🎬 Melissa P. (2005)

When I say “Rose” I mean the character on Keeping Up Appearances, played in the first season by the late Shirley Stelfox, and in the remaining four by the far superior (also late) Mary Millar. Millar’s Rose is steeped in irony and camp, and has not just the outfits but the giddy joy of a 15-year-old girl, inhabiting a 50ish (?) woman’s body. Unbothered by settling down or biological clocks, drawn to romance, not just sex, but not especially of the lasting variety, unlike Samantha Jones, she’s not out to shock, or to perform adventurousness. She’s simply joyful, in a way sometimes kinda-sorta allowed of very young women, but treated as not just undesirable but implausible the moment a woman ages out of the age range whichever dating app data claims men stop swiping favorably.

Rose loves men. This is an understatement. The number of boyfriends (married men, as a rule) and ex-fiancés she accumulates is the butt of many an affectionate or at least tolerant joke from her relatives. She doesn’t particularly discriminate (“when you get to my age there’s no shortage of short and fat”), but has a soft spot in her let’s say heart for the Dishy Vicar (married and, at least as per the show’s internal universe, quite handsome), and for Emmet, her sister Hyacinth’s neighbor, whose source of appeal is that he’s recently divorced.

Rose is one of those female characters about whom it could be said she lives her life like a gay man. Except, does she? She lives her life like a straight woman, just a certain kind of straight woman, one who’d plainly be miserable if in sister Daisy’s position, happily married to a man with lower appetites than her own. She’s unslutshameable, and is correct in believing that she looks nice in the skimpy 1990s teenager clothes she wears. Always in a miniskirt, always prepared to gesture at tugging it down to make it a longer skirt, but a longer skirt is never in the cards.