Elsie and Doris Waters
They are remembered for creating the comedy characters Gert and Daisy, and have been described as "the most successful female double-act in the history of British music hall and variety".
[1] They were born in Bromley-by-Bow, east London, the daughters of amateur singers Maud and Ted Waters, a funeral furnisher, who encouraged all their six children to learn musical instruments.
As singers, musicians, and comic entertainers, they started to perform widely in concert parties, at functions, and on variety bills, and made their first appearance on BBC Radio in 1927.
Their banter as Gert and Daisy, drawing on the conversations they had overheard when growing up in the East End, became an immediate success, and audiences requested them to repeat and develop it.
[4] In their performances as Gert (Elsie) and Daisy (Doris), they are credited with developing a new style of observational and naturalistic comedy, with gossipy and sometimes surreal asides delivered in a conversational matter-of-fact way, but sometimes replete with misunderstandings, malapropisms and innuendo.
They claimed never to have repeated the same sketch or song, and toured the country, appearing regularly on radio in shows such as Henry Hall's Guest Night.
It was written by Terry Nation, John Junkin and Dave Freeman, and the supporting cast included Ronnie Barker, Joan Sims, Ron Moody, Doris Rogers, Iris Vandeleur, Hugh Paddick, Anthony Newley and Peter Hawkins.
[4] However, they continued to perform in theatrical shows, including pantomimes, into the 1960s, and made occasional television appearances until a few months before Doris's death.
[4][6] It was widely understood that Doris Waters had been in a relationship with a diplomat in the 1930s, but after he was posted abroad the sisters agreed to stay together, for professional reasons and to aid the war effort.
Wheeler Winston Dixon, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, wrote that "Elsie and Doris Waters are perhaps the most influential social satirists of the period",[1] adding: By forming their double-act around the ever-affianced Gert and the indissolubly married Daisy, they offered women an ontological choice: whether to find their meaning in themselves and with other women, or in the state of gender subalternity, through servitude to men and to patriarchy.
By evoking laughter through song, music, patter, gossip, cross-talk, conversation, malapropisms, puns and jokes, through humour, wit, irony, burlesque, parody, satire, ridicule and a gynocentric misanthropy (counterbalancing misogyny), they also invoke a condition of delight, in which men and women might laugh at themselves, at their subject formations, their gender postures, their beings.
