Diary – 19 February 2005

As I approach a worrying age (don’t ask!) where everyone — as in this morning’s obituary page of the New York Times — is younger than me, a terrible thing has happened. An American fan has told me that she went to Madame Tussauds in London recently, with the intention of being photographed next to the effigy of Dame Edna, only to find that Edna wasn’t there any more. This information depressed me even more than the recent Washington inauguration of the blinking frog. When my client Dame Edna was first installed at Madame Tussauds about a quarter of a century ago, I was keen to know who had been melted down to create her, and I think they told me that it was partly a 1970s pop group called The Y-Fronts, and most of Mandy Rice-Davies. The thought of being melted down in one’s own lifetime is a horrible thought and I began morbidly to wonder whom Edna had become.