IN MEMORIAM WENDY RICHARD 1943 - 2009

She has gone.

She portrayed "Pauline" on the British Soap Opera EastEnders for more than twenty years. She was so tough politically that she refused to read an EastEnders script that required Pauline to give a speech critical of Margaret Thatcher. She left EastEnders in 2006 when the producers thought it would be a good idea to remarry Pauline after her first husband's death. Apparently not. Once, we hear, that the director handed her a broom to sweep the street in front of a background shot, and she refused to sweep.

"Pauline" would have had a better life if she had not been a character in British Soap Opera. The writers had to keep their audience, who were British after all, coming back, so Pauline endured the heart aches of three or four regular persons. Her first husband had an affair: Pauline beaned him with a frying pan; he went to jail; he died -- probably grateful to be out of reach of that frying pan. A son died of AIDS. She died in the snow of a heart attack. Some friends died in various heartbreaking ways, including one who died at her birthday celebration.

I first encountered her when the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? (1972 - 1984) appeared on public TV channel 7 KUED in Salt Lake City. She portrayed "Miss Shirley Brahms" an assistant shop girl on the Ladies Undies counter in Grace Brothers, a mythological London department store. One writer / producer of that classic of British low humor once described the show as self-cleaning pornography. The writers fill its scripts with comparison contrast word choices and puns.

She once did, as part of a Being Served episode, a radio play in the which she portrayed "Busty Sa,l" a country barmaid. A man asks for a drink; the sound effects guy pours a drink that sounds like a minute-long urination after a hard day's work in the steel mill, and she says without missing a beat, "My! You needed that didn't you?"

A Flaming Swoosh of a workmate came in on roller skates and announced about his experience on the road to work, "I was bent over adjusting my nuts when . . ."

"Mrs. Betty hair never the same color twice Slocombe," who served as Miss Brahms' senior on the counter, would make comments about her feline pet along the lines of "Will this meeting take long? If I don't exercise my pussy exactly at 6:30, it tears up the parlor."

Shirley had an east-end London accent as thick as (to borrow a line from Blackadder, another British sitcom) a whale blubber omelet. In that memorable 1977 episode when the Windsors announced a Royal Jubilee Walkabout Visit to Grace Brothers, she observed optimistically in high cockney, "Royals have married commoners,"

"Yes," Mrs. Slocombe replied as politely as possible, "but not DEAD common."

She reprised in 1992 her "Shirley Brahms" in an Are You Being Served? sequel entitled in the United Kingdom Grace and Favour and in America Are You Being Served? Again! The gimmick in this series involved some of the department store characters inheriting a country house bed and breakfast called MillStone Manner. MillStone in the Biblical around your neck sense.

By this time, she had superstared on EastEnders for eight seasons, so she could demand that they sophisticated Shirley. Well, at least Shirley thought she had more sophisticated which made it even more funny. She finds herself giving testimony in a country court room which according to the British Custom featured several judges. She tried to flirt on the stand with a male judge and instead caught the eye of an admiring female judge.

When she earned a lifetime achievement award for her career in British Television, she thanked the public for loving "Pauline" and thanked producer Jeremy Lloyd for casting her as "Shirley Brahms. "

She endured two bouts of breast cancer that her treatments successfully knocked back. However in October last, her doctors discovered the cancer had returned and spread all over into her spine. She married her long time companion and lived out her remaining days in quiet dignity, though she did tell a newspaper reporter that this cancer made her SO mad. I do not blame her.

I liked Wendy Richard OBE a lot in Are You Being Served. We who watched her programs will miss her talent.