Lipman was the face of BT during the 80s and early 90s, when she played a typical Jewish grandmother in a long-running series of ads created by J Walter Thompson. The ads finished their run in 1992.
Now mobile store Carphone Warehouse has signed the actress to front its multimillion-pound campaign to mark its entry into the fixed-line telecoms market that puts it head to head with BT in the £8bn market.
Not only do the ads use Lipman, but they also echo BT's old slogan "It's good to talk" with "It's good to talk, but it's better to talktalk".
Carphone Warehouse has just appointed the Will Pond Jones Collective, which is part of Chime Communications, to handle the task.
The retailer announced its talktalk service in March. The Chime agency won the business following a pitch that did not include Carphone Warehouse's main creative agency Clemmow Hornby Inge, which was unable to take part due to a conflict with its BT client.
Talktalk, a joint venture between Carphone Warehouse and Sainsbury's, is the latest offering to threaten BT's 70% share of the fixed-line market.
Carphone Warehouse chief executive Charles Dunstone said: "BT makes money through inertia. Apathy is what protects BT's dominant position."
Ironically, the Maureen Lipman campaign nearly never got made. Research had said that "Beattie", being the stereotypical Jewish grandmother who can never stop talking, was the one person who could never get people using the phone more.
In fact, research suggested that she was likely to depress calling volumes, particularly among higher-calling women, who were likely to distance themselves from her behaviour.
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