On top of all that, it feels this year as if we have lost an inproportionate number of well-known faces from the entertainment world: Victoria Wood (as mentioned in a previous post), Prince, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, the legend of the airwaves that was Terry Wogan, and only this week the unforgettable Gene Wilder. One star whose passing fell more or less under the radar at the end of June, probably due to the blanket coverage of Brexit in the news at the time, was the writer and actress Caroline Aherne, at the age of just 52.
Caroline rose to fame in the 90s through her appearances in sketches in The Fast Show - most memorably as the supermarket checkout girl who loves to comment on people's shopping, and the Spanish weather presenter for whom the sun is always shining and it's always "Scorchio!". Equally brilliant was her wonderfully tongue-in-cheek turn as a septuagenarian chat-show host in The Mrs Merton Show, who never shied away from firing the questions we all wanted asked to her celebrity guests - "So, Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?"