The Scottish comedian and impressionist Stanley Baxter, who has died aged 99, was one of the great superstars of British television in the 1970s, with a series of big-budget shows that almost matched the scale of Hollywood epics, and in which he brilliantly impersonated international celebrities of the day, often female ones.
His mastery of the nuances of dialect and the speech patterns of humbler folk was also uncanny: in one famous sketch based on BBC TV’s Nationwide, the presenter introduced newsflashes from regional studios: Leeds, Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast and London. Each reporter spoke unintelligible gibberish, yet each was impeccably accurate phonetically.
