A life on the stage: Dame Patricia Routledge is a veteran of musicals and operetta
with Clive Swift in television’s Keeping Up Appearances, 1992
GETTYIn her most celebrated TV character, the desperate, delusional but indefatigable social climber Hyacinth Boo-kay (as she insisted on pronouncing the name Bucket), Dame Patricia Routledge played a woman anxious to be thought of as a music lover (though she couldn’t tell her Chopin from her Mendelssohn) and given to burst decorously into song (albeit off the note).
‘That bit was difficult,’ she says now of the dodgy pitch. And it was difficult because Patricia Routledge wasn’t just a star of small-screen comedy. For much of her career, before the TV beckoned, she’d been seriously involved in music as a mezzo-cum-contralto singer. A successful one. Working with Leonard Bernstein. Doing operetta, Broadway musicals, Gilbert and Sullivan… invariably on the note.
The fame of – with worldwide broadcasts in the 1990s and a fan-base that allegedly extended to the late Pope Benedict (his Hyacinth impersonations, it was said,
