Joan Savage, who has died aged 89, was an actress, singer and comedienne who made brief appearances in Dad’s Army and Coronation Street; a perennial blonde who beamed sincerity, she was a mainstay of light entertainment and a survivor of the music-hall tradition, performing nostalgic wartime turns well into the 1990s.
Yet Joan Savage was perhaps best known for providing music-and-dance interludes with her husband Ken Morris on the ATV (part of ITV) comedy-sketch series The Arthur Haynes Show (1956-66), parodying serious works or sending up ethnic groups, such as their 1962 rendition of The Old Bazaar in Cairo.
Her Dad’s Army moment was in “A Soldier’s Farewell” (1972) when Captain Mainwaring, dreaming of being Napoleon, takes his men to see the 1937 film Conquest starring Greta Garbo as Napoleon’s Polish mistress, Marie Walewska. The producers could not afford a clip from the original film, so Joan Savage was hired to recreate Garbo/Walewska, embracing Napoleon.
In Coronation Street (2000), she returned to her hometown of Blackpool to play Celeste Pickersgill, a ballroom-dancing widow who picks up Malcolm Hebden’s Norris Cole. The pair look set for victory until a previous winning couple sabotage her shoe heel and her chances of glory, leaving Cole to win the trophy with Vera Duckworth, whom he had earlier abandoned for Celeste.
Joan Savage appeared with the Black and White Minstrels, Leslie Crowther,Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse and Les Dawson. Her party pieces included imitations of Barbra Streisand, Marlene Dietrich and Queen Elizabeth II. On one occasion she sang Noël Coward’s It’s Bound to be Right on the Night on the radio by royal request for the Queen Mother’s birthday.
Yet she could not afford to stand on the dignity of broadcasting alone. In the summer of 1986, for example, she was in the end-of-the-pier summer show at Cromer, in Norfolk, singing anything “from operetta to Nelly Dean, with jazz in between”.
Joan Savage was born in Blackpool on January 2 1934, one of seven children, three of whom died young. Her father was Norman Savage, a comedian whom she accompanied around northern clubs; her mother was Millicent “Millie” (née Nuttall), a pianist and sheet-music demonstrator.
Joan Savage was spurred on by her “slightly stage-struck” mother. Annette Schulz, who ran the Tower Children’s Revue in Blackpool, took the youngster under her wing, arranging for her mother to play piano at dance classes so that Joan’s lessons would be free. By the age of 12 she was singing and roller skating with Blackpool Tower Circus, where an elephant once soaked her sequined costume by answering a call of nature in the ring.
She graduated to throwing custard pies and understudying witches, her cackle impressing Ronnie Taylor, head of light entertainment at BBC North. He brought her on to Variety Fanfare on BBC radio and she followed him to Granada TV and a regular slot on his variety show, On the Air.
“She has proved one of the quickest to adapt herself to the TV medium and get the most out of working to camera,” noted the Manchester Evening News in 1959, when she was Dick Whittington in Wolverhampton.
Joan Savage met Morris when they appeared together in the revue Music and Madness. They were married in 1955 and became a popular duo, often committing musical murder with their parody act. In adverts for Kodak cameras she posed with her “extra bright, clear and lifelike” photographs of him.
One of her final performances was a rendition of Broadway Baby at a 2002 concert staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, at the Royal Festival Hall.
Morris died from a brain tumour in 1968 and in 1973 Joan Savage married Bryan Offen, an export director for Mercedes Cars. He survives her with a daughter from her first marriage.
Joan Savage, born January 2 1934, died November 1 2023