Throughout most of the 1980s Ruth Madoc’s annoyingly chirpy Welsh tones would regularly issue from the nation’s television sets with the greeting of “Hello campers, Hi-de-hi”, and slight variations thereon, marking the start of another episode of Croft and Perry’s hit sitcom.

Set in a holiday camp between the end of the Second World War and the arrival of the Beatles, Hi-de-Hi! drew on the personal experience of creators David Croft and Jimmy Perry, the partnership that also produced Dad’s Army. Croft had produced revues in holiday camps and Perry had been a Butlins redcoat.

At the fictional Maplins Madoc was Gladys Pugh, the chubby-faced yellowcoat, radio announcer and sports organiser with the pearly smile and the cropped, jet-black Liza Minnelli hair. A recurring plot element was her unrequited passion for Jeffrey Fairbrother, the entertainment manager and former Cambridge don played by Simon Cadell.

Ruth Madoc at an awards event in 2019 (Picture: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)

“I’d met women like her while growing up in south Wales,” said Madoc. “She was a woman of her time... Gladys used her womanly wiles to get on, which would probably be frowned upon today, but she had an innate intelligence and was good at her job.”

Madoc was in all nine series and 58 episodes of Hi-de-Hi! between 1980 and 1988 and she also appeared in the stage version. The show found new fans as a result of frequent repeats. And there is no debating that it is Hi-de-Hi! with which Madoc will be most readily linked.

However, she also played Mrs Thomas, mother of Daffyd, the self-declared “only gay in the village”, in Little Britain in the mid-2000s. And she appeared in Under Milk Wood on stage and screen, on stage with David Jason and Windsor Davies in a 1970 production and then in the film version with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole. She was Mrs Dai Bread Two and even had a nude scene in the film. “I have very vivid memories of when I had to do that flipping dive into Fishguard Harbour with my bosoms out,” she said.

Madoc had Welsh family, but was not actually born in Wales – just like the great Welsh politician David Lloyd George, to whom she learned she was distantly related in 2010 in an episode of the BBC Wales family history programme Coming Home.

Three decades earlier she had played one of Lloyd George’s lovers in the BBC series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, with her first husband Philip Madoc, who she married in the early 1960s and whose surname she adopted. He played Lloyd George.

She was born Margaret Ruth Llewellyn Baker in Norwich, Norfolk, in 1943. At the time her parents ran a centre for people with severe learning difficulties, but they moved around a lot and Madoc grew up largely with grandparents in Swansea.

She attended RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. She met Madoc there when he came to give a lecture. He was a decade older than her. She spent three years as a dancer and singer with The Black and White Minstrel Show, the enormously popular TV and stage show which saw the men blacked up and wearing top hats and tails.

Madoc’s early screen and stage work was largely in musicals. She played the lead role of Maria in an open-air, rain-bedraggled summer stage production of West Side Story in Scarborough in 1968 before graduating to the West End in the musical Man of La Mancha. Under Milk Wood was one of her first films. She also played the ghost Fruma Sarah in the 1971 film of Fiddler on the Roof with Topol. In the mid-1970s she had a recurring role as a policeman’s wife in the TV series Hunter’s Walk.

But she was thinking of packing in acting and retraining as a teacher when she landed the role of Gladys in Hi-de-Hi!. She drew on her early life for Gladys’s accent and character. But the hairstyle was borrowed, seemingly not from Liza Minnelli, but from Zizi Jeanmaire, the French ballerina who features in the lyrics of Peter Sarstedt’s No 1 single Where Do You Go To (My Lovely).

After Hi-de-Hi! Madoc made frequent guest appearances in television series, including Benidorm and Casualty, she featured in the short-lived circus sitcom Big Top in 2009 and she worked regularly in theatre.

She appeared in more than 30 pantomimes, including Babes in the Wood at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh in 1980-81, in the role of Robin Hood. Babes in the Wood was just one of a number of stage shows that brought her to Scotland, including in recent times The Wedding Singer and Calendar Girls.

She and Philip Madoc divorced in the early 1980s and she married for a second time to John Jackson, who was her manager and who died last year. She was due to appear in the pantomime Aladdin in Torquay, but suffered a fall and died in hospital a few days later. She is survived by two children from her first marriage, Rhys and Lowri.

Obituaries

If you would like to submit an obituary (800-1000 words preferred, with jpeg image), or have a suggestion for a subject, contact [email protected]

Subscribe

Subscribe at www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

Scotsman Obituaries: Ruth Madoc, actress best known for classic sitcom Hi-De-Hi!

Comments