Pose of the Day

Warhol accolyte, Studio 54 stalwart, drag queen Potassa de la Fayette poised at Coyote Hookers Ball, The Copacabana, New York City 1977.

Strike a pose. There's nothing to it.

That age-old domestic drama

A Gigastar has gone

“Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.”

"I was born with a priceless gift, the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others."

“My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.”

"I love making an audience gasp. I don’t crave the sound of applause. I crave the sound of sharply indrawn breath. That’s a good sound."

It's turning into a rather depressing year for losing our icons, with the sad news of the magnificent Barry Humphries, aka "Housewife Gigastar" Dame Edna Everage, who departed for Fabulon today.

From his early days in Melbourne as an academic, DaDaist exhibitor and budding thespian, he made a big jump by moving to London, just in time for what became known as "the satire boom". He befriended the leading lights of the genre, including Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Willie Rushton and all, and worked with Spike Milligan in his absurdist production The Bed Sitting Room - and also launched Dame Edna (as well as his myriad other characters including Sir Les Patterson and Sandy Stone) on an unsuspecting West End.

Inevitably, of course, the Brits took him/her to their hearts, and it was over here that he/she skyrocketed to fame and a righful position of "national treasure" (despite being Australian) - and The Dame Edna Experience chat show became a massive prime-time telly success in the 1980s!

Even once he'd put the Dame into semi-retirement, he remained a formidable cutural figure, with a revue based on Weimar Republic cabaret songs performed by chanteuse Meow Meow, and his own nostalgic BBC Radio 2 show all about "forgotten musical gems" from the early 20th century.

Adored the man - and, of course the Dame! We saw Edna on stage winding up another "lost treasure" Sir Terry Wogan at Proms in the Park ten years ago, and I and our friend Mark went to see his "farewell" show, also in 2013.

RIP, John Barry Humphries AO CBE (17th February 1934 – 22nd April 2023)

The leading lady of Limpopo

The annual Proms Season has been announced!

An amazing itinerary (as ever) - everything from Rachmaninov to Rufus Wainright to Radiohead, Mozart to Mahler to Lata Mangheshkar, Bach to Berlioz to Dee Dee Bridgewater, and much much more besides, over 71 concerts from 14th July to 9th September, and apart from the Royal Albert Hall, in venues up and down the country. Wow.

• Read what's on

And people knock the BBC licence fee, which pays for it all (mostly refunded by ticket sales, of course)!

By way of a celebration, here's a remarkably talented lady, indeed. Performing herself at Prom #28, South Africa's finest Miss Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha (for it is she) is not yet 30 years old - yet has a set of pipes on her that would make many a seasoned diva envious!

Here she is, celebrating another of London's grandest music venues the Royal Opera House, at the time it reopened for live performances after the pandemic:

Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha - Dich, teure Halle [Wagner - Tannhäuser]

Simply too, too divine.

Microtonally nuanced

Another sad loss - that marvellously fruity veteran actor Murray Melvin.

From the Familiar Unknown blog:

A truly individual actor, Murray Melvin's acid-camp performances are always mesmerising in their precision, microtonally nuanced in emotion. His path took him from West End office clerk to sweeping the stage at the East London's Theatre Royal Stratford East, where Joan Littlewood nurtured a company of remarkable natural actors plucked from all walks of society. She chose him to play the implicitly gay Geoffrey in the ground-breaking play A Taste Of Honey, a role he reprised in the film version in 1961, winning himself a Best Actor award at Cannes.

Having carved his singular niche as a striking-looking and slightly-menacing-in-an-effete-way character actor, he went on to appear in myriad classic films including Sparrows Can't Sing, Alfie, The Boy Friend, The Devils, Lisztomania and Barry Lyndon, and on telly in The Avengers, The Onedin Line, Jonathan Creek and Torchwood.

We always reckoned he was the reincarnation of Pharaoh Akhenaten:

By way of a tribute, here's a full 40-minute reminiscence, with the great man in conversation with eminent reviewer Michael Bilington:

Murray Melvin in conversation with Michael Billington

RIP, Murray Melvin (10th August 1932 – 14th April 2023)

Fashion is not frivolous

"Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today."

"The fashionable woman wears clothes. The clothes don't wear her."

"Snobbery has gone out of fashion, and in our shops you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dress."

“I love vulgarity, good taste is death, vulgarity is life.”

"A woman is as young as her knees."

RIP, the Swinging Dame Mary Quant OBE, FCSD, RDI (11th February 1934 - 13th April 2023)

On the Jukebox here at Dolores Delargo Towers this weekend

All rise...

...it's Miss Bette Davis's 115th birthday today...

...and she's looking good on it!

Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (5th April 1908 – 6th October 1989)

It's a look...