Arthur Mullard

My most vivid memory of Hylda Baker is that bizarre 1978 Top of the Pops appearance with Arthur Mullard, but there was so much more to the comedy actress, as Barbara Windsor finds out. She was a diminutive Lancashire lass with a booming voice who soon became a music hall regular, before starring in sketches and sitcoms (most notably Nearest and Dearest). Baker was often labelled loud and vulgar at a time when funny men overshadowed their female counterparts, yet is now considered by many to be an influential figure. Her silent stooge Cynthia was surely a prototype for Dame Edna Everage's Madge, and her performances brimmed with catchphrases - "She knows, y'know!", "You big girl's blouse!" - long before Little Britain and Catherine Tate cornered the market. About time, then, that her unique talent was reappraised.

The opening credits are the best thing about it, as long as you can get through the pain of Mullard singing. One credit reads: "Created and devised by Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney". Created and devised? How are we supposed to unpack the dense meanings residing in that? "Right Ron, now we've created it, we have to get through the difficult process of devising it" "Oh dear, I hate the devising part, it's always tough". Perpetrated would be a better word than either. But astonishingly Yus was in the top ten for at least five weeks in 1976, and allegedly hit the top of the ratings in the London region for one week, pipping Coronation Street.

Thank goodness for EastEnders' Frank Butcher. Without him, Mike Reid's TV acting legacy may have been this absolutely dire 1976 sitcom. Arthur Mullard, hugely popular in the 1970s, plays an old geezer lumbered with a nagging wife who moves into a council house. However, his layabout brother (Reid) insists on living off him too. Stepping in dog poo is funnier...