Su Pollard on her new stage show and happy memories of Hi-de-Hi!

Not for a good rummage around or to spot a potential bargain, but to drop things off.

It was part of her mission to declutter her home. “There are so many things around all of us,” says Su, the actress who shot to fame when she played the irrepressible and eternally optimistic Peggy, the chalet-maid of Hi-de-Hi!, and the slightly bewildered Ivy Stokes in You Rang, M’Lord?

“Am I alone in looking around my place and thinking ‘when did I last use that?’ One of the most recent things was a nice enough decanter that had

sat on the sideboard for heaven knows how long. I looked at it and I thought ‘when was the last time that actually had anything in it? When was it

used? Is it really doing anything?’ So it went. And I hope that it finds a good home, and that someone gets pleasure from it.”

“And secondly, it’s the play that I’m going to be doing later in the year, a one-woman piece called Harpy. We took it to Edinburgh for the Fringe last year, and it seemed to go down quite well, so it’s been tweaked and changed a little. And this will be a slightly more developed version.”

Her latest role is Birdie, an extreme hoarder, in the stage show Harpy (the UK tour has been postponed due to the pandemic). It’s one the few ‘‘straight’’ parts she’s ever undertaken.

The play focuses on society’s attitude to solitary, lonely, often elderly people, and is “a mix of humour and poignancy and shines a light on mental health”, she says.

“It’s all about a rather odd woman called Birdie, who lives in a home that is full of stuff. It’s the things that she’s squirrelled away and hoarded all over the years. But there’s a reason for this bizarre behaviour and I think audiences will find it rather poignant. Something that was very precious to her was stolen, many years back, and she’s been unable to jettison anything else ever since. She holds everything close.”

She gets called a harpy, harridan and hag. “It shows how we tend to judge people we don’t bother trying to understand, and there can be an underlying lack of respect for the elderly.”

As for her own neighbours, back home in South London, it’s a rather different story. “They really are marvellous,” says Pollard. “We’re not in and out of each other’s homes, but we are all friendly, and we look out for each other. Don’t you need that these days?

“I’m surrounded by nice people doing sane jobs, like banking and IT (all a contrast to mine!) and doing them at sensible times. Not me. I go out to the theatre, or I’m off on tour somewhere…”

Pollard discovered that she had a gift for comic timing very early on. “I was six, and back home in Nottingham I was cast as the Angel Gabriel’s assistant in a nativity play. I had to stand on a painted cardboard box and declare that he was about to arrive, and that he would give the good news to Mary. Which I did rather well, I thought. Until the box collapsed, because no-one thought to reinforce the thing, and I went straight into it.

“It got the biggest laughs of the night – and I was mortified for a moment or two. But then I thought to myself, ‘hey, I can make people smile’, and at the end of the evening, I also got some of the best applause as well.”

She was, she says, hooked. “There was never anything else that I wanted to do, after that. It was going to be acting, performing, whatever. And I was lucky, because my parents encouraged me.”

In 1974, she applied to go on Opportunity Knocks and came second, behind a singing Jack Russell. “Not many actresses can claim to have been trounced by a warbling canine, can they?”

She says the experience taught her a valuable lesson, which was “never take yourself too seriously”.

After her initial breakthrough she went on to tour around Britain in musicals, had a spell in the West End in Godspell and then, in 1980 she appeared on our TV screens in Hi-de-Hi!

She has hardly ever stopped working since – and that show, in which she played chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw, lasted for almost a decade. “They’re still repeating it today”, she laughs.

Does she sit and watch it? “If I catch it, it’s fun because it brings back a lot of memories”, she says, “but I don’t sit there like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, re-running ‘the greatest hits’. That would be a bit weird.”

Then came You Rang, M’Lord?, and a host of lucrative voice-overs for TV. You’ll also have seen her on Loose Women, the Antiques Road Trip and Strictly Come Dancing. “I’m blessed in the fact that I am as tough as old boots, and, for me, retirement isn’t on the cards. I’m having too much fun.”

There are, it seems, a few things that Pollard herself will never ever part with, and they all played a part in her career.

“It’s a very short list, but on it there’s Peggy’s cap and apron, from Hi-de-Hi! I kept those when the show finished, they were such a part of it all, and such a part of me. When I finally say ‘farewell’ to them, they’ll be going to the Museum of Comedy, or the theatre department of the V&A.

“I’m not saying that they are valuable as such, but they are part of what was a pivotal TV series, iconic in their own way. I’m not sentimental about them, but they were such an integral part of creating that character.”

She continues to work and enjoys the variety it brings her. “I’ve had a marvellous life, and a wonderful career – I still look forward to pantomime, every year, and whatever else is thrown at me.

“I’m a lucky lass. I was talking to the lovely Nicholas Parsons not so long before he died recently, and he told me that he was virtually forced into being an engineer by his own mum and dad, before he stood his ground and went into the theatre – and carved out a career of over 70 years.

“I think that is a shining example to us all. Do what you want to do, what you feel you will succeed at, and not a ‘wish fulfilment’ thing for others. Otherwise, when you get to be 40 or 50, you’ll be coming out with the two worst words in the English language – ‘if only’ – and looking back with regret.

“I always think that the best way to live is to look forward, with optimism.”

Harpy will be touring to rescheduled dates around Yorkshire from the autumn and into 2021.

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