Olive.

 Anna Karen has died in a house fire, which is a horrible way to go. She was 85. RIP. 

She's famous now for playing Barbara Windsor's sister in Eastenders, but for years she was known as Olive Rudge, in On the Buses. 

And On the Buses is inexplicable. It was incredibly popular. The 1971 cinema version (they made three On the Buses films!) was Hammer's highest grossing film of the 70's. They made 74 episodes of it, over seven series. It even survived the desertion of leading man, Reg Varney. There was a stage production! And yet there is never a single moment where it isn't feeble, witless and disgusting. 

The premise is that Stan, a bus driver, lives at home with his mum, Mabel, his sister, Olive, and Olive's stuck up husband, Arthur. Reg Varney was 53 when the series started. His mum, Doris Hayres was only 11 years older than him. Conversely, Anna Karen was 20 years younger than her screen brother. 

He's 53, and living with his mum. And I thought I was a late bloomer. 53 and still giggling at tits and trying to cop a feel. No one in this show is young. Jack, Stan's best mate, a nightmare scarecrow of nostrils, teeth and moist palms, has the sexual sophistication of a 15 year old boy at a school disco. By the time the series ended the actor playing him was 41.

 The plots are moronic. The lads will have a scam, the Inspector will attempt to thwart it. He'll fail. That's it. Or Stan will be on to a good thing with a "clippie" (a female ticket inspector) but his mum or his sister will ruin it, and she'll go off with another fella, often Jack. You would never need to dub this for foreign markets - anyone, anywhere could follow these knuckle-dragging, thumbnail pantomimes. They'd be better off too, as they wouldn't be able to understand what people are saying. 

On the Buses is, I think, the most brutally misogynistic TV program I've ever seen. Olive is mocked and abused every time she's on screen. It's unrelenting. She is mocked for her stupidity, her weight, her ugliness, her inexplicable desire for her husband. Her husband, Arthur, is by far the most horrible person to her, but they all give it a go. She's perennially a "stupid, great lump". And she just takes it. She never fights back. She stands there, silent and lonely as a cow in the rain. It's tragic. She's always bright, always cheerful, and she's constantly degraded and humiliated. The sheer welter of abuse meted out to her is astonishing. She's like a human pinata. As soon as she appears she's a figure of fun. She's barely human, just a prop for hatred of women, and because she is not sexually attractive to Stan and Jack and Arthur, she has no value. The clippies offer them a potential sexual outlet, so they are to be flattered and tricked. But Arthur doesn't even want to fuck his wife, despite Olive always being perkily up for it. And for that he hates her more than the others do though, crucially, no one appears to like her very much. Even her mum seems to thinks she's a bit of a pain in the arse. 

There is a weird strain of this in English comedy. I'm reminded of the tourist in Michael Winner's Bullseye. The running joke of the film is that the lead character's comical high jinks lead to some sort of terrible accident for the tourist's wife, and he repeatedly calls after them "Hey Buddy! At least let me buy you a drink!" This happens three times, because it's funny to reward men for carelessly damaging your wife's body. 

This was normal. This was popular. People thought it hysterical that an overweight woman would wear an undersized bikini, and so sicken the man she married. Olive is ritually humiliated, week after week, and that is not only her entire purpose within the show, but the entire premise of the show. On the Buses is about women who are deemed unattractive by palpably unattractive men (and the male cast are decrepit grotesques) being worthless. All desirable women are held in opposition to Olive. Her good humour is pathetic, her attempts at seduction are disgusting, her willingness to work is doomed by her incompetence. There are only two women in On the Buses, neither of whom are sexually available to  lead character Stan, as one is his mum and the other his sister. The mother is a prudish Gorgon with a voice that could scrape barnacles off a ship's hull. She continually thwarts Stan's attempts at "slap and tickle" with "dolly birds" because she's old fashioned. Olive, Stan's married sister, is unattractive, and the fact she is a sexual being is therefore repulsive. These are the only two women in the show who last more than one episode. They have no fun. They cook, clean and carp. They boss the boys about. They nag and scold. Olive gets ideas above her station and they're batted down. Mum never gets ideas - her life is over - she just wants her housekeeping, and to spoil Stan's attempts at "nookie".    

This was normal. This was popular. Of course, this was before all the PC nonsense. Earthy, honest jokes about how foreign and disgusting men find women. The good old days. Along with black passports, crowns on pints, imperial measurements, and no doubt the birch, this government will presumably attempt to bring it back. After all, all of Johnson's best Brexit lies were written On the Buses.