Mavis Nicholson, who has just died at 91, was one of Kingsley Amis's student conquests when he was a lecturer in Swansea. They remained friends, and he often visited her and her husband Geoff, a newspaper rugby correspondent, at their house near the Young Vic. Take a Girl Like You is dedicated to the Nicholsons.
It is said they had a rather Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice set-up going, with Amis's wife Hilly, which Mavis and Amis continued on their own.
She became quite famous with the afternoon chat shows, in the early days of Channel 4, having been picked out by Jeremy Isaacs. She had a sort of Welsh motherly air, and everyone confided in her - Elizabeth Taylor, Nina Simone, Kenneth Williams. Eric Morecambe's encounter with her is lightly fictionalised in his novel, Mr Lonely. She always hoped that the old VHS tapes, where they existed, would be remastered and put on DVDs - there was talk of this, but I don't know if anything happened.
Perhaps people opened up to Mavis because her programmes were broadcast in mid-afternoon and there was an assumption no one was watching - unlike the altogether higher profile Parkinson or Aspel. I remember her telling me that when she asked Dame Edna, "Edna, were you a man, what sort of clothes would you wear?", Barry Humphries rather bristled, didn't like tables being turned in that manner. Mavis was very attentive to atmosphere like that.
I knew her at The Oldie, where at the famous lunches she mistook me for Robbie Coltrane, perhaps the first signs of a bit of dementia - her final years were hard. We spent a fortnight going up the Amazon River together, on a cruise organised by the magazine, and she was meant to "interview" Maureen Lipman - but she couldn't do it. Maureen did her Joyce Grenfell show instead, which was brilliant. Mavis suffered terrible anxiety attacks, and removed herself from public view altogether -- eventually ending up in the remote countryside near Oswestry. She also felt the death of Geoff very keenly. She was a nervous person, and the nerves got worse.
Mavis was a wonderfully kind and loyal friend, and we clicked in the way only fellow (English-speaking) South Welsh persons can. I thought the world of her. Everyone did.
Roger Lewis is appearing at the Llangwm Literary Festival in South Wales on August 10. Click here for details
