Monday<\/p>\n
The week starts with Penelope Keith, sad news of whose death on Monday sends everyone over the age of 40 screeching back to her greatest hits \u2013 and they really were great, weren\u2019t they? There are those sitcom characters from the late 1970s who have more or less faded from view \u2013 if I try really hard, I can just about summon the image of Wendy Craig and Geoffrey Palmer in Butterflies \u2013 but the Good Life never waned, remaining as stubbornly embedded in the national memory as Fawlty Towers, Dad\u2019s Army and the winter of discontent.<\/p>\n
If Tom and Barbara were the beating heart of the show, the real star was Keith as Margo Leadbetter. We loved Margo for her wardrobe and her innocence, for her giraffe-like frame forever curling itself into slapstick contortions while Jerry rolled his eyes in the background. Margo was as emphatically a creature of her time as the women of Motherland are today, airily disdainful, endlessly perplexed and as English as they come. In the tradition of Joyce Grenfell, there was a guilelessness about Keith that, even at her most imperious, somehow hurt one\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n
Some things I\u2019ve discovered after reading about her this week: that she was RSC trained and played Beatrice (opposite Michael York as Benedick) in a 1978 TV movie of Much Ado About Nothing. That much of Margo\u2019s wardrobe in the Good Life came from Harrods and the fashion label Frank Usher, known for its flowy outlines and big shapes. And that Keith\u2019s follow-up sitcom, To the Manor Born, which faded more quickly from view than the Good Life, was Schitt\u2019s Creek but in Somerset.<\/p>\n
Keith communicated a gentleness that I think Paul Eddington, her co-star from the Good Life, put very well in his final TV interview, a piece of television so affecting I remember it clearly, although it was broadcast over 30 years ago. Knowing he hadn\u2019t long to live, and on being asked what he would like his epitaph to be, Eddington said, carefully, \u201cI think I would like it to be \u2018he did very little harm.\u2019\u201d The modesty of this statement, and the joy he and Keith put into the world, make the pair of them rarer than rubies.<\/p>\n
Tuesday<\/p>\n
Serena Williams, back on Centre Court after an absence of four years, was defeated in three sets by the 20-year-old Aussie Maya Joint on Tuesday, while the seven-time Wimbledon champion\u2019s eight-year-old daughter, Olympia, occasionally yawned from the box. For the rest of us, it was a nail-biting exercise in trying not to think too hard about the fact that Joint was not even born when Williams first played at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n
And yet here Williams was, playing a great match with a lot of the old magic still there. I watched from the sofa while ploughing my way through a pile of leftover fish fingers and a stack of puck-like hash browns and pondering the only question for those of us who remember the former world No 1 in her prime: \u201cShe\u2019s 44 and has had two kids, how is that form even possible?\u201d<\/p>\n
The answer, of course, is that these women aren\u2019t normal. I once found myself at a WTA event in a restaurant on Central Park South with the then titans of the women\u2019s game \u2013 Ana Ivanovic, the Serb who had just won the French Open, Kim Clijsters, and Venus Williams, 6ft 1in stocking feet and incalculable in heels \u2013 all circulating the room while the sports hacks stared, open mouthed, and tried not to get in their way. It was like being in a room with a superior branch of evolution, a status I guess you can\u2019t really reach when you mostly eat leftovers off your children\u2019s plates and enjoy the big matches from the L-shaped bend in your sofa.<\/p>\n
\u2018If any person here present knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage \u2026\u2019 Photograph: Kevin Mazur\/Getty ImagesWednesday<\/p>\n
I wouldn\u2019t mind taking a look at the Bayeux tapestry<\/a>. I mean, the word \u201ctapestry\u201d makes me a bit antsy, but it\u2019s of great historical importance and, as these things go, there are surely worse ways to spend an afternoon.<\/p>\n