Bookends: A felicitous trouper

When, during rehearsals for a production of Lorca, Celia Imrie expressed an opinion about a bit of business, a fellow player said to her: ‘And what would you know about playing Lorca? You are nothing but a mere TV comedienne.’ She slapped the impertinent thespian’s face, and quite right too. Though proud to bill herself as ‘Light Ent’, Celia Imrie is more accurately a great comic actor, not only in Acorn Antiques and Coronation Street, but also in The School for Scandal and The Way of the World.

When, during rehearsals for a production of Lorca, Celia Imrie expressed an opinion about a bit of business, a fellow player said to her: ‘And what would you know about playing Lorca? You are nothing but a mere TV comedienne.’ She slapped the impertinent thespian’s face, and quite right too. Though proud to bill herself as ‘Light Ent’, Celia Imrie is more accurately a great comic actor, not only in Acorn Antiques and Coronation Street, but also in The School for Scandal and The Way of the World.

Other slaps, if not literal ones, are administered elsewhere in The Happy Hoofer (Hodder & Stoughton, £20). But it would be wrong to call Imrie a slapper, and her slapees remain decently nameless. Anyone who is named here — nearly everyone else in British showbiz, it sometimes seems, especially Pam St Clement, Julie Walters, Victoria Wood, Judy Dench and Alan Bates — is thoroughly licked all over. But it would be equally wrong to call her a licker. As her title almost has it, she is a felicitous trouper.

Imrie likes to boast that she is as educated as Diana, Princess of Wales was. But she is evidently familiar with Aristotle and Brecht.