Mandy

Probably Dick Emery's best known character and the one with the most familiar catchphrase, Mandy was a busty blond who was forever misunderstanding the interviewers questions so that she always assumed it had a suggestive, sexual connotation. Her reaction would be to deliver the obligatory punchline "Ooh, you are awful, but I like you" which was delivered with a slightly less than playful punch to the interviewer's shoulder. She was a viewers' favourite. Dick Emery hated her: "I have no great love for the female characters I portray. I never present a 'nice' woman, perhaps because deep inside I resent the suggestion that I am a female impersonator. And of all my characters, Mandy is the least real. However, it is seldom that she does not encroach upon my own life, for all her unreality-she is rather difficult to live with, because wherever I go, someone is always ready with her punchline." The character was actually invented on an improvised stage on the back of a lorry in Normandy during the war. At that time she didn't have a name, and in fact wouldn't have one for many years until she was finally named after a notorious prostitute who was the centre of one of Britain's biggest sex scandals in the early sixties: Mandy Rice-Davies. Emery was always amazed at the popularity of the character: "Despite my own feelings about the unreality of Mandy, she seems to have achieved an identity of her own." Emery expressed his wish to drop Mandy from his shows but he never did. "I once dislocated the poor interviewer's arm with a rather too vigorous punch! It just goes to show how dangerous it is to tangle with blondes!"

• Category

  Film & Animation

[pix046]

Nothing like a double entendre.

[blinkzone1]

Shit is funny.

[slim439]

I ''like'' you too Misss Prissy XXXXXX

[TheDalgety]

Aww Foggy, You are awful. BUT I LIKE YOU. Miss Prissy XX with thanks