It is hard to disentangle Wendy Richard from the part that bought her lasting fame: Pauline Fowler in EastEnders. Miss Brahms in Are You Being Served? seems like an aeon ago, her busty, Cockney sparra flirtiness long superseded by Pauline’s hatchet face and curdling insults to anyone who crossed her. But before she became famous as a relentless cloud of misery, Richard was a Sixties starlet, a leggy blonde who became a model at the age of 16, starred in two Carry On films and duetted on a No 1 single.

It was Richard’s role as the ditzy shop-worker Miss Brahms that stamped her firmly upon the public consciousness. As Mollie Sugden’s matriarchal Mrs Slocombe worried about her pussy, Richard’s character fended off indecent advances from characters who were lucky that she did not have a frying pan to hand.

Over the years the levity of her earlier roles was chipped away by the grind of Pauline Fowler’s life in Albert Square. By the time of her “death” in 2006 Pauline had morphed into the strangest character in soap. She should have been a grand dame. Once you’ve done that length of time on a show — and gone through all the deaths, divorces, psychopaths and every conceivable problem with your children — you should be a national treasure. Even if you’re a villainess.

For some reason, however, the writers made Pauline into one of the most irritating characters in popular drama. She wasn’t a scheming bitch, she wasn’t a cuddly matriarch. She was just miserable, her lips pursed in judgment, forever castigating her son Martin, or not committing to Joe, the nice guy who was (for some reason best known to him) in love with her. Richard said that she had quit the show because she objected to the writers having Pauline marry Joe.

Times Archive, 1985: Eastenders: BBC's new soap opera

The only thing that keeps them going is gossip: Albert Square is awash with it

• Review, 1973: Are You Being Served?

All the warmth that Pauline had in the show’s early years, all that humanity — over her daughter Michelle’s teenage pregnancy or her other son’s HIV — was siphoned off. We first saw this darker side when she whacked her husband Arthur with a frying pan after he was caught cheating on her with Mrs Hewitt. We cheered. But after Arthur’s death the character folded in on herself and the audience’s affection for her dwindled.

Pauline died in the snow in the middle of the Square beside the bench dedicated to Arthur in a Christmas Day episode that also featured a climactic confrontation with Sonia, and an abortive attempt to be reconciled with Martin. It was a grand exit and it was beautifully acted by Richard, as was a preceding scene with June Brown as Dot Cotton desperately tried to remind Pauline what a warm person she had been and could be again.

Like Dot, the audience couldn’t quite work out where that character had gone wrong. But that was a fault of the show’s writers, rather than Richard’s as an actress.

EastEnders fans miss Wendy Richard, but not the Pauline Fowler she became. Whether to remember the bawdy maid, or the grizzled grouch, is down to each individual viewer.

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