The true test of her faith was demonstrated to superb effect in 2000 in a euthanasia storyline in which she helped her friend Ethel, who was suffering from lung cancer, to die. Dot’s conflict between her own moral code and her need to help her friend who was in terrible pain raised the bar for writing in soap opera. Some would say it hasn’t been bettered since.
That is not to say that Dot personified the misery with which EastEnders is often associated. Like all great performances, June Brown’s offered light and shade. There are not many soap characters who have quoted from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, or indeed could breeze into a storyline with an effortless sort of Dickensian grotesquerie. This latter point is crucial, I think. Brown learned her craft during the great boom of the British character actor in the Fifties and Sixties, which involved giving the viewer value for money: a full-blooded performance including all manner of quirks. She not only made you care about Dot, she was a lot of fun to watch as well.
Dickensian perhaps, but also Shakespearean. Dot was like one of those working-class characters that he used for comic effect but also to speak wider truths that his more major players were blind to – think of the drunken porter in Macbeth joking about being at the gates of Hell (a very Dot allusion) while real catastrophe is unfolding around him. Yet Dot wasn’t merely a comic creation, and her tragedies often seemed all the more poignant because we had seen her in rather less overwrought situations.
Above all, Dot was a cultural icon, a cliché perhaps but one that holds true. There are only a few in the world of soap – Hilda Ogden is one – and they are nearly always female. Dot certainly wasn’t another sort of cliché: the soap matriarch. Maternal yes, but not the tough, uncompromising sort, rather one whose gentle advice came from years of perseverance and suffering. No wonder when Spitting Image decided someone needed to explain the Hard Ecu to John Major, they chose Dot, puffing away on a Berkley’s menthol, and looking at the finer points of member country currencies. When Dot Cotton spoke, we all listened.
