I must admit I don't spend much time (on FerrariChat) in the U.K. section, as a rule .... .... tending to make the majority of my posts in the 'Vintage'; 'Other Italian' or 'Cars, Motorcycles, Boats & Planes' sections of FChat. But I believe this is the correct forum section for such a (new) topic .... something of a 'British institution'. I'm sure it will be much appreciated by 'Gentlemen of a certain age'. Back in the late 60's and early 70's, I, for one, used to be glued to the TV set on a Thursday evening, between 7:00 - 7:30pm tuned to BBC1, watching 'Top of the Pops'. .... I hasten to add - Not neccessarily to see and hear the latest chart hits (or listening to the rambling of the naff BBC 'jocks' like Jimmy Saville or Tony Blackburn) .... .... but to watch the programme's 'in-house' dance troupe Pan's People. There seems to be a big nostalgia thing, for the 60's and 70's going on at the moment. So it wasn't any real surprise to me, last night, when I stumbled across a PP video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XglhXHdzZA .... and then another, and then dozens more .... For the enlightenment of our younger readership (who may find this subject of topic a little mild, by current standards) .... .... and some of our colonial friends, who, from their comments on YouTube videos, only just now seem to be (re)discovering PP ) .... .... some background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan's_People and http://www.bbc.co.uk/totp2/trivia/pans_people/ My God, they were HOT !!! Still photos of the girls don't really do them justice - but this is my personal favourite PP line-up - from '72 onwards. L-R: Louise (LouLou) Clarke; Barbara (Babs) Lord; Patricia (DeeDee) Wilde; Cherry Gillespie (Yumm !) and Ruth Pearson. Please discuss. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Same 70's line up in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lMy84y9pws (mysteriously recorded in Black and White). Which of them would you choose for your Valentine ?
.... with only 2 dancers - who remain 'seated' !! Strictly for fans of 'jazz-funk' .... and 'LouLou' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THz7KZ0nkWU
Hmmm. Seems it was actually recorded in colour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFBfj6xZDCw (Unfortunately the BBC appear to have 'censored' the lower half of the screen. )
Courtesey of 'The Independant' : http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2491808.ece Heaven knows what can be the attraction of reviving shows and concepts from the olden days of television .... It's the phenomenon called Pan's People. The name will bring a faraway look to the faces of several thousand middle-aged chaps who were young and impressionable at the end of the 1960s, chaps for whom the highlight of the telly-watching week was Thursday evening: it featured Top of the Pops, followed by The Man From Uncle, thenThe Frost Report after the news. Top of the Pops was watched by almost every teenager in the country; nearly 15 million viewers tuned in every week. Every pop group longed to appear, and to quadruple its record sales by doing so. After the Beatles split, John Lennon reportedly rang the show's producers to ask if they'd let him perform his new single, "Instant Karma", live. It was that powerful. But if a group couldn't make it, or would cost the record company too much to fly them over from Seattle, the programme had a solution, a booby prize, a happy substitution: the TOTP resident dancers would entertain you instead. There were six Pan's People, gyrating across the stage in teeny-tiny skirts, ruffled blouses and fixed grins. Their dance moves were energetic rather than beautiful, and were strenuously interpretative: if the song was "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree," the girls would do their best to embody the concepts of "tie" and "tree" and "round" and "ribbon" - and quite possibly "yellow" and "old" as well. I can't remember how they contrived to embody the lyrics to "River Deep, Mountain High," but nothing seemed to faze them or wipe the smiles off their faces. In the eight years (1968-76) in which they strutted and marched, pointed and pouted, flirted and swooned, the personnel came and went, but the male fraternity best remembers the original line-up. They were Louise Clark, Flick Colby, Babs Lord, Ruth Pearson, Andi Rutherford and Dee Dee Wilde. They weren't the first dancers on the show - that honour went to The Go-Jos - but they became a weekly fixture. For the girls, it must have seemed a slightly negative honour to be asked to perform only because a starry group couldn't appear; but from their debut in May 1968, they smiled bravely through it all. Babs, Ruth and Dee Dee were already seasoned hoofers - they featured as "Beat Girls" in the BBC show The Beat Room. They formed their own dance troupe after meeting Flick Colby, a choreographer, who brought in Louise and Andi. Flick left the line-up in 1971 to work behind the scenes. Andi left a year later to start a family, and was replaced by Cherry Gillespie. Louise left for similar reasons in 1974, giving way to Sue Menhenick who, like Cherry, was chosen through open audition. Babs and DeeDee left in 1975. By they time they said farewell to the pop show in 1976, one original member remained, Ruth Pearson Just as umpteen millions of music fans are convinced they witnessed the first gig by the Sex Pistols, millions are sure they watched Pan's People's debut in 1968, dancing to "Mony Mony" by Tommy James and the Shondells. It wasn't long before a mildly lubricious tradition was established: that when the girls wore the skimpiest skirts available, the TOTP cameramen would manoeuvre his camera so the lens poked up the skirts like the snout of a slavering Weimaraner. Viewers might occasionally complain, but were overruled; it was one of those bits of casual British chauvinism, like Benny Hill's girl-chasing footage, that were accepted as mostly harmless. It wasn't just the legs that received the attention. Everyone's favourite Pan's Person was Babs Lord, who was blonde and cheeky-looking and had A Figure. In a 1974 episode of the prison sitcom Porridge, Norman Fletcher (Ronnie Barker) daydreams: "I could call up a couple of birds - those darlings who dance on Top of ther Pops, what are they called? Pan's People. There's one special one - beautiful Babs ... I don't know what her name is." Ms Lord left in 1975 to marry Robert Powell, the handsome actor who played Jesus Christ in Lew Grade's Jesus of Nazareth. The troupe had absurdly short amounts of time to prepare their routines each week. The show was recorded on Wednesday for broadcast the next day. But the all-important singles charts came out on Tuesdays. So if the record to which they'd prepared a routine unaccountably slipped down the hit list, they would have to scrap it and invent new choreography. Hence the occasional obviousness of the arm-waving and face-pulling as the girls strove to find a physical correlative to, say, Enrico Morricone's film score, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". They took obviousness to an extreme when dancing to "Monster Mash" by Bobbie "Boris" Pickett and his Crypt-Kicker Five in October 1973: the girls dressed up as King Kong and other silver-screen scaries. Two months later, on Christmas Day, the choreographer decided to accompany Gilbert O'Sullivan's song "Get Down" by introducing several dogs into the studio and having the girls dance around them. But it was often a little shambolic - you could see one or more of the girls forgetting the moves. Ruth Pearson remembers getting her feet tangled among the wires and camera cables just off-camera, and actually falling off set during the final take. "Nobody," she said drily, "noticed in the vision mixing room." The skirts got shorter, the routines cheesier and the fan mail more gross ("We got a package from one fan," Pearson recalls, "and erm ... well, it had some very odd things in it, including a used handkerchief which I'm only hoping contained snot") and as the flashy naïvety of glam rock turned to the street anarchy of punk, Pan's People came to an end; it's hard to imagine them beaming and twirling to The Buzzcocks or The Damned. They were initially replaced by a disastrous experiment (and name) called Ruby Flipper, a dance troupe of both sexes run by Flick Colby and Ruth Pearson. After six months, the male dancers were judged to be a mistake and the all-girl format returned as Legs & Co. They survived until 1980 and were ousted in turn by Zoo, a small army of dancers from which a selection would be chosen every week; their function, amid dwindling ratings, was not just to dance, but to lead the audience into displays of delirious enthusiasm. They attempted this crown manipulation every week until 1983, when Tops of the Pops dispensed with dance troupes at last, realising that the home audience preferred to watch the new promotional videos that were coming on stream. The original sextet went on to widely different arenas of fulfilment. Louise married a Sheffield millionaire. Dee Dee ran a dance school. Andi and Ruth became housewives. Flick ran a gift shop in New York. And Babs - the husbands' favourite - became an intrepid yachtswoman and explorer. She travelled to the Himalayas and the Sahara and holds the unusual honour of being nominated the Oldest Housewife to have visited both the North and South Poles. Just as bravely, she appeared on the final edition of Top of the Pops in July 2006, the only member of any Pan's incarnations to do so, 38 years after her starry debut. Flick and Ruth kept Pan's People going as a club act through the late 1970s and were joined by a toothy would-be diva called Sarah Brightman. She left them to form a sexier version of Pan's People called Hot Gossip, masterminded through the 1980s by a sharp-tongued choreographer called Arlene Phillips - the impresario who is now trying to recapture the spirit of the girly dance troupe. She will have her work cut out - because striving for perfection was never quite the point of Pan's People. It was the faint air of idiocy with which the girls acted out nonsensical 1960s songs, smiled and swanned about and trotted across the studio floor trying not to mind having cameras poked up their skirts, and trying not to fall over the power cables (again.)
Obsessive ? Moi ??? Tony ? ..... Not about Pan's People - that's just a 'Nostalgia thing'. Something else beginning with 'P', maybe.
Never heard of Pan's People, but I have now! I do remember catching some of Hill's Angels on Benny Hill's show. Classic "low brow" comedy with plenty of "scenery". Do a Youtube search of "Aerobicise" to see what was used to fill between movies on cable TV back in the mid 80s. Hey, what am I doing over here in the UK BL??? (It keeps me out of trouble in that other thread concerning the car with 4 numbers that we dare not mention elsewhere. THAT discussion seems to be getting a little warmer lately!)
You stalking me, Arlie ?? P.S. Reference the other matter, I have suggested to our esteemed friend that he was probably wasting his valuable time ....
