They gave her time to get herself tidied up, and when they brought her into the studio, the first thing she said was, "Oh dear, I have no idea what I'm doing here, I stepped out of the car, and there I was lying prostitute on the pavement." The audience roared. Her family were all there, and had been taken to the studios earlier in the day, but sadly her mother and her brother Harold had died by this time. Auntie Agnes was there, though, a real favourite of Hylda's, and one of the high spots of the show was that Hylda and her brother and sisters did the 'six Lancashire steps' with the clog dance. She made her own music hall debut at the age of 10, developing a popular act in which she sang, clog danced and performed impersonations. By the age of 14 she was already writing, producing and performing her own comedy shows. Her most popular music hall act was as a northern gossip, performing a monologue alongside a silent, sullen companion named “Big Cynthia”, almost always played by a man in drag. Either way, this is shaping up to be another tough, inter-governmental battle. Nicola Sturgeon is only too well aware of that. She knows, y’know.

Sadly, she was by now already suffering the early effects of dementia, struggling to remember lines and instead relying on cue cards and whispered prompts from her fellow actors. She fell out with LWT after slipping on some spilt beer on set and breaking her leg, appearing in a wheelchair in one episode. When she sued for compensation, it brought the third series to an abrupt end, but also marked the end of her TV acting career. I remember sitting in my dressing room thinking that I'd been an actor for eight years without making the limelight and had been in variety five weeks, hadn't uttered a word and was at the London Palladium," he says. Even now I hear voices on television and recognise them from rep in Darlington. I saw Charles 20 years ago in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Civic. He hadn't changed a bit."The infection may, for example, mutate into variants which are still transmissible, but less virulent. Ending not with a bang, but a whimper. En passant, she has fought and won a Scottish Parliamentary election, while shrugging off the unsolicited offers of advice and assistance, delivered in public by her predecessor as FM and party leader. Some material has not been retained: duplicates of scripts etc., some truly ephemeral items of correspondence, and some unannotated printed music scores have been destroyed. Audio tapes originally accompanying the collection have been transferred to the North West Sound Archive.

And, of course, all those malapropisms. This is where a word is substituted for another with a similar sound which creates a comic effect. The term comes from the character Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s 18th century play The Rivals. “Promise to illiterate this fellow from your memory,” she said. However, glancing ahead, there are one or two issues on the horizon which may further challenge that hard-won reputation for sangfroid.The store became Oxendale and Barker, then just Barkers, with no apostrophe to suggest how singular it has all become. In her late seventies her dementia worsened and in 1981 she moved to a care home for retired performers in London. Her final two years were spent in hospital, where she died in May 1986, at the age of 81. For a generation of TV and film viewers, Hylda Baker will be forever remembered as a feisty and sharp-tongued performer whose mangled monologues and comical facial contortions had us rolling in the aisles. You're the One That I Want – Full Official Chart History". Official Charts Company. Official Charts Company.