The Scottish star used his exceptional gift for impersonations to create genre-mashing specials that were as epic as the Hollywood films they parodied. He was a perfectionist performer with huge talent
Actor and comedian Stanley Baxter dies aged 99
The description “special” is overused in television schedules; Stanley Baxter’s programmes justify it. The comedian is one of the few stars whose reputation rests on a handful of astonishing one-offs – standalone comic extravaganzas screened in the 1970s and 1980s, first by ITV’s London Weekend Television and then the BBC.
In both cases, the networks ended their associations with Baxter not because of lack of audience interest – at their peak, the shows reached more than 20 million viewers – but due to the colossal costs demanded by the performer’s vast and perfectionist visual ambition. One of Baxter’s favourite conceits was to re-create, in witty pastiche, scenes from big-budget Hollywood movies that made it look as if his versions had also spent millions of dollars.
Cashflow was further stretched by the fact that Baxter played multiple roles – 18 of them in one sketch. Recent digital technology has made such multiplications relatively easy, but at the time Baxter was sharing a screen with several selves, primitive image-mixing technology left a giveaway outline – like the chalk marks homicide cops put around a corpse on the sidewalk – when scenes recorded at different times were merged together.
