THE HAT SQUAD - REMEMBERING DAME JUNE WHITFIELD

Dame June Whitfield died on December 28 at the age of 93.

For the American audience, she is best known for playing Gran, Edina’s mother, in ‘Absolutely Fabulous’.  (Her last credited role was as Gran in the AbFab movie.)  But she was also known in Great Britain for being the support to comic actors like Tony Hancock, Terry Scott, Jimmy Edwards, and Arthur Askey.  Before AbFab came along, she was probably best known for playing Terry Scott’s wife in ‘Happy Ever After’ and ‘Terry And June’.  Other shows in which she had long-running roles were ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’, ‘Cluedo’, and ‘The Seven Faces of Jim’ and its sequels.  For American audiences who watched the various British series showcased on PBS, she made guest appearances in ‘Marple’, ‘Midsomer Murders’, ‘New Tricks’, ‘EastEnders’, ‘Coronation Street’, ‘The Pallisers’, and ‘The Benny Hill Show’.

Beloved as she was in her later years by the British, I like to think of her as Britain's Betty White.

But it will be her small guest role in the two-part ‘Doctor Who’ “Christmas” special, “The End Of Time”, which terminated David Tennant’s tenure as the Tenth Incarnation of the Doctor, which will always come first to mind when I think of her. She played Minnie Hooper, a frisky friend of Wilf Mott who joined him in his senior citizen squad tracking down the Doctor.

When they did find him, Minnie insisted on having her picture taken with him and the rest of the squad squeezed into the shot as well.  That’s when Minnie made her move.

There’s no chance we’ll ever see Minnie Hooper again in ‘Doctor Who’, but I’d like to think that in the Toobworld which continues to exist out of camera’s range, she finally departed Earth Prime-Time as Wilf’s wife, Minnie Mott.

I could have made room for this post in the blogathon on New Year's Day, but I felt she deserved to be honored on her own and not lost in that sauce.

Good night and may God bless, Dame June…..