GHow fondly we all remember the Carry On films. They produced a wonderful stable of British comic actors, including Kenneth Williams, Sid James and Barbara Windsor, who became the nation's all-time favourites.
And despite the dirty jokes, sexual innuendos and absurd character names (Sir Rodger de Lodgerley and Dr Nookie anyone?) there was always something rather innocent about the series.
Over the years we have learned that the playful antics of the characters on screen masked some serious personality disorders, and that the schoolboy romps captured on the big screen were nothing compared with what was going on behind the scenes.
Carry On star Hattie Jacques will be portrayed by Gavin and Stacey star Ruth Jones in a new TV drama of her life
The gloriously funny Kenneth Williams was in the grip of a dangerous depression, while the hilarious Joan Sims was an alcoholic.
And now we discover that the buxom Hattie Jacques - who famously played the overweight matron figure, with a glint in her eye - was lusty to the point of nymphomania off-screen. And what's more, her ample size served only to make her many suitors even keener.
No one who saw Hattie dressed as the fairy queen, or as a flamenco dancer to Eric Sykes's Spanish guitarist, will ever forget her tremendous comic impact. Neither will they forget her husband, the much-loved Dad's Army star John Le Mesurier (Sergeant Wilson).
Hattie Jacques - who famously played the overweight matron figure, with a glint in her eye - was lusty to the point of nymphomania off-screen
Only recently a BBC drama told how Le Mesurier's third wife ran off with lugubrious comedian Tony Hancock - bizarrely with John's blessing. Now, it's been revealed that second wife Hattie Jacques actually acted as a matchmaker for Le Mesurier - she herself having developed an obsession with a rough-trade toyboy whom she entertained in their marital bed.
The extraordinary story of Jacques's passionate appetites, and her lifelong frustration at being too fat to become a ballerina, form the basis for a new television film starring Ruth Jones as Hattie. To most people, Ruth will always be Nessa, the black-clad goth from Barry in the marvellous TV sitcom Gavin And Stacey - a comedy she also co-wrote.
But take another look, and why yes, she could be the dark-haired, voluptuous Hattie Jacques, whose mere size would make the audience crack up - especially when she was caught in an embrace with the weedy Kenneth Williams in Carry On Doctor.
'No, no, matron. I was once a weak man,' implored Williams, recoiling in fastidious horror from Jacques's elephantine appetites.
'Once a week's enough for any man,' she responded breezily, before poor Williams was wrestled upside down, Jacques's long-suppressed amorous desires took over and the audience was left in stitches.
First love: Jacques with former husband John Le Mesurier, who couldn't satisfy her sexual urges
It was a winning formula and the scriptwriters did not have to look far to find it, because Jacques's desires were the driving force of her life.
Hattie was the real thing, a woman who liked sex so much she threw caution to the wind whenever she found it. In short, her gargantuan appetites matched her girth - Hattie was never discouraged from falling madly in love, even if it was almost always with the wrong people.
Her first great passion during World War II (when she still went by the name of Josephine Jacques) was for an American soldier called Major Charles Kearney.
Hattie was the real thing, a woman who liked sex so much she threw caution to the wind whenever she found it
The teenage Josephine, fresh from private school, met the debonair Charles when she was working with the Red Cross during the Blitz - first at an air raid post near King's Cross station, then in London's East End near the docks. While there she famously helped with the emergency delivery of a baby girl in a telephone box.
But it was in the West End, at a Mayfair theatre where nurses used to take wounded soldiers to see traditional music hall acts, that she was introduced to the love of her life.
The buxom school-leaver was completely taken in by the suave drawl of this transatlantic charmer, who wrote her rhapsodic letters warning her not to diet too much because he liked having a lot of woman to love.
She later recalled that even in those early days, she was the butt of jokes due to her size. While binding wounds and sheltering in Underground stations, she would hear comments like 'blimey, it's a good job Adolf hasn't got a bomb that size' or 'there'd be room for a whole family if you left the platform'.
When the Red Cross drafted its London staff out to country hospitals, Hattie refused to leave the city - and Kearney. She speculated in later life that she might well have become a nurse in real-life, had she not met her American soldier.
Ooh, Matron! Jacques with co-star Charles Hawtrey in 1968 film Carry On Doctor
As it was, the lusty 21-year-old had discovered sex. She took a job as a welder in a North London factory - where she was nicknamed Lady Muck - in order to be near her lover.
For a couple of years they enjoyed passionate assignations in friends' flats or in hotels where she proved herself insatiable. 'Eleven times ... wonderful!' she wrote in her diary. 'With your technique you should spend all your time in bed,' she told her American lover.
But her desire for Charles didn't stop her dating other men when he was out of town. 'Please God send me a man,' she wrote desperately one evening in February 1944 before going to dinner in London with another American soldier. She later recorded: 'God sent him! Met him at 5.10am, drunk by 6.10am.'
Increasingly frank about her sexual needs as she became more famous, Hattie ensured that her name remained in the phone book - in contrast to most stars who went ex-directory
Charles Kearney was not the last man who would concede defeat faced with the Hattie's voracious sexuality. He was well aware she played around and, since he could not stop her, agreed that he would consider her faithful to him 'as long as you never do anything that would someday make you feel that you had been unfaithful to yourself'.
The affair finally foundered when Kearney told her he was married to a woman in Massachusetts and they had a four-year-old daughter whom he adored. The impetuous Hattie responded by getting herself pregnant by him, saying she wanted his child, too - then she thought better of it and had a backstreet abortion in Streatham. She never saw Charles again.
By this time, she had landed a job singing music hall songs at the Mayfair theatre (where she and Kearney had first met). She wore a tight white jumper with a large red dragon emblazoned across her ample bosom to the audition. With a new name and a new career, she spun a story that her lover had been killed in the Ardennes.
In reality, she responded to Kearney's disappearance from her life by indulging in some unabashed dating. Increasingly frank about her sexual needs as she became more famous, Hattie ensured that her name remained in the phone book - in contrast to most stars who went ex-directory. Her biographer suggests this was a deliberate ploy to encourage suitors who liked large ladies to phone her.
And there were many who did. Her future husband, actor John Le Mesurier, took an immediate shine to her when he saw her on stage in 1947. Though married, he took Hattie dancing, apparently with the blessing of his first wife, then invited her to see him on stage.
Soon they were living together, something which suited Le Mesurier - who didn't even know how to make a cup of tea - down to the ground. As soon as his divorce came through, the ever impulsive Hattie proposed to him. They married in 1949 and she gave him two sons.
Well-loved: Jacques, seen here with Barbara Windsor in Carry On Doctor, was adored by everyone
Everyone adored Hattie. She loved entertaining and kept an open house for her friends. And she loved working, particularly on radio's famous Tommy Handley show, ITMA (It's That Man Again). Even its name brings back wonderful memories to all those who sat by their wireless sets laughing till their sides ached at the BBC comedies of the 1950s.
On the show Educating Archie she met all the names who would enrich the gloomy post-war years: Eric Sykes, Beryl Reid and Tony Hancock. She went on to star in Hancock's Half Hour, playing the overweight secretary and object of Hancock's desires.
Just like her most famous character, Matron, she had never learned to control her predatory impulses
'You'll never carry her over the threshold,' says a gruff Sid James. 'No, but a gang of us might,' retorts Hancock.
Towards the end of the decade, Hattie was cast in Carry On Sergeant. This was hotly followed by Carry On Nurse - in which the formidable Matron was born and Leslie Phillips coined his famous phrase: 'Ding Dong!'
Carry On Teacher followed, then Carry On Constable, Carry On Regardless - in all there would be 29 films and Hattie Jacques appeared in 14 of them. By Carry On Cruising in 1962 she was fair, fat, 40 and riding high.
Then, one day, when she was setting out for a charity function, instead of being picked up by her usual driver, a new handsome face appeared at the front door of the family home in Earl's Court - and Hattie fell in lust all over again.
Devastatingly attractive John Schofield was a young Eastender, almost half Hattie's age and a witty talker with an engaging personality. Quite the opposite of Hattie's taciturn husband.
'A fast-talking Cockney who made a living selling cars,' Le Mesurier would later dub him, while Barbara Windsor described him as 'stunning, a gorgeous bit of crumpet'.
Schofield and Hattie took one look at each other and went to bed that very evening - in the marital home she shared with Le Mesurier. Schofield was an adventurous lover and the couple were so infatuated that, in order to meet regularly, they pretended they had to attend a series of non- existent charity events together. At last she had found the lover she had been looking for ever since Charles Kearney .
Since Le Mesurier was often working away from home, the couple had the run of the family house. When Le Mesurier came back, Schofield stayed overnight on the sofa. Soon he had a room of his own in the house, though incredibly the mild-mannered Le Mesurier (usually confused by the amount of marijuana he smoked) was the last to realise what was going on.
When he did cotton on, he took the view it would eventually blow over.
Before her time: Jacques died of a heart attack in October 1980, aged 58
The final straw came when Hattie openly declared her love for Schofield in front of both men. Soon, Le Mesurier had found a lover of his own, Joan Malin, who worked behind the bar in a Shaftesbury Avenue theatre. And Hattie, by now besotted with Schofield, set about oiling the wheels of their affair.
With his wife having essentially left him for a younger man, Le Mesurier took the blame. He allowed himself to be sued for adultery, in order to protect his beloved Hattie's career and reputation.
By 1965, Hattie ruled the roost in the family home. But her lover's behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic. She put up with it for a year or so - even going on a crash diet to beguile him. When she appeared in public now she was often wearing dark glasses and when she took them off her eyes would be blackened or cut.
Though friends were concerned, Hattie was so in thrall to their sexual chemistry that she refused to think ill of Schofield. Then one day in 1966, when she was making The Bobo in Rome with Peter Sellers, Schofield told her he had fallen in love with an Italian heiress. A huge argument followed and Hattie phoned Le Mesurier in tears. The affair was over.
Schofield cruelly delivered the final blow when, back in Britain, Hattie was taken to hospital with a kidney complaint. He flung a gold medallion which she'd given him inscribed with the words 'I love you' on to her sick bed and stormed out.
He never even returned to the house to collect his belongings. Nor did he say goodbye to Hattie's young sons, to whom he had become a father figure.
According to friends, the ebullient Hattie was never the same again. Le Mesurier had, by this time, married Joan - even though within six months she had already fallen for his so-called friend Tony Hancock, with whom she carried on an affair until his suicide in 1968.
So Hattie consoled herself with the company of gay men - and with food. She always made light of her extra pounds - 'it saved me an awful lot of heartache about wanting to be Cleopatra or Juliet,' she claimed - but behind the scenes her fuller figure upset her tremendously.
She tried to slim down, going to fashionable health spas and managing to lose three stone, but she was so big that it didn't show. Desperate for another lover she even sent a lonely hearts ad to a magazine claiming to be of 'medium weight'.
Eventually, Hattie gave up hope of romance. Instead, she hosted sumptuous Christmas parties where the table would be groaning with food, including three separate turkeys cooked in three ovens.
And she threw herself into her work, battling painful arthritis and chest problems.
By the age of 58, Hattie's was alone. Her one remaining confidante was the seriously unstable Joan Sims. And when her mother died in her arms in 1980, Hattie felt she had lost her last true friend.
Hattie herself died of a heart attack - or perhaps it was a broken heart - not long after.
Just like her most famous character, Matron, she had never learned to control her predatory impulses.
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