Jude Kelly missed a trick when she set off in search of that very British creation, the battleaxe, for this week’s Archive on 4.
Jude Kelly missed a trick when she set off in search of that very British creation, the battleaxe, for this week’s Archive on 4. The stage director and now head of the South Bank Centre in London gave us Ena Sharples and Hattie Jacques, Hyacinth Bucket and Thora Hird but no hair-rollered hyenas from the radio files. Maybe the typical battleaxe was just too loud, too mouthy to work as a caricature on air? Maybe Sharples needed her hairnet and hatchet face as visual props for her powerplay? On air, she would just have sounded like a screech owl, an accusation levelled at many a sharp-witted woman in ages past.
The battleaxe could be cruel with her too-rigid belief in her own rightness, and her determination to control everything within her very considerable orbit.
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