Margaret Meldrew



Magaret Meldrew [Potrayed by Annete Crosbie ] is Victor's long-suffering, tolerant and kind-hearted wife, Margaret tries to maintain a degree of calmness and to rise above her husband's frustrations. However, she is too often engulfed in the same folly and often vents her anger, usually at Victor who bears the brunt of it all. In early episodes, her character acts more as a comic foilto Victor's misfortunes, for example 'asking if a cat found frozen in their freezer is definitely dead and mentioning a friend who died of a terminal illness. When Victor reminds her that the woman actually fell from a cliff, Margaret retorts she only did so because "she went to the seaside to convalesce".

In later episodes, Margaret develops into a more complex character. She is shown to be fiercely protective of her marriage to Victor, becoming easily suspicious and jealous, for example, of a Dutch marionette that Victor becomes occupied with repairing in the episode "Hole in the Sky", eventually leading her to destroy it. In "The Affair of the Hollow Lady", a greengrocer develops a liking for Victor and wrongly attempts to convince Margaret that he has been unfaithful to her. In revenge, Margaret assaults the woman with a pair of boxing gloves. However, Margaret herself is shown to have contemplated infidelity with a man she met on holiday in the episode "Warm Champagne", eventually deciding against it. She sums up her relationship with Victor in this episode by telling Ben (her admirer) "Victor's the most sensitive person I know - and that's why I love him. And why I continually want to ram his head through a television screen".