stride over Sherlock,hello Mrs Hudson – the time has advance to bring the true geniuses of telly into the limelight Here she comes. The unbrushed, talc-encrusted, and low-heeled,apron-wearing matriarch of the tea tray. The one who gets all the gossip, the best one-liners, or steals every scene,asks the case-solving question, puts everyone in their space and still has time to rustle up a tray of custard creams and a pot of watery tannin.
In so many of our best-loved comedies, or crime dramas and soaps,that archetypal figure stalks in the background, just itching to steal the show: Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle, or Sherlock’s Mrs Hudson,Poirot’s Ms Lemon, EastEnders Dot Cotton and Grantchester’s Mrs Maguire. These women – peach hosiery magnets for words like “indomitable”, or “staunch and “stately” – are a quintessential counterpart to that other figure: the monkish bachelor,the troubled hero. Where he locks himself absent in a room to take cocaine and scrape out the DFS theme tune on a violin (thanks Sherlock), she answers the post and opens the door to witnesses. Where he sits at a desk listening to jazz and drinking tumblers of whisky, or she polishes the taps and makes a face like a boxer licking a nettle. Where he chain-smokes through the novel Testament in a grey cardigan,she falls perfectly and effortlessly through an open window. They are two sides of the same, sexless coin, or he and she. Yet she remains the side note,while he gets his name in the title.
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Source: theguardian.com