Be quiet, Miriam! – spiked

It’s widely believed that Kenneth Tynan was the first person ever to say ‘fuck’ on British television, in 1965. But, wouldn’t you know, Miriam Margolyes had a go first, in a 1963 episode of University Challenge. Sadly for her, the word was bleeped out and she’s been trying to make up for it ever since. A fellow thespian recalled that she once gave her excuse for being late to rehearsal as having been delayed while ‘wanking off’ a park keeper. I looked up her Desert Island Discs, and was absolutely amazed to find out that she hadn’t chosen the old Flanders and Swann number that goes: ‘Ma’s out, Pa’s out, Let’s talk rude! / Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers / Let’s write rude words all down our street / Stick out our tongues at the people we meet / Let’s have an intellectual treat / Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers.’

Being a ‘potty-mouth’ is one of the things Margolyes is famous for. Indeed, it’s one of the things that makes her a ‘National Treasure’. (Ick, ick, and thrice ick!) I see that I wrote in the Spectator a while back: ‘Though they can be anything from actors to zoologists, they will have one loathsome character trait in common; they were all massively ambitious when young, but they like to pretend that their success was somehow organic and that only other – shallow, grasping – people are driven by attention-seeking and greedy for money.’

As if she wasn’t filthy rich enough (she owns three houses – four until recently, so downsizing), Margolyes is to embark on a national tour in September, warning us with a nice bit of pre-merching that ‘This old dyke can only go on so long’, as she’s 85. I thought of Alan Bennett saying, ‘If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize’. If you can still say ‘fuck’ at 60, they apparently give you the OBE.

Like much about her, the fact that Margolyes took the Order of the British Empire is a fascinating contradiction if one is being kind, an act of rank hypocrisy if not. The first political party she joined was the Workers Revolutionary Party, led by Gerry Healy, a prolific bully and rapist. In the 1970s, it was a kind of finishing school for very daft actors. It’s fair to say that her politics, like her vocabulary, never really matured. She was all over Corbyn. She signed a 2015 letter criticising the Jewish Chronicle for reporting her pin-up’s alleged associations with various anti-Semitic charmers. In 2019, endorsing his Labour leadership, she added her autograph to yet another billet doux to the saturnine scowler, and described him as a ‘beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world’. In 2020, she told The Times that he had been forced to resign from the leadership ‘by a conspiracy within the party motivated from Israel’.

The Gaza conflict has been a field day for her, where she can indulge her demonising of Jews who think differently to her as blatantly as she pleases. She is a signatory to Jews for Justice for Palestinians. In a short video posted to social media, she said:

‘I have never been so ashamed of Israel as I am at this moment. To me, it seems as if Hitler has won. He’s changed us Jews from being compassionate and caring and do unto others as you would have them do unto you into this vicious genocidal nationalist nation.’

Understandably, the Campaign Against Antisemitism has called her views on Israel ‘repugnant’ – there is something uniquely vile about a Jew comparing other Jews to Hitler for the slobbering delectation of left-wing Pally-flag-shaggers.

Her big thing is making everything – from her suicidal empathy to her swearing – ‘cuddly’ and because she has clung stubbornly to her bulk, she’s got away with it. She’s a tranny fan, too, giving her the hat-trick of trans, Palestine and potty-mouth in common with Dawn French. But French has somehow managed to foul her own nest, with even former fans aghast at last year’s ‘bad fing’ Gaza video. Is it because Miriam’s a lesbian? Or because she’s registered as disabled, with spinal stenosis, which means she needs mobility aids, as well as osteoarthritis? Perhaps there is a feeling that to openly admit dislike of her would be to ‘hate on’ too many minorities at once.

That she is plain has also worked to her advantage. No one can point at her and say, ‘Well, she only got hired because everyone fancied her!’. It’s fair to say that her voice, rather than her face, has been her fortune. She started out in the 1970s reading an ‘erotic’ audiobook called Sexy Sonia: Leaves From My Schoolgirl Notebook and later made many a young man worry that he might be a pervert for fancying a cartoon animal when she voiced the Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny in the 1990s. She has worked non-stop in a profession where female beauty is almost compulsory – and she has gained more work the older she becomes, even in films, which are unkind to the aging female. Her first major film role might have been the ignominious-sounding Elephant Ethel in 1977’s Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers, but by 1989 she was winning the LA Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress in Little Dorrit. Dickens was to come in handy, from the one-woman show Dickens’ Women, in which she played 23 characters, to the 10-part BBC documentary, Dickens in America.

Her credits make the head spin. Blackadder, Babe, Muriel Spark’s Girls of Slender Means, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, all the female characters in Monkey and for the Gay Sweatshop theatre company. When did she find time to eat? But somehow she has, being refreshingly open about her own greed, to the point that she partially blames her bad health on her love of desserts. (These days it would be ADHD, as Caitlin Moran recently claimed about her love of booze.) She told the How To Fail podcast:

‘I’ve limited my life because of my longing for fudge or cheesecake… It is a major failure, and because of that, I’ve got spinal stenosis. I can’t walk. I’m going to be in a wheelchair before I’m much older… It’s just greed, lack of discipline, all the things that I’m embarrassed by in myself.’

Again refreshingly, she admits to being ‘greedy for money’ and makes an ‘enormous amount’ of it. She turned down a Marvel role after demanding a million pounds and they ‘only’ offered her half. Though she appears to ‘identify’ as a socialist and has said that she often feels that rich people ‘shouldn’t have what they have’ and that ‘I don’t feel easy with rich people’, how can she square this with sitting on more than £4million, half a mil of which came from recording Cameo fan messages?

But just when you think she can’t be any more of a hypocritical bore, she has to go and spoil it all by saying something smart. Though I love JK Rowling, and can’t get enough of her Strike novels, I do find adults who read Harry Potter amusing. In 2024, Margolyes, who played Professor Sprout, offended quite a few of them by saying: ‘I worry about Harry Potter fans because they should be over that by now… it’s for children.’ A Guardian Q&A in 2016 revealed her to be eye-poppingly honest and original:

‘JK Rowling is a fabulous woman. And I just love the fact that the richest woman in Britain is a writer – what a brilliant state of affairs… I can’t bear children. I support children’s charities, I just don’t want them around me… Marriage is for straight people. I’ve been with my partner for 48 years – although she lives in Holland and I live in England. We’ve had a civil partnership, but the thought of referring to one another as “wife” makes me feel sick.’

Reluctantly, having started out in full-on flamethrower mode, I came to the conclusion that there’s much to admire about Margolyes. It’s like the honest side of her keeps trying to duke it out with the socialist side of her. Perhaps (like me) she simply talks too much. Queen Elizabeth II had the right idea at that reception for British Book Week, perhaps. Asked what she did, MM replied that she was ‘the best reader of stories in the whole world’ – but when Her Maj moved on to speak to a man who worked with dyslexic children, Margolyes kept butting in, to which the queen merely said: ‘Be quiet.’

Still, in a world where being left-wing requires one to never keep one’s politics sensibly à la carte (to quote Lionel Shriver), I can’t help wishing that this old dyke goes on for a good while longer yet.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.