'Hi-de-Hi!' legend Su Pollard says comedy is being ruined by political correctness.
Su Pollard
The 70-year-old actress - who played hapless chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw in the beloved 1980s BBC sitcom set in a 1960s holiday camp - says the fear of offending killjoys has taken precedent over making audiences laugh and she believes that lots of people feign offence just so they have something to post on social media.
In an interview with the Daily Star newspaper, she said: "There's so many people on the politically-correct bandwagon now.
"We were used to saying certain things and it was just water off a duck's back. If you've grown up saying certain words then you still have it in your psyche.
"It's good to be aware of being offensive, but you have to know where to draw the line.
"I think nowadays you get people who are offended but don't really know why. Or they want to be seen to look offended so their tweet appears on TV and they look controversial. I sometimes think: 'What's the matter with you? Get real!' "
Pollard also appeared in the sitcoms 'You Rang, M'Lord?' and 'Oh, Doctor Beeching!' but is her role as Peggy that she is still most recognised for.
Although she has nothing but fond memories of starring in 'Hi-de-Hi!', Pollard doesn't think it should ever make a return to screens because it's so easy to still watch the original episodes.
She said: "I loved working on 'Hi-de-Hi!', and it was such a springboard to other things but I think why bother to reboot it?
"I think the recent 'Are You Being Served?' remake was good because they got very near to the original. Ultimately, I just think when you can buy box sets these days, doing a remake would be a vanity project. Leave it alone!"
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A tour-de-force performance from Pollard, Harpy is a heart wrenching exploration of one woman’s struggles with mental health and loneliness, manifesting itself through extreme hoarding. At heart it’s a bittersweet dramatic comedy, which showcases a grittier side to the Su Pollard of the eighties, and also asks us to look beyond our prejudices against those who appear to disrupt the norm.
The neighbours call Birdie a harridan and a harpy even though most of them have never even met her. They see her obsessive hoarding as detrimental to the value of their own homes. For Birdie, saving what others regard as the junk from her own life allows her to make sense of the world around her; her possessions are memories of a time past. Shunned by conventional society, she regards it as her duty to salvage these tiny histories that without her would be entirely forgotten.
Harpy is inspired by the retro cinematic sub-genre of Grand Dame Guignol – or ‘hag horror’ - wherein fading stars battled to survive by playing mad, potentially dangerous women or bewildered creatures in peril. Beneath their acting veneer were brave and brilliant women and Meeks is fascinated by their survival instincts. This idea of struggling and fighting for what we believe in comes to the fore in Harpy which seeks to explore mental health, questioning what madness really is.
Su comments, I am thrilled to be able to bring Harpy to a wider audience across the UK, having first performed it at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018. I hope the new audiences enjoy themselves as much as I’m enjoying revisiting this complex character. Philip Meeks’ writing is both funny and poignant, and many people have remarked at how relatable the content is, openly tackling issues of mental health.
Su Pollard gives the performance of her life, an unmissable tour-de-force of comedy and drama brought together in a fantastically constructed piece of theatre. (★★★★★ Theatre Weekly, Edinburgh Fringe 2018)