Michele Hanson nominates Joan Bakewell as her heroine of mature people in today's Guardian. But we have our own Top Five Older Ladies What Rock, after the jump....
ANNE REID
Recent BBC4 outing In Love With Barbara only hints at the sheer magnificence of Reid, who quite apart from being electrocuted by a faulty hairdryer in her departure from Corrie, (and that's what we call a soap exit), also did a grand job of shagging Daniel Craig senseless in 2003's The Mother. She was 68 at the time. Like Helen Mirren without the alarming rape comments, here she is above in a gratifyingly daft Victoria Wood reality spoof about trying to find Mr Right when your mum is a witch in a wheelchair. Incidentally, despite Ricky Gervais and Peter Kay being considered early masters of the pretend docu-thing, Wood's verite comedy predates The Office, People Like Us and That Peter Kay Thing by quite some years, and is just as funny.
CLAIRE RAYNER
Rather than spending her twilight Agony Aunt years dispensing advice on whether it is judicious to shag one's sisters' boyfriend or not (and that is YOU, Dear Deirdre), Claire Rayner was as recently as last month campaigning against target-led care in the NHS, rather sensibly claiming that it results in 'deceitfulness, bad practice and a culture of blame.' Not bad for a lady who overcame the surname 'Berk' (no, REALLY) and had to contend with bringing up Top Greedypants and Guardian restaurant critic, Jay Rayner. Now a vocal supporter of the intensely brilliant British Humanist and National Secular Societies, Rayner is a woman after my own heart - marrying TV-friendly cuddly approachability with a fiercely rational attitude to health ishews. LOVE her.
JUDGE JUDY
Judith Sheindlin quite literally (to borrow from Becca's piece yesterday on vocal irritants) saved my life when I lived in small-town, no-town Detroit one year. I was quite the court show connoisseur, but it was Judge Judy's courtroom proceedings, flirtations with Officer Bird and marvellous bon mots which buoyed me the most. Quite apart from coming up with the genius that is 'Beauty Fades, Dumb Is Forever' she was seen on last night's ITV2 episode giving one daft ladyperson very short shrift. Girl A was frantically banging on about how she'd done EVERYTHING for her useless beau - 'I cooked for him, I cleaned his house, I went round every day because it was so disgusting,' The Judge simply retorted 'You picked him, honey,' cutting through the crap like so much butter.
ISABEL ALLENDE
The fact that Isabel has sold over 30 million books does not concern us here, for it is her breezy and delightful sauciness which earns her a place in this Top Five. Frank, honest, prone to waxing lyrical about how she would gladly toss a naked Antonio Banderas in guacamole and wrap him in a tortilla, she fled a military coup in Chile to write extensively on her 'fundamentals'. Which, since you ask, are family, cooking and sex. After her daughter's death in 1992, she wrote 'Paula', an unflinching love letter to the child she'd lost. Invited to read her daughter's love letters while researching the book, she discovered the 'real' Paula - a fully rounded woman capable of writing 'pornographic' missives and yet still the child she loved. She included them in the book. So then - a mother willing to embrace all aspects of her daughter's personality (including the squeamish bits), Allende is a lady-shaped lesson in clever candour.
DORIS LESSING
Doris (my Nanna's name, therefore best name ever, therefore the name of my as yet unborn and as-it-happens-unconceived child) wasn't having any truck with the journalists who door-stepped her last year and told her she'd won the literary prize to End. Them. All. Having spent the day out with her son, the fact that the Swedes had just named her the 'epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny' (and that's quite a quote) had utterly passed her by. Sayed the journalist; 'Have you heard the news?' And sayed Lessing: 'Ohhh, Christ,' before buggering off to pay the taxi man. She later responded with the quite right and marvellously immodest fact that, 'I've won all the prizes...every bloody one...the whole lot. It's a royal flush.' This, from a woman of 88 - fiercer than any woman one quarter her age, despite what Beyonce et al would have you believe.
But that is just what Roby reckons. What about you, readers?
