Miriam Margolyes is on the road, bringing joy to every corner of the kingdom, and aren’t we the lucky ones? It’s a kingdom she no longer has much time for, if she ever did, however hard the coiners of trite phrases try to dress her in the garb of a ‘national treasure’. When the tour is over she’s off quick-smart to a new life in Tuscany, where British folk who dislike their native land have always found a bed.
There’s a book out as well, so there is no excuse for not paying attention. As dozens of chat shows have tried to persuade us, she is a bona fide ‘character’, fitting into the English pageant somewhere between Lady Godiva and a bearded lady. Have your tummy tickled as she farts merrily along the rolling English road.
She loves farting, does Margolyes, almost as much as talking about it. Oral sex is also up her strasse. It’s reassuring to know those three years at Cambridge weren’t entirely wasted. It was at Cambridge, representing Newnham College on University Challenge six decades ago, that she first backed into the spotlight, treating television viewers to the f-word. What fun to be so liberated, and splash rude words around like champers at Ascot.
She is also a lesbian, and a Jewish lesbian to boot. Not that she’s proud to be Jewish right now. The Israeli government’s response to Hamas atrocities has exhausted even her resources of indignation. ‘I’ve stopped believing in God’, she told the Observer; a slight the Almighty may take in their stride.
Opposition to events in Gaza ‘makes me moral’, she declares. And there can be no being more moral than a potty-mouthed woman in her ninth decade who flaunts her flatulence as a badge of honour.
Goodness, what a thumping bore she is. To lift a line from Karl Kraus, that scourge of Viennese society, the lady has nothing to say and is determined to say it. Though when she proclaims ‘the English don’t like Jews’ as a self-evident truth, it is permissible to kick a few stones back.
Would Margolyes have grown up more happily among the olive groves of Tuscany, say, or the beer halls of Bavaria? After centuries of competitive Jew-hatred Poland and Russia still jostle for the much-coveted gold in the anti-Semitic Olympics, and the Irish are now giving Austria a mighty challenge for the bronze. There are many worse places to be Jewish than England.
But we mustn’t call her unpatriotic, though she adopted Australian citizenship years ago. In idle hours, when she’s not clearing her bowels, or reading Dickens, Margolyes salutes the flag. ‘I love the King’, she says. ‘I think we have a rapport’, adding ‘I hope he would say we do’. He probably thinks of little else.
To plod through life with such apparent candour and so little self-knowledge is quite a feat
So why is this preposterous mummer granted so easy a ride? She is a comic actress of some talent, true, but this country has supplied many gifted comic performers. We are known throughout the world to be a funny lot, and our women can be as amusing as the men. She makes an easy interviewee because she grins and gurns, and says things that are considered ‘edgy’. Not daring, though. To be truly daring in the world of sleb chat shows would mean saying Nigel Farage isn’t all bad, or showing as much sympathy for the victims of Pakistani rape gangs as transsexuals. Such things are not in the script.
Her documentaries about foreign adventures have – spoiler alert – revealed quite a lot about her, and not so much about the places she passed through. Rednecks in Arkansas! Who ever would have thought it? Rugby in New Zealand! It’ll never catch on.
To plod through life with such apparent candour and so little self-knowledge is quite a feat. And to think she was pally with Barry Humphries and Ken Dodd, two giants of comedy. Yet no trace of their stardust touched the hem of her gown. Humphries, speaking through the voices of his much-loved characters, could be magnificently rude. Unimpressed by the orthodoxies of a censorious age, he was also stupendously funny. Doddy was everything Margolyes is not: generous, witty and wise. Like Humphries, he carried the audience with him. Like Humphries, he was never deceived by stardom.
There is room for coarseness in comedy – Bernard Manning was a superb teller of filthy jokes. Margolyes is merely vulgar, and let’s be honest, she hasn’t improved with the years. She knows her Shakespeare, this ageing trouper, so she will be familiar with the tale of Antony and Cleopatra, ‘a lass unparalleled’. Behold Miriam Margolyes: flatulent bore, and prat unparalleled.
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