Michele Hewitson interview: Pam Ayres

Pam Ayres is not amused people think she made a career of knocking off a few funny verses, and less happy about bad imitations. Photo / Brett Phibbs

You're Pam Ayres! I said to Pam Ayres, and as she was the only other person in the room this might have seemed a funny thing to say. But I was reminding myself really because she'd just said: "It seems to me there are only a few wonderful sensations in life ..."

Then she paused for effect, no doubt to let me think something like, oh, it's Pam Ayres, it'll be slippers and kippers and a nice cup of tea. "And one of them," she went on, managing to look mischievous while also looking like a sensible lady of 64 who wears comfy shoes and cardies and does the flowers at the local church, "is first-class sex ..."

Which is when I said: "You can't say that! You're Pam Ayres!"

"Well, why not?" she said. I couldn't and can't think of an answer to that but, well! You could have knocked me down with a feather. Not really. I'd just read her just-published memoir, The Necessary Aptitude. I'd given up counting the boyfriends.

There were, I said, delicately, rather a lot. "I know. There was quite a cavalcade of them." They weren't those sorts of boyfriends, surely, I said. "What sort did you mean?" she asked. I didn't like to say. "Let's not say then! We'll draw a veil over it." Quite right too and that "first-class sex" information served me right for being so interested in the boyfriends.

Still, you would be interested , wouldn't you, if you think of Pam Ayres? Because if you do - and she's much in demand again, after having been famous for five minutes, or years, which is about the same thing, in the mid-70s - you think of those Laura Ashley frocks, buttoned to the neck, with frills and flowers, of sensible sandals and of tea cosies.

When she won Opportunity Knocks in 1975, the producers created a set for her which included a tea cosy. Another competitor, a singer, got a silver curtain, slashed, daringly. She still remembers "how disappointed I was when the other bloke had all the curtains and I got this crummy old chair and a tea cosy. A knitted tea cosy".

As though she was 80! No wonder she's still cross. "I was only 27! And I just got shoved into what they thought the mould I should be in was. A sort of country twerp. Like a freshly baked loaf, is how they used to talk about me. But actually I was quite a determined writer."

She's still quite a determined writer and so is less than amused when people write parodies of her poems. There's a really rude one on the internet, of what is probably her most famous work: Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth. "I Wish I'd Looked After Me Tits? I know. I've seen it." I thought she might think it was funny, but she doesn't. "Well, because it's got my name all over it and I didn't write it and ... it goes over the line, basically."

I thought she might see such parodies (there's another called He Always Leaves the Seat Up) as a sort of flattery, but again, certainly not. She told me, in an exasperated way, about how recently she was speaking at a literary festival and "a lady came up with a big white padded wedding album and she said, 'my daughter got married last month and they had your poem at the wedding'. I wrote a poem called Yes, I'll Marry You, My Dear ... a funny sort of poem about being married and she said, 'here it is. I wonder if you could sign it?'

"I looked at the damn thing and it's all engraved on lovely thick card in silver script and it's all wrong. There were missed lines and the syllables were wrong. It's not what I worked on so carefully. So I had two choices. I could say, 'well, I'm not signing that because that's not what I wrote' and then you look like a real po-faced old cow. Or I could just sign it and say, 'I wish them every happiness'."

And she did, but it obviously rankles and you can see it might get up a poet's nose even when the poet calls her poems "potty verse".

People used to think, "oh, she just knocks off a few rhymes, how hard can it be?" Harder than it looks, I can tell you. When people found out I was interviewing her a few, including, me, tried their hand with spectacularly appalling results, which I spared her. She's had quite enough to put up with, what with the fake knockers and the left-up loo seat.

Also, she doesn't find many people funny, which is a bit funny in a comedienne, which is what she says she is really, if an unusual one. "I always feel like I'm such a let-down to people because they say, 'Now tell us who makes you laugh' and I can hardly think of anyone."

She does find her husband, Dudley Russell, funny. She's really Pam Russell, but neither of them minded when I introduced him as Dudley Ayres. "I've been called much worse!" he said.

Well, yes, by his wife. She once called him, I thought, a "windbag" in a poem called They Should Have Asked My Husband, about a know-it-all. "You'll feel the glazing of your eyeballs, and the bending of your ear." Dudley wasn't in the room at the time (thank goodness - God knows what I'd have heard about their first- class sex life) so I couldn't ask him what he thought about being called a windbag. She says it's not really about him. "It's an amalgamation of windbags I've known." Is it really?

"Yes, definitely. I mean, he does know a lot! But it grew out of the new one-way traffic system around Cirencester [in the Cotswolds] because on Saturday mornings we had a family ritual to go into town, do our bit of shopping and have a sticky bun and a cup of coffee and they introduced this one-way system and it drove me husband mad and he said, 'God almighty, why don't they bring the traffic round past the police station, up through the church ...'

"And we started saying, 'well, I don't know why they didn't ask you'. And every Saturday we went through this ritual ... So that's where the poem idea came from." I still think it might be a bit about Dudley, but they've been married almost 30 years so he knows what he's in for.

He is very posh and she isn't. She said: "Oh, me 'usband's exceedingly posh!" He comes from old money and stately houses, lost in the 1930s, but the poshness remains. She came from a council house, six kids, two parents and an outdoor bucket arrangement for a loo.

She grew up in Stratford in the Vale in Oxfordshire. Her father called the local doctor "sir" and they all called the local land owners "sir" and if they weren't quite wearing cloth caps to tip, they might as well have been. It wasn't until she left home that she realised hers was the accent of "a smock-wearing yokel, a carrot-cruncher, swede-basher, grass-chewer, ditch-digger, shit-spreader, cheese-roller and village idiot all rolled into one".

She writes, beautifully, cleverly and with much good humour (she's excellent at smells, mostly the pongy impoverished variety) about her childhood in her memoir. It is called The Necessary Aptitude because that is what she lacked for just about any job she tried her hand at. She went into the civil service - she was about to become a cleaner but her beloved mother, usually timid, wasn't having a bar of that because her Pam had "a good head piece" on her.

She later joined the Women's Royal Air force as an incredibly inept "plotter" which involved drawing technical things; she thought it would involve drawing pictures which she was a bit good at. Then she took up writing her "potty verse" and started doing readings at little clubs where people laughed (and not at her accent) and asked where they could get copies of her poems. So she made a little pamphlet and flogged them off at 40 pence a time. She used to go back to her bedsit and count, with great relish, the piles of pennies.

What happened next is why we know who Pam Ayres is. Opportunity knocked. Really famous people did impersonations. "Oh, there were innumerable impersonations of me." Benny Hill did her as a milkmaid. Ronnie Barker fed her prawns and champagne at a fancy charity gig and asked her about herself and "I thought he must think I was a really interesting person!"

The impersonation turned up the next week on the telly. She didn't mind that one - "although I felt that I'd been conned!" - but mostly they were "crummy impersonations involving some lavatorial rhyme and a wig. So I can't say I was particularly flattered by all that, no".

Everyone said she'd made and she says she'd love to be able to tell everyone "it was like a fairy story. But it wasn't really. It was like being minced up by some great machine and coughed out at the end".

She doesn't want to bang on about this, or for me to bang on about how it all went wrong. But, briefly, there was an agent she can't talk about because of a gagging order, and a TV series that was "a monumental turkey". There were mad gigs offered. She did the one at a Birmingham company called, truly, Tubes and Extrusions, and she bombed.

"I can still hear my boyfriend laughing at the back of the hall and he was the only one and it was a fake laugh." It has the ring of something she might make up and put in a poem but, no, tragically, it happened and, I'm afraid, it made me laugh. She said valiantly: "If it's made you laugh, I'm pleased."

She's happy making people laugh but off-stage, she still lacks confidence. "I'll always feel second-rate. I always feel I don't measure up." I thought that was a terrible shame and said so, and didn't she think it was a shame? She said: "You haven't got a psychiatrist's couch around have you? Ha, ha."

She doesn't go in for indulgences like navel-gazing. She just gets on, and she's had to, more than once. After Dudley took over her career and she got her legal matters sorted out, they did all right but then nearly went bankrupt - a barn conversion project and soaring interest rates. To keep their lovely house in the Cotswolds and their two boys at public school she had to go back on the road. Anyway let's, she suggested, not talk about what she likes to call "wrist-slashing" stuff.

"But I'm all right!" she said. Good! I said, and meant it. "Thank you Michele," she said, and she meant it too. What a nice woman she is and (I had to ask) her teeth are all right too. She showed me. "Much repaired, but all me own," she said. Much like her.