My first appearance on television

I’ve got a great big list of things I want to write about, but the space in my brain has been shrinking all week and by lunchtime, there was a centimetre left. It had all been used up on a motion project I’m working on, and it requires having seven layers of ideas going on at the same time. It’s tiring.

I took the afternoon off and went for a walk in the park in the hope it would help free up my brain a bit so I could write something or other coherently. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, with some cloudage to look at to keep me from being bored. Thank god I don’t have a proper job.

I jammed my earphones in my ears and listened to Holst’s Planets as I watched geese strut around the place. Jupiter really suits geese. After a couple of hours, I stuck on my early 80s playlist, to give me some verve to get walking home. The music that is MY music is the pop music of about 1981 to 1985. It’s the music that slings me back in time to vivid memories of being a pre-teen and teen, when it meant the whole world.

A song came on and I almost cried at the edge of the park.

Early 1982, I was in second year of comprehensive school. Imagine the school in Adolescence, but in Devon. I was not yet twelve. My tutor group teacher who was also my general science teacher had something to tell us. “Alright, alright, everybody, quieten down. You might be going on the television.”

The heads of 30 twelve and thirteen year olds, and one eleven year old swivelled round to listen what Sir had to say.

“I said MIGHT. But first I need to know who wants to go on The Saturday Show?”

If I had been thirteen, my hand would have stayed in my pocket, even if I’d wanted to go, but I was eleven and three quarters and I wanted to be on Television South West’s Saturday morning show however uncool that might be.

To my surprise, almost everybody put their hand up. Even the thirteen year olds. One of them, Gillian, was almost two years older than me and she had been on Top of the Pops, even though you were supposed to be sixteen. “What was it like?” we asked when she came back from London. “Oh, you know,” she said, like it was nothing.

We watched Top of the Pops every week, of course, because everybody did, but never to see the public dancing, just the bands. It was the only 30 minutes of the week that was just chart music, the only time we would get to see what the bands looked like, other than in magazines and occasional appearances on chat shows and Saturday morning shows. The bands would appear on stage and lip sync to their songs, or a dance troupe would dance to it if a band couldn’t be there. Even when I was eleven, I found the dance troupe incredibly naff.

That Thursday, though, we were glued to our screens to see our classmate not just the bands. We saw her, dancing nonchalantly, with her older sister, as was the style in the early 1980s, just bobbing up and down, arms marking the beat, no smiling.

The Saturday Show was as close to being on Top of the Pops as I was ever going to get. I think my fellow classmates felt the same, apart, of course, from Gillian.

A few weeks later, we got the sad news that we had been bumped from the Saturday Show. I still remember how disappointed I was. Nobody else seemed to care as much as me, but I bet they did.

Just a week later, though, our teacher came in and told us it was back on after all, and we were going to Plymouth! I started planning my outfit right away. This was 1982, so no fast fashion for us, but luckily, I had just been given a tshirt from Clothkits, in candy coloured stripes. Perfect. Together with my pale blue pin corduroys, I was ready for the big time.

Now April, and after three hours on the bus (Devon is a big county) we arrived at TSW and we were herded into the studio and the show was made. I remember nothing of the show except for two things. Dancing to some music or other, and Talk Talk.

I’d never heard of Talk Talk before. We were all sitting on a platform, on steps, to watch them play their new single, Talk Talk, and when they finished, they came up and sat behind me to be interviewed amid the teenage horde. I had just 30 seconds before fallen entirely in love with these four young men, and now they were sitting behind me. One of them, it was Paul, kneed me in the back by accident. A POP STAR HAD TOUCHED ME. He leant forward and said sorry. I turned as far as I could, and shook my head briskly, “no, no, it’s ok”, grinning like an eleven and now eleven twelfths year old who has just been touched by a pop star who she is madly in love with even if it’s only been 42 seconds although she would have liked it even more if it had been Mark because he was, as of 43 seconds ago, etched on my heart (and still is). We were all given a signed single. Oh, my heart.

The very single, now in custody of my sister, because she’s better at that sort of thing

I’m pretty sure the show went out live, because the first time I saw it was a week later when TSW had sent a videotape for us to see in our tutor group rabble.

And there I was dancing like nobody was watching local television, and noticed for the first time my tiny nascent boobs, pin pricks of swollen nipple, poking through my candy stripe tshirt… at the very same moment as everybody else. “EEEEWWWWW Look at Lucy’s tits!” shouted Mark, who hadn’t gone to Plymouth. He was my nemesis for the next three years. Most of the class laughed. “You need a bra!!! That looks HORRIBLE” he insisted.

My god, the shame. For now, my day at the Saturday Show was tainted.

Just a year later, those tiny things had blown up into pretty big knockers, and dear, sweet Mark (the little prick) now gave me my new monicker, of Jugs Pepper which stuck until I left that place in 1985.

I still had Talk Talk, though.