Happy 87th birthday today to the icon that is June Whitfield CBE!
She has, in her long career, played ditzy "Eff"in The Glums, the long-suffering wife in Terry and June, and various characters alongside such greats as Jimmy Edwards, Tony Hancock, Roy Hudd, Arthur Askey, Frankie Howerd, Benny Hill and the Carry On team. She has stuck her tongue firmly in her perfectly-crafted cheek for "cult" roles with Julian Clary, French & Saunders, and in Dr Who, culminating in possibly her best-loved role as Gran in Ab Fab.
She has sung with big and small bands, played deadly serious as well as light entertainment parts; the woman can do anything - yet, who knew she once played a bacterium?
With the modern craze for health'n'safety, and recurrent "plague scares" (bird flu, MRSA, ebola etc) in the tabloids, it's easy to forget that in our own recent past even the most rudimentary facts about contamination of food were felt sufficiently misunderstood that public information films such as these were commonplace. This, of course, is more than just that - it is a stroke of camp genius:
Now wash your hands!
June Whitfield on IMDB
J'adore June x
ReplyDeleteWho doesn't? Jx
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