has since credited Routledge as "an amazing teacher" who taught him some "very valuable lessons" in acting. In 1990, Routledge was cast as Hyacinth Bucket in the comedy series Keeping Up Appearances. She portrayed a formerly working-class woman with social pretensions (insisting her surname be pronounced "bouquet") and delusions of grandeur (her oft-mentioned "candlelight suppers"). Routledge delighted in portraying Hyacinth, as she claimed she "couldn't stand people like her" in real life. In 1991, she won a British Comedy Award for her portrayal, and she was later nominated for two BAFTA TV Awards in 1992 and 1993. Routledge left the role in 1995, despite the series' ongoing popularity, as she wished to pursue other roles as an actress. During an interview on Australian television, Routledge said: "I'd much rather people look back and say 'I remember that' than say 'Oh, is that still on?'" Another reason she wished to leave the role was that she felt that the writer Roy Clarke, was "rewriting old scripts". Routledge has also played several real-life characters for television, including Barbara Pym and in a dramatised BBC Omnibus biographical documentary of 1994, Hildegard of Bingen. In 2001, Routledge starred in Anybody's Nightmare, a fact-based television drama in which she played Sheila Bowler, a mother and piano teacher who served four years in prison for murdering her elderly aunt, but was later acquitted following a retrial. Radio and audio books In 1966, she sang the role of Mad Margaret in Ruddigore, the title role in Iolanthe, and Melissa in Princess Ida, in a series of BBC Radio Gilbert and Sullivan recordings. She took part in a studio broadcast of Tchaikovsky's opera Vakula the Smith (narrating excerpts from the work by Gogol) in 1989. In 2006, she was featured in an episode of the Stage and Screen series on Radio 3. Routledge's extensive radio credits include several Alan Bennett plays and the BBC dramatisation of Carole Hayman's Ladies of Letters, in which she and Prunella Scales play retired women exchanging humorous correspondence over the course of several years. A tenth series of Ladies of Letters premiered on BBC Radio 4 in 2009. Radio work prior to 1985 included Private Lives, Present Laughter, The Cherry Orchard, Romeo and Juliet, Alice in Wonderland and The Fountain Overflows. Having a distinctive voice, Routledge has also recorded and released a variety of audiobooks including unabridged readings of Wuthering Heights and Alice's