The thing is about Fanny is that she has an almost mythical like status, the surviving footage of her, like the Christmas episodes which are generally laughed at by modern audiences are viewed through a modern lense. She was in her 70s at that point, people laugh at her frocks and penciled on eyebrows, but all old ladies back then looked like that when they were dolled up, they were young in the 20s, 30s, 40s, they had all plucked away their eyebrows and drawn them back on decades ago, it was the fashion.
She came about in the post war years and of course demonstrated lots of bright and innovative cooking, such as dyeing eggs blue and mashed potatoes green to bring glamour into people’s lives after the drab war years. But she did demonstrate lots of normal cooking, two shows exist on YouTube of her showing how to cook casseroles and the like, but the bbc had a videotape wiping policy back then as tape was expensive, so most of her shows no longer exist that would show that she was a very competent cook and champion of the housewife and budgets etc.
Reading about her life and a bit between the lines, she had an incredibly hard beginning, she was born in 1909 and had to survive in a world where women were not given a shit about, I think she embellished a lot of her stories, but she was widowed young and had to take on lots of jobs to survive, had to leave two kids behind, and also had to leave one son locked in a bedsit to go out and work, no social security in those days. She may seem harsh to modern audiences and a bit of a joke, but those women were hard and had seen a lot, my nan was in an unmarried mothers clinic in the 30s and treated like shit for getting pregnant out of wedlock, bloody hardcore and incredible, just like Fanny! Fanny used to light her cigs off the gas cookers and swear like a sailor apparently 😂