Stanley Baxter, the Scottish comedian, impressionist and clandestine master of drag who could impersonate the Queen better than the Queen ever managed herself, has died at the age of 98. One feels compelled to add 'finally,' because Baxter had been threatening to outlive us all ever since he vanished from television in the early 1990's, presumably to spend the rest of eternity perfecting a new sketch in which he played both Margaret Thatcher and a corgi simultaneously.
Born in Glasgow in 1926, Baxter grew up in a city whose natural climate is damp disapproval. This proved ideal training for a career spent sending up the British establishment with a sweetness that made the knife go in unnoticed until the victim was already bleeding smiles. His great gift was to look exactly like whoever he was taking off, only more so. His Noël Coward was more Coward than Coward; his Princess Margaret had the authentic note of someone who had just discovered the lower orders were still breathing her air. For two golden decades the Stanley Baxter Show and its successors turned BBC and ITV schedules into a national pantomime in which the entire ruling class was played, with loving malice, by one small Glaswegian in a frock.
Audiences howled; the subjects themselves watched through their fingers and, in several documented cases, rang up to ask for private performances. The Palace, it is rumoured, kept a discreet file marked “Baxter: Do Not Encourage.” Then, abruptly, he stopped. No farewell tour, no tear-stained This Is Your Life, just a quiet retreat to a cottage somewhere north of civilised complaint. Offers poured in; cheques were written in sums that could have bought half of Dundee. Baxter sent polite refusals, apparently content to let the world remember him at the peak of his powers rather than risk the indignity of a comeback in which he played the Queen Mother doing the Macarena.
He leaves behind a nation that still, in moments of pompous crisis, finds itself thinking “What would Stanley do?” and then realises, with a pang, that he isn’t there to do it. A unique talent, a genuine original, and—by the standards of showbusiness—almost indecently modest. One suspects he is already upstairs, dressed as St. Peter, telling God he’s early and suggesting a nice cup of tea while they wait for the rest of us.