Paterson and colleague Clarissa Dickson Wright were mobbed in the street when they arrived in Sydney last year to promote the third series of Two Fat Ladies.

In the show, they would be seen thundering around the UK in a motorcycle and sidecar, with Paterson's Triumph Thunderbird sporting the registration N88 TFL - for Two Fat Ladies.

The duo built up a following in the US as well - where up to 55% of adults are overweight - and were hailed as a potent weapon in the fight against "body fascism" promoted by Hollywood and TV programmes.

Paterson was born in London but spent the first four years of her life in China before her family returned to live in Rye, East Sussex.

She was expelled from boarding school at the age of 15, saying of the nuns at The School of The Assumption at Ramsgate: "They had to expel me in the end. They said it was the only way to get the rest of the school to settle down."

Nicknamed 'The Mermaid'

A year later she left school and after two years with her father in Berlin - where he had been posted with the Army - she went on to teach English in Portugal, and lived in Venice and Sicily.

She recalled: "My whole life was one mistake after another, because I was totally unqualified. I took whatever came along."

Jennifer Paterson: Worked on Candid Camera, but did not achieve TV fame until 1996

Friends in Sicily - who included Greta Garbo's lover Gaylord Hauser - nicknamed her "The Mermaid" in tribute to her good looks and swimming ability.

She was taken in by an aunt and uncle in Benghazi, Libya, to feed and care for their children.

"I'd always cooked from the age of four," she said. "With my aunt's family I only had a Baby Belling to cook on."

In 1952 she came to London and worked on magazines before working behind the scenes for the ITV show Candid Camera, and became a fixture of London's party scene.

Other jobs included being a matron at a girls' boarding school near Reading, and being a cook for the Ugandan legation in London.

Spectator cook

In 1977 she became the cook for the Spectator magazine, where she stayed for 15 years, cooking for the likes of the Prince of Wales, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness and Enoch Powell.

In 1991 she met Clarissa Dickson Wright at a party in Tuscany, but it was television producer Patricia Llewellyn who came up with the idea for Two Fat Ladies some years later when she met Dickson Wright in an Edinburgh cookery bookshop.

Paterson described her new colleague as "splendid, a barrister, Alcoholics Anonymous, and, of course, fat like me".

Launched in 1996, millions switched on to watch the ladies ride around Britain on a motorbike, cook lavish meals and mock the tastes of vegetarians and teetotallers.

Dickson Wright recalled: "She was great fun and very funny but I didn't know how it would work.