'Ida Barr once was a big star in the British Music Hall. Now she's a star again cos she's singing the RnB music, innit. Thrill to her version of Missy Elliot's "She's a Bitch" and get down as Ida drops some rhymes about the topics that matter - her home help, flu jabs, and the fall she had doing the Hokey Cokey last Diwali in her sheltered accommodation (Thabo Mbeki Court - formerly Winnie Mandela House, E9).

Ida first appeared on the British stage as an infant in a pantomime at the turn of the last century singing "A Marrow's A Banana's Father", the song that made her name. Since then "the original ragtime girl" has survived wars, the decline of variety, the break-up of her marriage to "the only Scottish Yiddisher fusilier in the Irish Guards" and recurrent financial embarrassment.'