Goodbye, possums. It’s been a blast: those arch remarks, echoed by lips and eyebrows that arched as suggestively, those cutting asides that pricked political pretensions more sharply than a barbie skewer, that tremulo of the newly ennobled aristo, those gem-studded glasses — oh, those glasses. . . all now discarded like yesterday’s koala droppings. Dame Edna Everage is hanging up her falsies. From now on, no more touring for Australia’s most sparkling, most voluptuous, most extravagant queen of fashion. At the age of 78, Barry Humphries is to take the trans out of transvestite.
We shall miss his outrageous liberties. We squirmed with embarrassed delight as David Steel squirmed under Dame Edna’s malicious glare. We cowered as her beady eyes roved over the audience, seeking another celebrity to lampoon — or, worse, to embrace. We gagged as the good lady described, with all the delicacy of an outback slaughterman, the bowel diseases of her late husband or the sexual misdemeanours of her wayward offspring. And all the time poor Madge looked on, unblinking, unsmiling, unloved.
It is an art as old as the medieval fool to speak the unspeakable or assail the untouchable in jest. Dame Edna turned the interviewer’s art into a black art indeed: that touch of spite and gratuitous insult that left the victim blinking and the foul-mouthed old lady smirking. It combined a peculiarly English sense of embarrassment with a savage satire and an Aussie bawdy bluntness. But though Dame Edna will no longer be holding court on stage or in panto, she may sneak a last few peeps on television. And then we can tell her: take care of Sir Les Patterson. We hear that his expletives, like his saliva, will pour forth no more