What could be more natural than illustrating an obituary of a well-known actor with a photograph of them in the role for which they are best-known? For classically trained British actors, those roles are inevitably on television or film. It was a tribute to how good Prunella Scales was across the board that the Guardian had tributes from not one, but two heavyweight theatre critics who could testify to her stage presence, both in the lost testing ground of the British repertory system and also in London’s West End. Some of the lead images even showed her in Shakespearean roles.
Rakewell makes no apology, however, for remembering Scales as Sybil in Fawlty Towers. One of the delights of rewatching the series – all 12 episodes of it – is seeing her character effortlessly run circles around John Cleese’s maniacally flailing Basil, exposing him as a leading man who is merely following in her wake. When Basil beats his broken-down car with a branch, nothing could be more in character or more futile. When Sybil sets about a cowboy builder with a tightly furled umbrella she means business. And few actors could get so much sonic variation out of the three words but many swooping syllables of Scales saying ‘Oh, I know’ on the telephone.
Her control was absolute – and perhaps easier to see in the TV adaptation of Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution when she duels, silkily, with the art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt. (Your roving correspondent has long been tickled by the casting of Scales’s son Samuel West as Blunt in two separate TV series, nearly 20 years apart.). The same control is there in the marvellous adaptation of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels starring Prunella Scales as Miss Mapp and Geraldine McEwan as Lucia (and Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie). Scales tilting her cloche-hatted head as she goes into social battle with her more modish rival is one of the more menacing gestures of 1980s television.
It’s a tribute to the writing of Fawlty Towers and to Scales’s performance that, while it’s possible to see Sybil through Basil’s eyes, it is more rewarding to imagine the world according to Sybil. (For the record, your roving correspondent feels the same way about Miss Piggy and The Muppet Show and Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life.) Fifty years after the first episode was broadcast in September 1975, watching Scales cut a swathe through the surrounding nonsense in a hairdo that is the definition of soigné, it’s even possible to believe in progress.