Eccentric and oversized half of popular ‘Two Fat Ladies’ TV series
1947-2014
CLARISSA Dickson Wright, who has died at the age of 66, sprang to celebrity as the larger of the Two Fat Ladies in the astonishingly popular British television series.
Dickson Wright was a recovering alcoholic running a bookshop for cooks in Edinburgh when the producer, Patricia Llewellyn, was inspired to pair her with the equally eccentric Jennifer Paterson, then a cook and columnist at The Spectator.
The emphasis of the programme was to be on “suets and tipsy cake, rather than rocket salad and sun-dried tomatoes”, Llewellyn declared. Hence bombastic tributes to such delights as cream cakes and animal fats were mingled with contemptuous references to “manky little vegetarians”.
The London Evening Standard referred to the ladies’ “uncompromising physical ugliness” and “ugly personalities”. Another critic quipped: “Perhaps handguns shouldn’t be banned after all.” Most, though, became instant addicts, and by 1996 the programme was attracting 3.5 million viewers.
Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmeralda DicksonWright was born on June 24 1947, the youngest of four children. “My parents had great trouble deciding what to call me in the first place,” she explained about her abundant christening, “but then they were so delighted they had finally found a name that they got pissed on the way to the church.” To decide which name should come first, “they blind-
I didn’t go around beating people up, but if people were aggressive to me then I hit them
folded my mother and turned her loose in the library, where she pulled out a copy of Richardson’s Clarissa”.
Her father, Arthur Dickson Wright, was a brilliant surgeon who was the first to extract a bullet from the spine without leaving the patient paralysed. His patients included the Queen Mother, Vivien Leigh and the Sultana of Jahore. He had met Dickson Wright’s mother, Molly, an Australian heiress, while working in Singapore.
He became a progressively violent alcoholic and broke three of her ribs with an umbrella. On another occasion, he hit her with a red-hot poker. She later confessed to poring over botanical volumes in search of suitable poisons and scouring the woods for lethal mushrooms.
Boarding school proved a wonderful refuge. She then did a law degree externally in London (her father refused to pay for her to go to Oxford unless she read medicine) . It was while she was at home studying for her bar finals that a letter arrived for her mother from her father announcing divorce proceedings. After her father left the house, Dickson Wright never saw him again.
She was by then a regular pipe smoker. The first woman to practise at the admiralty bar, she was elected to the bar council as a representative of young barristers.
But things started to go awry when her parents died in quick succession in the mid-1970s. Her father left his entire £2-million fortune to his brother, explaining his decision in a caustic rider to his will: “I leave no money to Clarissa, who was an afterthought and has twice caused me grievous bodily harm, and of whom I go in fear of my life.”
When Dickson Wright came home one day to find her mother dead, “it was a shock I quite simply couldn’t handle”, she said. She went to her boyfriend’s house and surprised everybody by pouring herself a large whisky. “I remember thinking why have I waited so long? I’ve come home. I felt this enormous sense of relief.”
Her “habit” soon consisted of two bottles of gin a day and a bottle of vodka before she got out of bed.
In 1980, she was charged with professional incompetence and practising without chambers. She was disbarred three years later. Financially, this presented no immediate hardship because her mother had left her a fortune. Yet, by the age of 40, she had blown it all on “yachts in the Caribbean, yachts in the Aegean, aeroplanes to the races — and drink”. At rock bottom, she went to the Department of Social Security to ask for somewhere to live, only to be told: “We’re not here for the likes of you, you know. You’re upper class, you’ve got a law degree.”
Dickson Wright began to cook in other people’s houses. One day, when preparing to cook for a house party, she was on her knees cleaning the floor. “I looked up,” she remembered, “and said: ‘Dear God, if you are up there, please do something.’ ”
The next day she was arrested for refusing a breathalyser. “I was carted down the long drive just as the house party was coming up it. From then on, I was inexorably swept into recovery.”
She owed her proportions to drinking six pints of tonic a day over 12 years, leading to “sticky blood” (a condition normally associated with people taking quinine tablets over a long period) and a very slow metabolism.
Of the ungallant nature of the Two Fat Ladies title, she said: “Well, there are two of us. I have a problem with ‘Ladies’ because it sounds like a public convenience. But which bit do you object to? Are you saying I’m thin?”
Her size could also be a formidable weapon. She once put two would-be muggers in intensive care. “I didn’t go around beating people up,” she said, “but if people were aggressive to me then I hit them.”
A knowledgeable food historian, Dickson Wright argued that the “use of antidepressants is directly relatable to the decrease in use of animal fat”, a stimulant of serotonin.
Following the success of Two Fat Ladies, she was elected a rector of Aberdeen University and opened a restaurant in the grounds of the Duke of Hamilton’s 16th-century Lennoxlove House. Her autobiography, Spilling the Beans (in which she claimed, among other things, that she once had sex behind the speaker’s chair in parliament), was published in 2007. —
My parents had trouble deciding what to call me,’ she explained about her abundant christening