Everything about Isobel Barnett totally explained
Lady Isobel Barnett (
30 June 1918 –
20 October 1980) was a
British radio and
television personality, popular during the
1950s and
1960s.
Isobel Barnett was born in
Aberdeen, Scotland. She went to the independent
Mount School on
Dalton Terrace (
A59) in York and studied medicine at
Glasgow University. She was a practising doctor, and appeared as an
actress, but it was as a panellist on
BBC television shows such as
What's My Line? that she became famous.
Elegant and witty, she was regarded by audiences as the epitome of the British
aristocracy (although her title actually came from the fact that her
solicitor husband had been knighted; she wasn't an aristocrat, nor had she married into the aristocracy). She also made regular appearances on the long-running (1948 to date) BBC radio series
Any Questions?, on the radio panel game
Many a Slip and on the women's discussion series
The Petticoat Line.
When the more informal culture of the 1960s and 1970s brought an end to her television career, she descended into a reclusive and eccentric existence. In 1980, she was found guilty of
shoplifting, being fined for stealing a can of tuna and a carton of cream worth 87p from her village grocer. This brought her briefly back into the public eye, and just four days later, she was found electrocuted in the bath of her home in
Cossington, Leicestershire, apparently having committed suicide.
Because of past public perception, viewing her as 'a hardline aristocrat', after her death the British tabloid press seized upon her apparent disingenuousness and hypocrisy. Her past broadcast remarks (which were very authoritarian) were held up for ridicule.
Her story was sensitively recounted by several of her friends and colleagues in a 1991
BBC Radio 4 documentary in the
Radio Lives series, which confirmed that she gave no indication whatsoever to any of her friends that she was planning to take her own life, and that she kept up a facade of "business as usual".
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