Dame June - a Treasure for any month of the year

It’s a well-worn cliché but, when Dame June Whitfield died at the tail end of 2018 there was a genuine end-of-an-era aura around the announcement. She was one of the last remaining stalwarts of BBC Radio light entertainment in the 1950s, and went on to lend sterling TV support in the ‘60s to established stars such as Tony Hancock, Jimmy Edwards, Arthur Askey and Benny Hill. But all this was before my time. Well before!

In the Seventies, Whitfield remained a familiar face on telly. A bit more versatile than another of my Treasures, Pat Coombs, she featured in loads of comedy shows, from The Goodies to The Dick Emery Show. She was too big a name to be a mere short sketch stooge but anything requiring some proper acting and perfect timing of a funny line, June was the one who you were gonna call. 

For years I automatically associated her with Terry Scott. The moon-faced comedian was an even bigger part of my childhood. I remember watching him as a six year-old with Hugh Lloyd in Hugh and I then The Gnomes of Dulwich and he had a few series of themed sketch shows called Scott On…, with June as the primary female comrade-in-arms. My 1973 diary records that I watched some of these programmes but it was the arrival the following year of Happy Ever After that cemented their professional TV relationship.

In what was arguably the golden era of TV comedy, much of which has lost none of its ability to make me chuckle, Happy Ever After was hardly a beacon of brilliance, and yet it ran for five years. It was surpassed in terms of both longevity and harmlessness by Terry and June which provided more of the same, albeit in a different average suburban street with a different average suburban surname. The ‘naffometer’ reading was off the scale but there was usually something to smile at. With Scott’s childish naivete and permanently sunny outlook, and Whitfield’s more practical wife struggling to keep him out of trouble, it became part of the BBC’s midweek furniture well into the ‘80s, by which time it had become a byword for old-fashioned, old-school comedy. ‘A bit Terry and June’ was a phrase I’d use for something safe, undemanding and not particularly funny, but it was hardly June Whitfield’s fault, and it didn’t stop her showing up in a great range of programmes. Most of them were off my personal radar but I did catch her in a 1984 episode of Minder, also featuring young Ray Winstone and Jimmy Nail. However, in 1992 came a role which would make her more popular than any other show since the early sixties.

Launched on BBC2, Absolutely Fabulous quickly became one of the network’s biggest hits. While most of the humour was generated by the joyously outrageous characters like Edina, Patsy and Bubbles, the show would not have been the same without the strait-laced daughter Saffy (Julia Sawalha) and her slightly dotty gran played by June Whitfield. They had some delightful scenes together but often it was June whose almost throwaway lines disguised sharp barbs which so effectively punctured the balloon of pomposity and ego that doubled as the brains of the two leads such as this classic put-down.

Sadly, for me after two or three series, Ab Fab lost its element of surprise and with it what made the show so original and funny. I haven’t seen the movie and the periodic one-offs just don’t do it for me. Only la Whitfield continued to make me smile, fussing around the kitchen unfazed by the appalling Patsy and guest stars like Lulu or Emma Bunton on whom Ab Fab came to depend. Her small stature only served to make her character greater. I saw her once, in Broadcasting House back in ’98, only then realising how short she was.

In between those sporadic specials with Jennifer Saunders et al, June Whitfield, by then a CBE, made many more appearances on the screen. I never watched her on Last of the Summer Wine – its personal appeal having faded three decades earlier – nor did I witness her sprinkling a dose of stardust on either EastEnders (as a nun) or Coronation Street. However, I did enjoy her cameo as the cheeky ‘Minnie the Menace’ with Bernard Cribbins and David Tennant in Doctor Who’s 2009 two-parter The End of Time and we were treated to two Junes for the price of one in an otherwise lacklustre 2014 Jonathan Creek, portraying whimsical twin sisters.

Whitfield was belatedly made a Dame in 2018 and died almost a year later. At 93, she left a massive legacy of roles, be they on radio, stage, TV or the silver screen which surely few can match.