To millions of television viewers Jane Freeman was Ivy, the ferocious tea-shop owner in Last of the Summer Wine, the long-running television sitcom written by Roy Clarke that revels in a nostalgic rural Yorkshire idyll that never existed. Compo, Clegg, Foggy and their various replacements and successors would take refuge in the café, which in the early years Ivy ran with Sid (John Comer), her husband.
Although Sid and Ivy were affectionate, she was never shy about bringing up his infidelity with an unseen bus conductor. Their bickering occasionally boiled over. When Ivy suggested that Sid needed something better than a screwdriver for a job, he shot back with: “Well, pass me something sharp like your tongue.” Sid was killed off after Comer’s