The late Victoria Wood described Beryl Cook as ‘Rubens with jokes’. This was flattering for an artist whose fat, eye-shadowed ladies were more at home in the bingo hall than the boudoir. Fleshy, but utterly unsexy, Cook’s buxom babes have long been objects of veneration as well as ridicule. The question being posed in this, the centenary year of her birth, is whether they ought to be taken more seriously.

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 Listening to the documentary on Radio 4 this week, I was inclined to think this a fatuous question, over which Cook, had she still been alive, would have rasped. An untrained painter, who worked out of the ironing room of the B&B that she ran in Plymouth, she seems to have set out simply to please – herself as much as others. A nice piece of archive footage captured her recalling some graffiti that inspired her. ‘I am ten inches, would you like me?’ read the first bit, ‘Yes, but what size is your prick?’, ran the response. Cue one of the filthiest laughs you’ve ever........

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