Wendy Craig - Perennially Harassed Housewife

I can’t with any honesty proclaim Wendy Craig to be one of my favourite TV actors but for longevity she is hard to beat. She also has a special place in my own history of live entertainment. At the age of seven I was taken up to London for a post-Christmas treat: Peter Pan, the first pantomime I can actually remember. I still recall the awe I felt sitting in the Circle watching ‘Peter’ flying above the Scala Theatre stage. Yes, flying! And who was in that green pixie costume? Yes, Wendy Craig. 

A little research reveals that her co-star – presumably as Captain Hook - was the great Alastair Sim, but it’s only the title character’s aerial exploits I remember from that matinee performance. Even at such a tender age I knew Craig very well from the telly. While most of the situation comedies on British TV at the time seemed to be awful American imports, one exception was the BBC’s Not In Front of the Children. Watching this clip more than five decades later, the memories all come flooding back: Wendy’s Sixties hairdo, Ronald Hines as her hubby and the two young daughters. Suddenly I’m transported back to 54 The Meadows on a Friday evening, ‘Cinderella Rockafella’ at number one and facing bedtime before The Troubleshooters comes on. 

Not… ran for four series before Wendy Craig switched to ITV in 1971 for another Richard Waring suburban family sitcom And Mother Makes Three. She was once more in harassed mum mode, which she subsequently reprised, now remarried, for the sequel And Mother Makes Five, although I don’t think that series was in the Smith household’s repertoire. Not only could she probably play that role in her sleep but she wrote a number of episodes, too. 

Wendy’s pseudonymous scripts were also in evidence later in her career but I’m pretty sure writing responsibilities for her next major role, possibly the one for which she is best remembered, was Carla Lane. As with much of her work I have mixed memories of Butterflies. There were some lovely lines but nothing much ever happened and there was a tad too much rambling philosophising for my liking. However, it got off to a good start. 

Craig portrayed Ria, yet another slightly ditsy but devoted housewife, this time in leafy Cheltenham. Husband Ben was a likeable but conservative dentist played in inimitable style by Geoffrey Palmer, happy with his lot. Ria, however, was not, and strayed into the arms of suave, wealthy Leonard. I know that the adultery was a crucial part of the set-up but this old-fashioned eighteen year-old felt sorry for Ben and hated Ria’s businessman bit on the side. Ben was not entirely happy with everything; his wife’s consistently disastrous cooking was a constant bone of contention and hilarity, not only with Ben but also their adolescent sons. It was notable that the male family members were rarely moved to use the oven themselves, but of course the microwave had yet to be invented! I also quite liked the scenes where Wendy’s Ria lost the plot, taking revenge on the kitchen and her tedious existence, much to the amusement of Nicholas Lyndhurst and Andrew Hall. 

She co-wrote and starred in another sitcom, Laura and Disorder, in the late Eighties. Her name was enough to attract my attention but based on the series opener, for all Wendy’s efforts, I considered it dreadful. I wasn’t alone. Her following dramatic roles were in series more suited to Mum’s tastes than mine. I think I saw the occasional episode of Nanny when at home from uni but never watched her in the Noughties Heartbeat spin-off The Royal. The closest I came was on a September break to Scarborough when I almost had an altercation with a giant cherrypicker used to film the panoramic North Bay opening sequence. 

In 2010 I was willing to give the BBC revival of Reggie Perrin a go. It wasn’t a patch on the David Nobbs original but Martin Clunes made a fair fist of playing the grumpy Reggie, careful not to try and emulate the wonderful Leonard Rossiter. One new character was Reggie’s mother, who it transpired was none other than Wendy Craig whose comedy timing was as ever impeccable. 

In the last decade, it’s been a pleasure just finding her cropping up in unlikely places. I’m no aficionado of Emmerdale but even I pricked up my ears when in 2018, aged 82, she made an entrance in the soap as love interest for the even older Freddie Jones. Sadly it wasn’t destined for an extended run. In any case, Freddie himself died the following year. Wendy also popped up in the second series of ITV’s superior cold case crime drama Unforgotten. 

I don’t remember whether or not she, or even her daughter Holly Aird, was a murderer but hers was a welcome addition to the cast, even if the days of playing stressed-out mums in domestic sitcoms are well behind her.

Geoffrey Palmer - TV's Greatest Grump

When it comes to a lugubrious demeanour and laconic devil-may-care middle-class drawl, Geoffrey Palmer takes the biscuit. He is a shortbread, rich tea and Hob-Nob all wrapped up in one single, perfect package. Narrating BBC2’s tongue-in-cheek Noughties documentary series Grumpy Old Men was a role he was surely born to play. He is on record as saying: “I am not grumpy, I just look this way”, but that’s all you need in the acting business. If I’ve ever seen him crack a smile, that moment of magic is long forgotten. 

In the ‘60s he played a variety of senior cops, professors, lawyers and doctors, and such roles seemed to follow throughout his career. I probably first saw him, like so many familiar character actors, in series such as Z Cars and Doctor Who but it was as a physician that I definitely watched him in The Liver Birds, Fawlty Towers and, a few years earlier, Colditz. 

In the wartime drama, he may only have been a minor role but it was an important one, especially in the gut-wrenching 1972 episode when Michael Bryant’s prisoner character Wing Commander Marsh attempted to escape by feigning madness. Even my eleven year-old self was emotionally gripped when Marsh immersed himself so deeply that his mental health deteriorated for real.                                                            

Nevertheless it was in comedy roles that he made his name in the Seventies. For me the name Geoffrey Palmer first entered my vocabulary during the first run of The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin in ’76. I’ll never forget Leonard Rossiter’s tour-de-force in the lead role over three series but two other characters ran him close for laughs and catchphrases. John Barron’s stereotypical boss CJ didn’t get where he was today without belittling his employees, then there was Reggie’s brother-in-law Jimmy, played by Palmer. His Farage-like determination to lead Britain back to some kind of right-wing utopia was matched only by his staccato phrases and sheer incompetence, prompting his catchphrase “Bit of a cock-up on the  …front”. He also delivered one of the funniest monologues in sitcom history, a definite grumpy old man in the making. 

Rossiter died suddenly in 1984, but the character of Jimmy lived on, sort of. Reggie Perrin writer David Nobbs wrote Fairly Secret Army for Channel 4, so had to subtly change Jimmy to Harry, although his traits and politics were basically the same. It wasn’t as funny but Geoffrey Palmer was appropriately inept and stiff-upper-lipped. 

TV comedy in the Seventies and Eighties enjoyed a whole raft of supporting actors from which to call upon to play the stodgy officer-class stooge to funny men like Terry Scott, Eric Sykes, Richard Briers, Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Michael Crawford’s Frank Spencer and so on. Reginald Marsh, Geoffrey Chater, Richard Wattis, Allan Cuthbertson and Henry McGee were undoubted masters of the part but Geoffrey Palmer possessed a touch more star quality, even on the 1982 Kenny Everett Christmas Show. In particular, his cameo as General Haig in the climactic episode of Blackadder Goes Forth was absolutely spot-on. 

By this time, he was a regular in more significant sitcom roles. I don’t think he actually uttered “Cock-up on the catering front” in relation to his screen wife Ria’s notorious attempts at cooking but as the long–suffering Ben in Butterflies the fifty-something Geoffrey Palmer finally moved into new territory. As usual, Carla Lane’s star was a woman, the redoubtable Wendy Craig, but much of the humour came from Ben’s dry comments and his relationship with the two sons, including a young Nicholas Lyndhurst. 

I often found Carla Lane’s sitcoms uneasy viewing, with too many words and main characters I struggled to warm to. Maybe it was because I’m a bloke, maybe not, but nonetheless the first few series of Butterflies were essential viewing. Also in the ‘80s Geoffrey switched to ITV for a few series written by the prolific Renwick/Marshall partnership. You don’t have to have watched it to imagine him as the Foreign Secretary in Whoops Apocalypse then he was the newspaper editor shafted by the brash Robert Hardy in Hot Metal. I didn’t tune in every week but I remember feeling sorry for his character. 

For many, it’s his part opposite Judi Dench in As Time Goes By for which he’s most fondly remembered. The humour was a bit wistful and gentle for my liking but I know Mum liked it for those very reasons. Palmer was well into his seventies when the series ended in 2005 but the scenes always seemed to be him and Dench just sitting on a sofa reminiscing, so not exactly physically arduous. 

The wry deadpan delivery was ideal for situation or sketch comedy but that military bearing has also held him in good stead for crime drama over the decades. The parts always seemed alike, be they in The Professionals, Inspector Morse or Bergerac. In 2008 he had a cameo playing Lord Scarman visiting a mistrustful Gene Hunt’s cop shop in Ashes to Ashes but he seemed to be on auto-pilot, doing what he does so well. 

However, for all his memorable roles on screen, one of his most enduring contributions to television history came in the Eighties and Nineties when his face was hidden. From 1986 he became the voice of Audi in their TV adverts. Even now I can’t see the words ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ without hearing that lovely laconic voice. Thierry Henry may have injected some va-va-voom into the car commercial sector but it’s Geoffrey Palmer OBE whose vocal engine purrs to perfection.