The British public has a long-held fascination with men in drag. Perhaps it dates back to Shakespearean times when women weren’t allowed on stage but it has continued ever since. The Victorian era had George Robey, the early 20’s had ‘Old Mother Riley’ and so it continued, through Danny La Rue to Dame Edna and, most recently, ‘Mrs Brown’ and her boys.

In 1983 two ‘family favourites’ – Dr Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket – were given their own BBC television series, Dear Ladies. The characters – two refined but slightly eccentric spinsters – were developed and played by George Logan and Patrick Fyffe respectively.

Logan and Fyffe put immense effort into creating the notion that the two ladies were indeed ‘real’ people. For example, they never gave interviews out of character. At their performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the audience arrived to find Dr Hinge and Dame Hilda behind a stall selling their own home-made jams.

As was so often the case with drag ‘artistes’, the two ‘ladies’ included a number of subtle (and not-so-subtle) gay references in their repartee. Dame Hilda’s cousin Julian, for example, had a short-lived career in the Guards after being caught playing cards with his privates.A regular routine was Evadne asking Hilda why she was wearing her brother’s watch, to which she would reply, “because he’s wearing mine”.

Sadly, most of the ‘Dear Ladies’ clips seem to have been removed from You Tube so there’s no longer the opportunity to sample the full range of in-jokes and double-entendres that was their hallmark. Nonetheless, the following example, ‘Self Service’, gives a small taster of this:

Upon the death of Patrick Fyffe in 2002, George Logan decided not to pursue a solo career as Dr Evadne Hinge and the work of the ‘Dear Ladies’ came to an end.