Robert Ross pays tribute to the late Terry Scott, best known as the home counties husband from Terry and June, but also a Carry On favourite and the voice of Danger Mouse’s sidekick!

Terry Scott (1927-1994)

Terry with June Whitfield in Terry and June (1979-1987); Penfold from Danger Mouse (1981-1992) was voiced by Terry; as a policeman in Murder Most Foul (1964); as Peter Potter in Carry On Camping (1969)

Terry Scott is so often unfairly dismissed as a catalyst for lazy, self-assured domestic situation comedy. Indeed, if he is discussed at all, Terry’s cherubic face is eternally linked with his longrunning husband-and-wife, on-screen and stage partnership with June Whitfield: Terry the bumbling, easily-flustered, forever agitated fall-guy who would fall backwards off a deckchair as soon as look at it.

In actual fact, in his long and varied career Terry Scott was many things: he was certainly one of the nation’s finest purveyors of the stage farce dullard and the pantomime dame; he was a highflying member of the Carry On team at their absolute zenith; and, as a pioneer of television sketch shows, he could be as right-on or surreal as the most trail-blazing of comic anarchists.

At his humorous core though was a lifelong desire to emulate his great musichall hero Norman Evans: much of Terry’s talent to amuse happily wallows in that ‘Over the Garden Wall’ social gossip and the mileage of gaining laughs through outrageous and deliberately haphazard drag.