
Patricia Routledge, who has died at the age of 96, could have become a TV institution earlier than she did – she had a part in Coronation Street when it was still in black and white in 1961. She was the foxy cafe owner, Sylvia Snape, flirting with tradesmen and upselling cheese baps, and everything about her – from her frisson to the fact that she had her own set, a little cafe – screamed regular-character energy. But she “just knew, inside, that I needed to have other adventures,” she said on Parkinson, nearly 40 years later. She then spent the 50s, 60s and 70s mainly on stage, in jaunty-sounding musicals (How’s the World Treating You?) lost to posterity. She had a stunning voice that the small screen rarely found a proper use for, and was a longtime member of the RSC.
Mrs Snape was the last time she played the romantic interest, and the first time, she said later, she’d been offered a role that wasn’t significantly older than her. An episode of Z-Carsand a couple of appearances in Steptoe and Son later, she was back as the title character in Plain Jane in 1977, an extravagantly weird, extremely British rumination on the class system (maybe this is unfair, but the inquiry seems to be: who would have thought that a working-class woman who isn’t pretty would know so much?).
She was 40 before she considered herself to have an acting career, she said once, and in her mid-50s, by the time she started working with Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood, both of whom would have called her a muse, if people who wrote with their kind of self-deprecation would ever have used a word like “muse”. Routledge did Bennett’s stand-alone TV play, A Woman of No Importance, in 1982, in which she’s an inflexible, overbearing spinster who dies alone. Her performance was almost certainly part of the inspiration for Bennett’s groundbreaking monologue series, Talking Heads, which first aired in 1988, with Routledge first playing Irene Ruddock – another overbearing spinster who ends up in prison – and then Miss Fozzard who, through a series of quite normal events, ends up in a transactional relationship with a foot fetishist (“very kinky”, she said in 2007. “I didn’t really enjoy it”).
She loved performing Bennett, saying later: “The fact that his work is microcosmic, he sees the world in a grain of sand – and the sympathy, the humanity. I know those women. It’s in one’s bloodstream, almost. There but for the grace of God, one could be one of those tragic spinsters, a lone person fighting bureaucracy.” It was commented upon – well into the 90s, and with dispiriting regularity – that Routledge herself had never married, and perhaps this was Bennett’s jumping off point, into his imaginative universe in which not having a husband was the worst thing that could happen to a woman. In fact, she didn’t seem to mind much that she’d never found the prospect of a man “quite exciting enough, as an alternative” to her career, and Bennett definitely fell for her as an actor rather than an emblem of thwarted femininity. Sending her a script once, he wrote: “I’m sorry if you find there are echoes, but I can hear your voice.”
Around the same time, in 1985, in fabulous counterpoint, Victoria Wood wrote her as Kitty, this brassy, garrulous creation who could bring furniture to life with her comic charisma. In 1990, Hyacinth Bucket – who insisted her surname was pronounced “bouquet”, a weirdly memorable detail we’ll still have long after we’ve forgotten how to pronounce our own names – arrived in Keeping Up Appearances. A sitcom of manners, it was very different; a grotesque, really, but plainly tapping into a Routledge quality: that she could yammer away for ever, and even if the entire dramatic point was to be totally unlistenable, you nevertheless wanted to listen. That’s quite an elegant and enigmatic art, and her own origin story, about her relationship to comedy – that she fell in love with it as a child, going to the Argyll music hall in Birkenhead every Monday night – doesn’t really nail down her uniqueness.
Hetty Wainthropp, an adaptation of the novel Missing Persons by David Cook, started as a two-hour adaptation for Yorkshire TV. Fun but clunky, it became episodic for four seasons. Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, on the BBC, saw Routledge through to the end of the 20th century. She was brisk and redoubtable and could see through humanity like a pane of glass but liked to help it out all the same, “flying the flag for the senior citizen”, she said later, though she considered herself “younger than springtime”.
“Getting a performance together seems like starting on a long walk,” she said as Wainthropp reached the end of its run. “There in the distance, there is a tiny speck of a character, that you have an idea of in your imagination, and bit by bit, you come closer to each other. If you manage to meet up, link arms, and go off in the same direction, then you’re in business.”