Claire Rayner memorial fundraiser draws star-studded cast | Media | The Guardian

Claire Rayner memorial fundraiser draws star-studded cast

Sandi Toksvig and Stephen Fry among attendees at event to support one of redoubtable agony aunt's favoured charities

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• Michael White
• The Guardian, Monday 6 June 2011
• Article history

Stephen Fry was among the famous guests at the Claire Rayner fundraiser. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian

"No point in a having a memorial service for an atheist like mum in St Bride's," Claire Rayner's family decided after Britain's most redoubtable agony aunt died (she was not one for euphemisms) last October. "Let's make a few bob for one of her causes."

So, instead of Fleet Street's church, they packed the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus with friends and admirers, plus a star-dusted cast of both, to raise laughs and tears, plus £20,000 for the Patients Association, of which mum had been president. It was one of 60 charities she supported.

Well-meant but improvised performances can be risky occasions, lurching between triumph and disaster, piety and sentimentality. This show, two hours of music, jokes and memories entitled "Now with Wings", directed with plenty of pace by Douglas McJannet, avoided such pitfalls – not least because the cast seemed to be assuming that, atheist or not, the late departed was looking down on their efforts and keeping order.

Rayner was scornful of the ignorant and bigoted but kind to those who suffered. She sympathised with those who "fall in love outside marriage", but scorned those contemplating adultery as a hobby. Take up knitting, she suggested. Long before it was fashionable, she was fiercely supportive of gay people.

Even the title had a Rayner story lurking behind it: "Now with wings" was the slogan used to promote a new sanitary towel with flaps in the 80s, one of only two TV commercials she ever agreed to do – because, as Sandi Toksvig explained, Claire was fed up with "airy-fairy adverts with women leaping around in trousers or diving into swimming pools".

It caused a row, as she often did. From an unhappy childhood in the East End, offset by a very happy 53-year marriage to Des, ad man turned artist, Rayner evolved from being a nurse to a novelist (50 books published), to an outspoken agony aunt and health educator (40 more books published). She ended up sitting on royal commissions and, though she was a militant republican, she was made an OBE. One of her children said it could stand for "Old Bag Extraordinaire".

Claire was kind, humane, feisty – "one of the finest women I ever knew," said Toksvig. Claire stood for human dignity and for "knowledge over ignorance", said Stephen Fry. Nurse Chetwynd (her maiden name) is "kind and reliable", wrote a ward sister in 1951, though by 1952 the NHS had detected "an overwhelming personality if not subdued".

Subdued it never was. Actors Isla Blair, Martin Jarvis and Patricia Hodge punctuated the music – Gershwin, Cole Porter, Sondheim sung by Kim Ismay and Jessie Buckley – with readings from Rayner's countless columns and TV programmes, which attracted 1,000 letters a week in her heyday.

In old age she took up the cause of the care of the elderly, but she also dealt with men who sent her carvings of their erect penis or rang to ask if she would listen while they masturbated. "If you need to," she would say, resting the phone on her desk for a suitable interval. She had what she called "the altruism DNA", which made it impossible to ignore pain.

Jo Brand popped up to explain that she, too, had been a nurse, but not a good one like Claire, because she had a degree and couldn't even read a patient's blood pressure – "I just made it up."

Rayner wrote in plain, evocative English. She was kind to the unhappy and the bullied, harsh on the bullies. She loved food, drink and laughter – a good life well lived, said Lady Helena Kennedy. And she stood by her good causes to the end. As she said on one of her last outings: "Wild horses on bended knees would not have kept me away."

via guardian.co.uk