‘We us ...tha Ed to send ourselves up t was the British way’
IT WAS ONE of the most treasured comedies of the 1980s. Repeats of ’Allo ’Allo! – with its farcical plots, crackpot characters and absurd catchphrases – still trigger warm nostalgic memories for a generation. Only now they come with woke warnings. “It’s silly nonsense,” says Sue Hodge, the actress who played man-hungry waitress Mimi Labonq in the long-running wartime sitcom.
“People are frightened to say anything these days in case someone gets offended.
“Even with pantomimes. Aladdin might be banned for cultural appropriation. It’s nuts.
“It’s a traditional fable which has been performed as a panto for more than 200 years.”
Sue, 65, who has a streaming cold from playing the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, goes on: “Buttons used to greet the Fairy Godmother with ‘Goodness it’s Ann Widdecombe’. But we can’t say that any more for reasons that defy logic.
“It’s just a bit of fun. They won’t shut up and let the rest of us enjoy ourselves!
“And I can’t understand why everything is aimed at people under 40 now.
“Millions of people aren’t getting the comedy they want – good family entertainment, no foul language, just pure comedy that leaves you screaming with laughter.
“There is nothing clever, witty or warm about most modern comedy. It’s just cheap and offensive.”
Comedy runs through Sue’s veins like “Southend” through seaside rock.
The Essex-born actress made her TV debut aged 14 on the Dick Emery Show in 1973.
“Dick was lovely, like a kindly grandfather.
“I did my first panto that year in Jack And The Beanstalk at the Cliff ’s Pavilion, Westcliff-on-sea, with Charles Hawtrey and Peter Glaze from Crackerjack.”
She’d trained as a dancer from the age of five, “But when I got to 14, I stopped growing…” She is 4ft 9in.
After attending the Corona Theatre School in west London, Sue had a four-year-run in Toad Of Toad Hall at the Old Vic.
But it was her next role, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that was the game-changer.
Sue played fairy Peaseblossom alongside Richard E Grant as Lysander and Natasha Richardson’s Helena in the New Shakespeare Company production, at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park.
Time Out described Grant’s performance as “more wooden than the surrounding Regent’s Park trees”. So Sue affectionately presented him with a spoof award, an inscribed plank. “I asked if the ‘E’ in his name stood for elm,” she laughs.
However, one audience member who lapped up tiny Peaseblossom’s gigantic performance, was David Croft – co-writer, with Jonathan Lloyd, of ’Allo ’Allo! Croft later said that if Sue had been born two generations earlier, she’d have been “a female Charlie Chaplin”.
Sue recalls: “He cast me that August, but nobody told me about it until February. I was in rep in Colchester and got a call from my agent, saying I had to go to David Croft’s house the next day.
“I said, ‘I can’t, it’s the end-of-show wrap party’ and she yelled back, ‘Get yourself down there, madam!’”
Sue, who joined in series four, laughs: “By the end of that year I couldn’t walk down the street without someone shouting, ’Allo Mimi’…”
Before that, her biggest screen role had been playing one of the Forces Of Darkness in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian 1985 comedy Brazil.
But Croft and Lloyd’s daft farce ’Allo ’Allo – a parody of the BBC drama Secret Army – was a different level of bonkers. Set in Nazi-occupied France, it revolved around café owner René Artois, a reluctant Resistance hero and unlikely sex symbol played by Gorden Kaye.
The series ran for 85 episodes over 10 years and is repeated to this day. As are its catchphrases – “Good moaning” and “Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once”.
Why was it so popular? “Because people were allowed to laugh out loud with comedy legends,” Sue says
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‘‘ People are crying out for comedy now, but they don’t make them like this any more
out now for comedy, but they don’t make ke this anymore.” Pocket-rocket Mimi Paree) fitted in with fellow waitress Yvette Blanche, Gestapo creep Herr Flick and the ought-after Fallen Madonna with the Big s. make-up was amazing,” Sue recalls. urned me into a bald-headed butler with th. I was so much like Richard O’brien, I like I was going to break into the Time Another time I was hanging upside down the café as a Patagonian fruit bat. ll have to buy my book to find out about ng nun episode. I had a stunt double who d for doing nothing! That’s all I’m going to ending up doing all my own stunts.” classic scene involved Lt Gruber and l von Strohm in ill-fitting false teeth. only did it alter their appearance but also oices,” she laughs. “They couldn’t speak!
d always wanted to get the show done on kes, but with them it got up to take 32! dience were in hysterics. We all were.” final episode aired in 1992, but 15 years later the ’Allo ’Allo! stage play opened at the London Palladium, penned by Croft. It ran there for six months, then toured the provinces before hitting Australia, New Zealand and Bulgaria – where the show had aired 23 consecutive years.
Sue was born in Orsett, Essex. “My father was an unwell man, he had died by the time
I was 15. My mother was a John Lewis upholsterer. I’ve got one younger sister, a therapist – that’s handy, Garry, isn’t it?”
SHE married Keith “Paddington” Richards in 2003, whom she met at the Theatre Royal, Chichester, when he was musical director for Jack & The Beanstalk. “I hated his song for my character, so I asked him to rewrite it. Two years later he proposed…”
Keith praises Sue’s big heart and helpful nature, but claims that she and Vicki Michelle “keep the French wine economy booming”.
When they started dating, David Croft invited them to dinner. “I think he wanted to vet me,” he jokes. Sue was also close to René star Gorden Kaye. “Some people found him difficult to work with – he wasn’t. I watched him every night and it was like watching a masterclass.”
Kaye died in 2017. “I knew he was going to go but when it happened it was devastating.
“He was the best man at my wedding in Australia – he was best man twice because we had another ceremony here.”
In 2015, Sue was invited to take part in a comedy cruise with Jeffrey Holland, Sue Holderness and the late John “Boycey” Challis.
On the ship she told the director about her idea for a stage show, which became Mimi & Me (’Allo Again). He advised her to write her book, Mimi’s Memoir.
“I self-published it but then my agent sent the manuscript to publisher Austin Macauley and they’ve taken it on. It’s going really well.
“I’m putting together the sequel now. I don’t really relax. I’m busy all the time, re-inventing things, re-inventing myself. I love writing, I love musical shows. I’m patron of Lamberhurst
School of Theatre Dance near Tunbridge Wells. I like teaching younger generations, passing on my experience and knowledge.
“I’m helping create the Easter panto, Alice In Easterland, directing and co-writing it.
“Then I have two cruises and summer school with the kids. Keeping busy.
“I enjoy working with the younger generation, I don’t want to stop!”
She misses great TV comedy though.
“People can’t understand the other style – that’s why they’re still watching Dad’s Army.
“I like Gavin & Stacey, that’s a good script. But the rest… Bring back decent, good old British humour – funny faces people know and love.
“Jasper Carrott, Russ Abbot, Mick Miller is brilliant…they won’t be replaced.
“We used to send ourselves up, that’s the British way. It’s our humour, laughing at ourselves. We need to learn how to do it again.
“We can’t do things we should be able to do anymore and it’s not right.”