Paper Monitor
11:50 UK time, Friday, 3 July 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Now that the news has sunk in and the public have had time to come to terms with the death of a pop icon, the papers have found their voice, and there's no shortage of follow-up material in the press... about the late Mollie Sugden.
The Sun gives a run down of Sugden's "favourite... pussy innuendos" alongside a story which notes that after Sugden's and Wendy Richard's deaths this year, there are just three surviving members of the Are You Being Served sitcom. Can you guess them?
Over at the Daily Mail, Jan Moir (she of the Wimbledon-hating fraternity) refuses to stoop so low as simply just listing all those pussy gags. Instead she frames it with recollections of watching the show and poignant thoughts on why it wouldn't make the cut in today's TV climate.
And at the Daily Telegraph, Melissa Kite, who Paper Monitor once had a humbling encounter with while out reporting the story of the fox hunting ban ... uses Sugden's death to reflect on the British love of the double entendre.
Were you to use such a phrase in front of a Frenchman, Kite reveals, he would have little understanding of what you were on about. A double entendre in French is actually called a sous-entendu (or "under-meaning"). Er, 10 things, are you listening?
Comedians today are too anatomical and lack the sort of richly layered subtlety that, er, defined Mrs Slocombe's pussy references, believes Kite.
A point that is perhaps proved by Andrew Collins's payoff in his Guardian tribute to Mrs Slocombe.
Sugden's death even makes the obituary pages of the New York Times, in a land where Are You Being Served proved to be a big hit.
The 
