Special Guest Blogger: Prunella Scales

I blame the Sunday supplements who used words like venerable, iconic and National Treasure when describing me. National Treasure is a particularly terrifying term, isn't it? It makes one sound like a dusty Ming vase kept behind velvet ropes in a drafty museum, or perhaps a slightly chipped gargoyle on the side of a cathedral.
I always said that i only became an actor to be people much more interesting than I am and would say things more intelligent than anything I can think of myself and i was cast in many comic roles  before my big break in 1975 when i was cast as a Hotel Managers wife.
To the world, I suppose, I am Sybil Fawlty. It’s a cross I bore with a certain amount of floral-printed pride. For decades, people have walked up to me in supermarkets, squinted at my face, and then shouted "BASIL!" at the top of their lungs into my ear. It is a testament to my vocal training that I haven’t reflexively slapped a stranger in the frozen pea aisle.
People seem to think I spent the 1970s trapped in a cupboard in Torquay, permanently holding a telephone and a cigarette, waiting for John Cleese to trip over a radiator.
Then, of course, there is my life with husband and fellow actor, Timothy West.
We have spent a significant portion of our golden years on canal boats, which is an interesting choice for two people who are supposedly venerable. If you want to test the foundations of a fifty-year marriage, I highly recommend steering a twenty-ton piece of iron through a hole the size of a needle’s
eye while your husband shouts instructions at you from the towpath.
There’s something remarkably grounding about a canal. You can’t be a Grand Dame of the Stage when you’re covered in duckweed and trying to fend off an aggressive swan with a wooden spoon.
Being an actor is a peculiar way to build a legacy. We spend our lives becoming other people, only to realize at the end that we’ve left bits of ourselves scattered all over the place. I left a bit of my heart in a rehearsal room in 1962, I left a bit of my sanity in the Fawlty Towers kitchen, I left my favorite pair of gloves in a dressing room in Birmingham and I’ve certainly left several layers of skin on various brambles along the Grand Union Canal.
Dementia claimed me but let it be remembered that Prunella Scales was a woman who was married to a very loud man, lived on a very slow boat, and occasionally shouted at a tall hotelier.