Isobel Barnett

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Lady Isobel Barnett (30 June 1918 – 20 October 1980) was a British radio and television personality, popular during the 1950s and 1960s.

Isobel Barnett was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. She went to the independent Mount School on Dalton Terrace (A59) in York and studied medicine at Glasgow University. She was a practising doctor, and appeared as an actress, but it was as a panellist on BBC television shows such as What's My Line? that she became famous.

Elegant and witty, she was regarded by audiences as the epitome of the British aristocracy (although her title actually came from the fact that her solicitor husband had been knighted; she was not an aristocrat, nor had she married into the aristocracy). She also made regular appearances on the long-running (1948 to date) BBC radio series Any Questions?, on the radio panel game Many a Slip and on the women's discussion series The Petticoat Line.

When the more informal culture of the 1960s and 1970s brought an end to her television career, she descended into a reclusive and eccentric existence. In 1980, she was found guilty of shoplifting, being fined for stealing a can of tuna and a carton of cream worth 87p from her village grocer. This brought her briefly back into the public eye, and just four days later, she was found electrocuted in the bath of her home in Cossington, Leicestershire, apparently having committed suicide.^[1]

Because of past public perception, viewing her as 'a hardline aristocrat', after her death the British tabloid press seized upon her apparent disingenuousness and hypocrisy. Her past broadcast remarks (which were very authoritarian) were held up for ridicule.^{[citation needed]}

Her story was sensitively recounted by several of her friends and colleagues in a 1991 BBC Radio 4 documentary in the Radio Lives series, which confirmed that she gave no indication whatsoever to any of her friends that she was planning to take her own life, and that she kept up a facade of "business as usual".