As a baby boomer, I’d never experienced a whiff of ‘you people’ in my life

Last Monday, I attended the “Celebration” of the life of Alan Strachan, who directed Re-Joyce and the Florence Foster Jenkins, farce Glorious. Sometimes these funny, touching memorials are the best shows in town. I want mine to be held while I’m still alive.

Actors like Simon Callow, Penelope Keith, Oliver Ford Davis and David Horovitch and mentee Tom Littler brought Alan back into the room, in all his guises and many of his disguises. I chose to do a piece by Joyce Grenfell called Opera Interval, which Alan had wanted to put into Re-Joyce but one which I had always baulked against, feeling perhaps it was more Joyce than Maureen.

On this day I said: “OK Alan, Today I’m going to do it and prove I was right.”

It goes without saying that amongst, as Mel Brooks would say, “the great and the near great,” it went down an absolute storm.

“Ok, Al” I admitted, eyes to heaven, “just this once…I might have been wrong.”

What a month for departures. Jane Goodall, Patricia Routledge and Jilly Cooper and then, suddenly, the unique Diane Keaton – splendid, gifted, charismatic women, all of whom seem to have been in our lives forever. I never met Jane Goodall but one piece of film will remain with me. She and her fellow conservationists placed a cage containing a recovered chimpanzee on the ground and slowly opened the cage door. Released into freedom the chimp moved swiftly into the tundra then stopped, turned around to find Jane, ran to her and gave her a long slow hug of thanks and goodbye. The camera was on Jane’s face as she closed her eyes and received the love and respect of the primate. It was and remains, for me, a deeply affirmative moment.

When asked once, what was her favourite animal she replied: “Dogs of course. Chimps are too much like us.”

I did encounter the formidable Miss Routledge on several occasions, including a transatlantic crossing but was too scared to do more than bob and say hello. It is her talent for observation, her physicality and her incredible technique which will endure in my memory. There is a bit of ‘business’ I urge you to look up, from the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances with Josephine Tewson and many teacups, which should be force fed, weekly, to every student at Rada. Like the best of Buster and indeed, Diane Keaton, it must have taken hours of rehearsal to make it look so completely casual. “Dying is easy,” said the great actor Edmund Kean on his deathbed. “Comedy is hard.”

As for Sooper Jilly, was a sweet, funny yet deadly wordsmith who had much to teach us about forbearance and unconditional love. Diane Keaton’s death felt different. I haven’t grown up with her, I’ve grown better because of her. She had beauty, grace and comedy bones. She also made everyone she worked with look sexier than they were.

Honestly, with giants like Michael Caine and Clint Eastwood turning 100 it is getting fearsome and, when Attenborough goes, God forbid, it will be like the passing of the Lord himself.

This week I was due to perform a Joyce monologue at the memorial for the irreplaceable jazz singer, Cleo Laine. Joyce and Cleo were good friends and the piece First Flight, concerns a naive northern woman, flying for the first time to meet her mixed-race daughter-in-law. Cleo and Johnny Dankworth’s mixed marriage had many trials touring fifties England. I hope it will be apposite.

Of course, this week was Shemini Atzeret, when we said Yizkor for our bereaved which may go some way to explain my autumnal melancholy.  It was the great American writer Arthur Miller who wrote: “One day you look in the mirror and realise you are shaving your father’s face.’ I empathise. My mother’s expressions and so many of my father’s Yiddish-isms come pouring out of me these days.  Who confesses to feeling “suffrunzled’ about the frown lines on my forehead? I do.

Then again, who will be shedding tears and schlepping nachas next weekend, when my beautiful granddaughter Ava reads from the Torah at her bat mitzvah ? Break a leg my darling girl because the future of our tribe leans, oh so heavily, on you.