Aw-uh, it's Pat Coombs!

I can’t identify the first time I saw Pat Coombs on the box. Like The Beatles, Smarties and Mum’s knitting needles, she just seemed to be a constant and comforting presence throughout my early childhood, not so much an actress as a benevolent sorceress dispensing spells of happiness towards a child like myself being treated to grown-ups’ television.

For some reason I was allowed to stay up for Up Pompeii in the early Seventies. The Carry On-style sexual innuendo may have passed harmlessly over my young ginger bonce but Frankie Howerd was such a visual comic and so appealed to adults and kids alike. I would titter along with the best of them. I almost certainly would have seen this great scene with Pat as an actual sorceress called Tarta (oh, the puns!) in which she very nearly stole the show from under the star’s nose.

Born in the Twenties, Pat Coombs inevitably made her name as a stooge to the leading radio comedians of the Fifties, like Arthur Askey, Bob Monkhouse and Charlie Chester. She may have trained at LAMDA but her natural Camberwell twang served her well on the Home Service. I guess she had what you’d call a great face for radio. With that nose she was never going to compete with Liz Taylor, Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn. Cinema’s loss was domestic broadcasting’s gain and as a character comedy actress she found her true niche.

Obviously her radio career was way before my time but as a child I grew to recognise her smiley eyes and distinctive voice, especially her trademark “Oh-ah” expression of shocked surprise. Funnily enough, Typhoo Tea cottoned on to her catchphrase in the Eighties, hiring her for her “Oo”s in a TV ad campaign. Years earlier, she reminded me ever so slightly of my Nanna Grimble. Not in her looks but perhaps it was something about the voice, hairstyle, handbag and ‘screw-on’ hats that triggered the association.

Coombs tended to play the archetypal downtrodden London housewife, under the thumb not necessarily of her hubby but of the womenfolk. Irene Handl, Thora Hird or Peggy Mount may have been the outspoken battleaxes but it was with Coombs’ character that we would often have the greatest affinity.

I think I may have seen her in the 1969 sitcom Wild Wild Women (I certainly remember the theme tune) and definitely on ITV’s hit comedy On The Buses at around the same time, although I don’t think it was a ‘must-see’ in our household. The spin-off Don’t Drink the Water certainly wasn’t, nor were Pat’s other ITV vehicles in the Seventies and Eighties.

Instead, it was her cameo appearances in shows such as Sykes, the Dick Emery Show, Noel’s House Party and Johnny Speight’s In Sickness and In Health which were always welcome. I’m not sure whether or not I watched this particular edition of Les Dawson’s Blankety Blank but there’s Pat on the back row in what must have been 1985, given the fab prize of ZX Spectrum computer games, some splendid period-piece hair-dos and the reference to a new BBC series called “The Eastenders”.

I did become a devotee of the aforementioned soap for a number of years, including the nine months in which Coombs played the part of downtrodden spinster Marge (typecast?). Amidst the welter of storylines concerned with racism, AIDS and domestic violence, Marge was introduced specifically to provide much-needed comic relief in light-hearted exchanges with Mo Butcher, Ethel Skinner and Dot Cotton, queen of the laundrette. Unfortunately the experiment was deemed a failure, Marge jarring too much with the heavy stuff and she was packed off into the sunset. At least she wasn’t bumped off by the Mitchell brothers.

In 2002 Pat Coombs left us for real. Suddenly, when seeking elderly London women smiling through adversity and blessed with comic timing, casting directors for TV and radio had to widen their net. Their number one choice was no longer available. She is much missed.