesto in wanting to stop the allowance for wealthier pensioners.
‘I can’t understand why the wellto-do moan, because if they don’t need it, why shouldn’t they do without it and let someone else benefit whose need is greater?’
Equally, she was horrified about the gender pay gap at the BBC.
‘If women do the same job as men, they should get the same money, shouldn’t they?’
The excesses of political correctness bemuse her, too. For example, when the Advertising Standards Authority announced a clampdown on what it considers ‘sexist’ adverts that pander to gender stereotypes — women washing up, cooking or vacuuming would be banned under the new edict — she was ‘speechless’.
‘Groups of people trying to force their ideas on everyone . . . the world’s gone mad!’ she says.
Numerous adverts June appeared in for Birds Eye frozen food between 1969 and 1981 playing a mischievous housewife — since considered to be comedy masterpieces — would have fallen foul of the sexism police.
Two years ago, encouraged by her only daughter Suzy, 56, and following a fall in which she broke a wrist bone — ‘I was shipped off to hospital for six weeks’ — she sold the family home in Wimbledon and moved into a garden flat, with care on hand should she need it.
The upheaval was huge: she and her late husband Tim Aitchison, a surveyor, spent most of their happy 46-year marriage at the Wimbledon house until his death in 2001. June continued to rattle round in it alone for the next 14 years.
‘So much stuff had to go. It’s sad,’
‘People actually thought Terry and I were married’ ‘It’s either sex or murder! Where’s the fun gone?’
she laments, adding that her dear friend Joanna Lumley (Bollinger-swigging Patsy in Ab Fab) helped with the great sort-out.
‘Jo helped me clear out. She’s such a dear girl,’ she says. (Lumley is now 71). ‘We’ve been friends for 30 years — we met at a Chichester Festival Theatre production in 1987. I don’t know how she does it. So magnificent! All those trips across Nepal and India.
‘There was a little bit of: “You’re not keeping this, are you?” when she helped me sort out, but my daughter was even more strict. She’d tip a drawer full of stuff onto a bed and say: “Do you really need 60 pairs of tights, Mum?” ’
Meanwhile, the vast archive of theatrical memorabilia and photographs she’s collected from her TV and theatre shows over the years — a unique compendium of post- war entertainment — has gone to the V&A Museum where Suzy, an actress, is cataloguing it.
Suzy has no children of her own but took on an extended family when she married, which means June has step-grandchildren. ‘Do I remember all their names? Oh gosh no, I can barely remember my own!’ she laughs. Dame June looks remarkably young, only a slight unsteadiness of gait betraying her age. Her skin is unlined and her pale blue eyes are alert and often amused.
Her beauty secret, she says, is ‘good genes’. She would never contemplate cosmetic surgery: ‘You can have all kinds of things done on the outside, but you can’t stop your inside getting older.’
However, she enjoys a therapeutic massage from her personal trainer, and demonstrates a few stretches that help keep her supple.
She’s vastly entertaining company. At one point she breaks into her famous Margaret Thatcher impersonation — still uncannily good — and explains she was hired for BBC Radio’s The News Huddlines, a topical radio comedy with Roy Hudd, as a result of it.
She keeps abreast of technology. ‘I’ve got an iPad, but it drives me barmy. You turn it on and something you don’t want pops up and it takes you half an hour to get rid of it. But it’s marvellous when you find something you do want.’
Her days are still jam-packed. ‘I love going out!’ she cries. The other week she was in the Royal Box at Wimbledon alongside the Countess of Wessex. The next day it was lunch at a new restaurant near her home. Then there was a party.
‘But these days it takes me a week to recover, so I do try to limit my excursions,’ she says.
‘I’ve had a marvellous career. If there’s more work to come, fine — but it will have to be a role that involves sitting down.’