Yes indeed; Christmas and the New Year; a time to look forward… but equally a time to reflect on the past and remember absent friends… not that Biddy Byrne from Glenroe was my friend – God no - she was more a mentor… a role model really -  like many of us she was slave to her flyaway hair, a martyr to the singed look of a tight perm but never, save a bit of natural lumpiness, did she let herself go even after she got her man. 

I, for one, was thankful when Miley Byrne finally got up the proposal.  I had sat with the rest of the nation gripped by the suspense - tension even, I mean who could have read that face without an iron? 

When it did come, there was no conjoint epiphany or anything.  Just auld Miley, less flowery than cauliflowery, dithering his way to the point which, if memory serves, ran along the lines of “Biddy I love every acre of ye.” and so it was agreed that together they would tarry on for Godot and mercifully the ‘love scene’ was sealed with a bit of spit and a handshake.

Still, Biddy was a good woman of rural proportions.  Upon her betrothal, countless young bucks must have pined for the squelch of her wellington through the high grass and the swish of her overalled thighs rubbing.  She herself did not pine but flourished choosing starchy potatoes and  the forever of building up her calves against the tenacious mucklands. 

But all that’s nothing really – nothing against the gutsy courage of this woman who flouted convention, a woman who, when she married Miley Byrne, slapped society in the face with a wet fish of its own making.  Yes; from the undercurrent of uneasy whisperings and nudges about country ‘traditions’ Biddy pulled that very wet fish to the surface when she married a man intimate with her own sister.

They got married in a church and everything…  

‘I do’ she said and with that a taboo was broken…   

'Course it wasn’t all happily ever after - we saw Biddy McDermott Byrne through some marital crises and enough see-saw shapeshifts to guarantee her a future in talkshow hosting – but in her forbearance and patience she always lived up to her name and through that goldenvale of tears that was her plot, she kept right on scowling… right up, that is, until her very last episode in telly land when she apparently became lockjawed.

Everywhere you looked for that half hour, there was Biddy; smiling- nay, grinning, effervescent, as if for all the world Lever Brothers had offered her a toothpaste contract as well.  Not that she looked remotely comfortable.  In fact, her continuous display of full frontal twitchings seemed like a sort of inverted Tourette's Syndrome. 

Mind you it has to be said those babies were impressive, whiter than white.  Maybe it was just because Biddy’s teeth, hidden so long from sunshine under that frown, were simply untanned and pale.  Maybe she went a bit Hollywood, panicked at the thoughts of her ‘happy’ debut and called in the professionals. Either way she sealed her own fate entirely…

Go ahead, think back… there she was driving along in her final scenes when some lone farmer perched on a tractor seat started to cross her path.  Remember… he looked to the left and his way was clear.  Then, he looked to the right where she was… but what chance had he?  The man was helpless, caught transfixed, like an innocent rabbit, in the glare.