Su Pollard plays wanting. Behind the glasses and the squawk is a woman who hopes for something small and is refused it, kindly, week after week; in Hi-de-Hi that is funnier and sadder than the noise suggests, and television never asked her for anything else.
Fi1m perspective
Peggy Ollerenshaw has a mop in her hand and her eye on a yellow blazer. She is a chalet maid at a holiday camp who wants to be a Yellowcoat, one of the paid entertainers, more than she has ever wanted anything, and roughly once a week somebody tells her, gently, that she cannot. Su Pollard plays her behind big glasses with a toothy grin and a delivery that runs out of breath before the sentence does, and everything about the part is built for shrillness. We expected to wince. Instead the refusal got at us, because Pollard plays the hope and not the stupidity, and the face she makes in the second before she recovers is the saddest thing in a loud programme.
That is the performance, and it is why she has a page. She left school at 16 to sing in working men's clubs, went on Opportunity Knocks in 1974, worked in musicals and farces, and took her first sitcom part in Two Up, Two Down (1979). Then Jimmy Perry and David Croft cast her in Hi-de-Hi (1980), and she stayed with Peggy until 1988. Perry and Croft kept her on, as Ivy Teasdale in You Rang, M'Lord? (1988) and Ethel Schumann in Oh, Doctor Beeching? (1995), with Paul Shane and Jeffrey Holland beside her each time. We have not reviewed either. She has said of the first: "That was the show that made my name. It’s what enabled me to do so many other things."
What works is the wanting. Pollard is not a subtle actor and does not pretend to be; the volume is the instrument. But she can put a want under the noise and let you see it, and a sitcom that runs the same pool gag every episode needs somebody whose disappointment is different each time. What works less is that television only ever asked her for that. Eccentric, clumsy, enthusiastic: the words follow her from part to part, and the parts were written to fit them. Her other life has been on stage, where a toothy grin and breathless delivery are not a limit but the job. Me and My Girl (1985) ran in the West End for over a year, she has done more than forty pantomimes, and she has toured a one-woman show marking fifty years in the business. She has noted that parts for women get harder to find with age; in her case the stage never stopped asking.
If you know her only as a loud woman in spectacles, watch a single episode of Hi-de-Hi, wait for the moment Peggy is told no, and watch what happens to her face before the next line rescues it. Then stop, before the second episode shows you the trick. It is a small thing to have done for nine series, and she did it every week.
Biography
Su Pollard is a British actress, singer, songwriter and author. Born Susan Georgina Pollard on 7 November 1949 in Nottingham, she began performing as a child and trained at the Nottingham Arts Theatre. She appeared on the talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1974 and made her television debut in the 1979 series Two Up, Two Down.
Pollard is best known for playing chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw in the BBC sitcom Hi-de-Hi! (1980–1988). She later appeared in You Rang, M'Lord? (1988–1993) as Ivy Teasdale and Oh, Doctor Beeching! (1995–1997). Her stage work includes West End productions such as Me and My Girl, and she had a UK top-five single in 1986 with "Starting Together".
