Patricia Routledge, who has died at the age of 96, could have become a TV institution earlier than she did – she had a part in Coronation Street when it was still in black and white in 1961. She was the foxy cafe owner, Sylvia Snape, flirting with tradesmen and upselling cheese baps, and everything about her – from her frisson to the fact that she had her own set, a little cafe – screamed regular-character energy. But she “just knew, inside, that I needed to have other adventures,” she said on Parkinson, nearly 40 years later. She then spent the 50s, 60s and 70s mainly on stage, in jaunty-sounding musicals (How’s the World Treating You?) lost to posterity. She had a stunning voice that the small screen rarely found a proper use for, and was a longtime member of the RSC.
Mrs Snape was the last time she played the romantic interest, and the first time, she said later, she’d been offered a role that wasn’t significantly older than her. An episode of Z-Carsand a couple of appearances in Steptoe and Son later, she was back as the title character in Plain Jane in 1977, an extravagantly weird, extremely British rumination on the class system (maybe this is unfair, but the inquiry seems to be: who would have thought that a working-class woman who isn’t pretty would know so much?).
