Remembering Jo Kendall 

5 February 2022 tbs.pm/74756

 

The actor Jo Kendall has died at 81.

She had been known to listeners since she starred in I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again on the BBC Home Service (later on the Light Programme) along side Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden, later The Goodies, and John Cleese, later of Monty Python. The series pioneered the humour style of both of those successors. She also went on to appear in the quasi-spin off I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue for BBC Radio 4.

She appeared in, and spoke the first line of, Yorkshire Television’s new daytime soap Emmerdale Farm in 1972, with her character, Peggy, daughter of matriarch Annie Sugden, dying of a brain haemorrhage in 1973. She had found the grind of soap opera life to be mind-numbing.

On television she also worked with her former ISIRTA colleagues in episodes of At Last the 1948 Show and The Goodies, as well as playing Roland’s mum in Grange Hill.

But she remained most famous for her radio work. She was in the first episode of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had a two-year stint on Radio 2’s Waggoners’ Walk, and was a mainstay of The Burkiss Way, a sketch comedy that originated on BBC Radio 3.

She died on 29 January 2022.

 

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