So now, fame at last. What on earth is going on here, please? Nothing to see. Oh, careful. It's Florence Foster Jenkins.
Very good, it is Florence. Tell us about Florence Foster Jenkins. Florence Foster Jenkins was a very rich heiress. She used to rent out Carnegie Hall to do recitations.
In fact, I... think Maureen Lipman did a show about her. She just wanted to be an opera singer. She wanted to. She was rich enough to rent out.
But it became a cult and she sold out. I mean, she could have sold out ten times over the Carnegie Hall gig. Cole Porter was so enamoured of her. that he wrote a song for her.
Did she not notice the whole audience pissing themselves? She did, but she rose magnificently above it. She did say, some say that I couldn't sing, but no-one can say that I didn't sing.
Yeah, she was left a great deal of money when her father died. She sang Carnegie Hall at the age of 76. Sold out weeks in advance. 2,000 were turned away at the door. And it was $20 apiece, so she actually made a lot of money. That's about $400 a ticket in today's money.
If you paid to see that show, you think at your first bit, you're laughing, she's terrible, she's terrible. But the joke doesn't really go anywhere, does it? By the end, you're just so bored listening to this terrible singer. It was visually quite interesting. She did her own costumes.
She would change them regularly, telling the audience not to go away while she changed. I used to do that to him actually. Try to make sure that he couldn't get out when I was changing. You did?
Yeah, because it was very good fun. She used to show me her breasts. It's a fantastic effect I used to have on him.
I could do it now, I'm not going to... I can make him scream. No, don't not just not like that scream that we just have a real actual sort of scream of terror and and fright Just by appearing nude at the top of his stairs and doing what I like to do, which is locking all the doors at the bottom so that when he tried to get out, as I came down the stairs going, yes, baby, they're all yours, he couldn't get away. And by the end of it... She was in a state of such extreme panic and it's great to make someone very clever Thank you for watching do remember to subscribe to the QI channel and click here to watch more videos