LeftLion - Nottingham TV Timeline Nottingham TV Timeline 22 May 14 words: Harry Wilding "We flashback to watch Nottingham's role in local and national TV through the years" Features illustration: Tom Heather It’s been just over ten years since Carlton Studios on Lenton Lane was shut down, with more than 350 jobs going to the wall with it. Since then, we’ve had our Central news broadcast to us from Birmingham, which as anyone with a vague sense of direction and geography can tell you, is not near enough to us to be called local. The launch of Notts TV is full of hope and promise - a bit like Notts County and Forest fans at the start of every season, but with less naivety. Could it mark a return to the glory days of us having local telly that actually means something to the people of this city? Let’s press the rewind button on our HD ready flatscreens and look dreamily into the distance as the screen goes all wibbly and we flashback to watch Nottingham’s role in local and national TV through the years… 1953 The BBC show Robin Hood is the legend’s first representation on television.

It stars Patrick Troughton as the man in tights and runs for six episodes. There will be much more of our outlaw on the box over the next sixty years, and not just from the UK - the likes of Germany, France, USA, Japan, and Russia all have a crack at the legend in their own various, often wacky, ways. 1956 Following the creation of Independent Television (ITV) in 1954, Associated Television (ATV) - after messing about providing London with telly for a year - are awarded the franchise to provide the weekday independent television service for the Midlands, which began on 17 February. This was all beamed to TV viewers from Birmingham. illustration: Tom Heather 1963 Pioneer of gay rights and self-proclaimed anarchist, Ray Gosling has his first TV documentary, Two Town Mad, shown on the BBC. The film is a comparison between Leicester - where he attended uni - and Nottingham – where he moved in the early sixties and stayed.

He would go on to make over a hundred documentaries up until his death in 2013, including an Inside Out in 2004 in which he revisited the same Leicester and Notts people and places he had filmed over forty years earlier. 1967 ATV extend their Midlands service to seven days a week. So, yeah, now covering, like, 100% of time. 1972 Cult children’s TV series Rainbow gets its first airing on the ITV network. The voice of George, and later Zippy, are both done by Nottingham-born actor and voiceover artist Roy Skelton. His previous work was mainly on Doctor Who, voicing villains such as Daleks, Cybermen and Krotons. Born in Nottingham in 1925, actor Ivor Roberts - after a lot of theatre work - starts his TV acting career in his mid-forties with several episodes of Coronation Street. He would go on to star in episodes of The Sweeney, Doctor Who, Porridge, Z Cars, Crossroads, Two Up Two Down, You Rang, M’Lord?… the list goes on.

His most recurring role was as Arnold, an engine driver, in Oh Doctor Beeching, from 1995 to 1997. 1974 Brian Clough makes TV history by carping on about how much he dislikes Leeds and Don Revie in a very candid interview with David Frost. This comes days after his forty four day stint as manager at Leeds United, just prior to him joining Nottingham Forest for a trophy-ridden eighteen years. illustration: Tom Heather 1977 Alan Sillitoe makes his TV writing debut with an adaptation of his 1972 short story Pit Strike, written in response to the 1972 miners’ strikes. It is shown as a part of BBC2’s Premiere, a series of standalone dramas, and stars a young Bernard Hill. Ilkeston-born Robert Lindsay becomes the archetypal ragtag radical in a three-year run of the BBC comedy series Citizen Smith. 1980-1988 A year after making her telleh debut in Two Up, Two Down, the fictional English holiday camp Maplins opens its doors to Su Pollard, and us, with its friendly greeting, Hi-de-Hi!

The sitcom, and Su’s part in it, lasts for nine series and firmly installs her and her character of Peggy into the hearts of Nottingham and the whole bleddy country. 1982 ATV Midlands are renamed Central Independent Television. Viewers, and even City Councils, in the North and East Midlands want better coverage of their areas and finally rebel against the fact that anywhere twenty miles outside of Birmingham doesn’t get a look in. Thus, a separation of the East and West Midlands coverage was called for and, thankfully, heard. illustration: Tom Heather 1983-84 Lenton Lane in Nottingham becomes the location for Central East Midlands. In March 1984, the seventeen acre site is officially opened by Prince Philip, who was somewhat slow off the mark as Central had begun operations the previous September. The Lenton Lane workforce consisted of ex-Elstree Studio workers, who were forced to choose between a job in Nottingham or no job at all when Elstree shut down - a bit of a no brainer; ex-Birmingham staff who mostly just wanted a change of scenery; and, no doubt the happiest of the lot, Notts residents who applied for jobs when the studios arrived on their patch.

The studios at Central West Midlands in Birmingham were, logically, numbered one to four, so Nottingham got the continuity of five to nine (and later ten in the nineties). Studio Five was used for local news bulletins (not the main news programme) and in-vision continuity when that still existed (for those who grew up after the eighties: smartly dressed, well-spoken presenters used to pop up on your TV screen to introduce the next programme or promote ones that were coming soon - only UTV in Northern Ireland persevere with it to this day. Studio Six was a medium-sized studio with an audience capacity of 100, which was mainly known for accommodating Blockbusters; Studio Seven and Eight were the two biggest studios, each with an audience capacity of 500, and they were used for game shows such as The Price is Right, Family Fortunes, Supermarket Sweep, and as well as the likes of sitcom The Upper Hand and the debate show Thursday Night Live; and Studio Nine was used for Central News East. 1983 It was early in Central’s life that the Junior Television Workshop was started by Sue Knott.

It gives many young actors their first TV experience, with such shows as Woof!, The Bretts, Peak Practice, Boon, and The Upper Hand. Many now well-known actors began at the workshop and they continue to pump them out to this day - Samantha Morton, Toby Kebbell, Ace Bhatti, Georgia Groome, Joe Dempsie, Andrew Shim, Vicky McClure, Lauren and Michael Socha, Pui Fan Lee, Rosamund Hanson, Oscar Kennedy, Aisling Loftus, Jack O’Connell, to name but a mere few. illustration: Tom Heather 1983-1986 The great Auf Wiedersehen Pet, starring Tim Healy, Timothy Spall, and Jimmy Nail hits the country’s TV screens. Although sold as the adventures of a gang of Geordie workmen in Germany, the show was actually the adventures of a gang of Geordie workmen in Notts. Apparently Nottinghamshire looks just like Newcastle and Dusseldorf. 1989 Nottingham-born Cherie Lunghi becomes a national sex symbol in the title role of Channel 4’s The Manageress, a drama about a woman managing a professional football team.

She follows this up with a series of adverts for Kenco where she bats off a string of potential lovers with dismissive one-liners as she just wants to drink coffee, okay? Hands Up Puppets is set up in Nottingham by Marcus Clarke and Helena Smee. Marcus had previously worked with legendary Muppet creator Jim Henson, who encouraged him to create puppet characters for the telly. That is certainly what happened, and continues to this day, with Hands Up having designed and made over seventy TV puppet characters, as well as being the puppeteers and writers on many. They have won BAFTA Children's Awards for Bookaboo (about a puppy drummer who demands a story a day to continue to play) and Helena has recently worked on Muppets Most Wanted. 1991 Samantha Morton makes her TV debut, starring in four episodes of Soldier Soldier at the age of fourteen. A few years later she becomes a national celebrity due to her portrayal of a young prostitute in Band of Gold. BBC East Midlands, following a shift around of the channel’s regions, is created in Nottingham and based at York House on Mansfield Road.

Central Elstree exiles often thought of Lenton Lane’s output as not the proper telly they has previously made dahn south and staff that had stayed at Central Birmingham expected everything to come back to them eventually. What actually happened was the opposite, when Central transferred the majority of the work, and staff, to us heathens in the East. 1993 Housewife’s favourite Dale Winton, after a stint on Radio Trent in the eighties, returns to Nottingham to present the hit game show Supermarket Sweep. Students and dossers around the country tuned in every morning to watch contestants go “wild in the aisles” with a trolley as they frantically swept goods off shelves. The nation goes completely sex mad as a TV adaptation of DH Lawrence’s classic Lady Chatterley’s Lover hits the screen. Joely Richardson and Sean Bean are cast to be controversial with each other. illustration: Tom Heather 1994 Common as Muck, a drama about binmen (better than it sounds), starring Neil Dudgeon, Edward Woodward, and Kathy Burke, is written by Notts County fan Billy Ivory.

He wants to set the programme in Nottingham, but the powers that be do not let him; so Oldham it is. Central is taken over by Carlton Communications and the studios are rebranded as Carlton Studios, before eventually being renamed Carlton in 1999. Things changed for the worse when Carlton took over, with fewer shows being made in the studios and more being bought from outsiders, as Lenton Lane started being dictated to by London much more. 1997 Pui Fan Lee, a student of Television Workshop, dons a red suit that is equally as cute as it is terrifying, to become one of the four Teletubbies, Po. The show courts controversy with allegations of teaching the youth of the day about homosexuality, communism and big pimping. Uh-oh! Bernard’s Watch, a kids’ show about a boy that could stop time with a pocket watch, was initially filmed for CITV at South Wilford CofE Primary School. 1999 New, swanky, state-of-the-art headquarters for BBC East Midlands are built on London Road, containing the newsroom for East Midlands Today, a small studio for use by regional news, and even accommodation for Radio Nottingham.

illustration: Tom Heather 2001-2003 The original series of the soap opera, Crossroads, set in a Birmingham motel, ran from 1964 to 1988 and had been filmed at Birmingham’s Broad Street studios. It is decided that its revival will be filmed at Lenton Lane. MistaJam makes his name by playing Minty for two years, as reactions to the comeback, after the initial surprise, are favourable at first even though hat-wearing fan favourite Benny was no longer part of the cast. Four cast members from the original series returned, to then quickly leave; Doris, played by Kathy Staff, left citing that it was no longer the family show as she knew it with too much sex in the storylines. A new producer in 2002 tried to take it in a new direction further by aiming it towards the gay market. No-one seemed to be enjoying it, though, whatever their sexual orientation, and the show died, seemingly dragging the studio down with it.

2004 The Lenton Lane complex is sold to Nottingham University and, among other things, is now home to the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), where most of ATV’s and Central’s programmes are archived. 2007 West Bridgford lad, Joe Dempsie, bags a main part in the original Skins series, as Chris. It spawns six more series, with three changes of cast, an American remake, and no doubt far too many Skins inspired parties from real teenagers. Parents all over the country despair and blame the telleh for their wrecked houses. 2009 Samantha Morton makes her writing and directing debut with the TV movie, The Unloved, a semiautobiographical film about an eleven-year-old girl who is placed in a children’s home. She chooses to film it here in Nottingham with local talent. illustration: Tom Heather 2010 After periodically popping up on our telly screens since 1984, Ace Bhatti makes his Eastenders debut as the mischievous Dr Yusef Khan.

Following the success of his 2006 This Is England film, Shane Meadows revisits the characters again, setting the mini-TV series’ action in 1986. It proved to be one of the most powerful TV shows for years. He followed it up with This Is England ‘88 - ‘90 is currently in the works. “I killed someone once. He’d been my lover and he got aids. I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. No regrets.” These were the words of Ray Gosling on an Inside Out about death shown on BBC East Midlands. The police promptly arrested him, but upon further investigation realised that Ray had made the story up - he wasn’t even in the UK at the time of his supposed victim’s death. 2011 Ace Bhatti’s right bad-un Dr Khan is killed off in a suitably spectacular fashion on Boxing Day, having had a decent stint on a popular show, while not lingering around long enough to become majorly type-cast. illustration: Tom Heather 2013 The Old Market Square is taken over by a film crew, a large truck, and a naked Stephen Tompkinson.

A few months later, Billy Ivory’s Truckers airs on the BBC, set and shot a few miles south of Oldham (you know; ‘ere in Notts, innit, duck). While certainly not her first telly role - having been working steadily since she was ten years old when she appeared in Peak Practice in 2000 - Aisling Loftus gets a major role in ITV’s Mr Selfridge, as the well cockney Agnus Towler, guv’ner. Nottingham’s bid for its own TV channel is won along with eighteen other UK cities and towns - including Birmingham. 2014 Actress Cherie Lunghi: 'There are no losers on Strictly' | Daily Mail Online Actress Cherie Lunghi: 'There are no losers on Strictly' She may have been tangoed by John Sergeant – being voted off Strictly the week before he decided to hang up his bolero – but the party isn’t over for Cherie Lunghi.

As she rehearses for Saturday’s group finale, she reveals why she’s still having a ball comments Cherie Lunghi is so poised and graceful that she can make the task of carrying a laden breakfast tray look like a perfectly executed Viennese waltz. But then, her life for the past few months has been dominated by dance. Its influence is in everything, from her conversation – which is all paso doble, salsa and American smooth – to her diet (we meet in the café of the gym where she is rehearsing for the group dance in next week’s Strictly Come Dancing final, and she has picked a large almond croissant ‘to keep up my carbohydrate intake’). Dance has even turned the actress into a pill popper – albeit the kind who gets her fix in health stores. Putting down her tray, she simultaneously manages to swing her handbag over her shoulder and on to the table, revealing an array of pills, patches and potions designed to boost her stamina, brighten her smile and strengthen her bones during her Strictly marathon, which continues until the end of the national tour (in which she will be performing) in February. ‘My handbag is like a medical field station.

Look, there’s ginseng, DHEA – which is a magic formula for energy – arnica for my bruises, chondroitin patches to ease my joints, vitamins, antioxidants and, most importantly, my omega 3. I take that so I can remember to take all the rest,’ she says with a self-deprecating laugh as she prepares to take a handful of tablets with her cappuccino. Cherie was not the oldest person involved in series six of Britain’s best-loved talent show, although press coverage might lead you to think she was. At 56, she is 24 years younger than presenter Bruce Forsyth, eight years younger than judge Len Goodman (who allegedly commented that she was ‘too old’ to win) and eight years younger than fellow contestant John Sergeant. ‘They talk about me as if I were a jar of pickled onions.

“Well preserved!” I am not trying to preserve anything – I’m just leading my life in the best way I can, and I am not going to worry about ageing until I am 70 and I have got a replacement hip or bad eyesight or really low stamina.’ The actress – who is also working on the next series of Casualty 1909 (which will be screened on BBC1 next spring) – is philosophical about her exit from the series and the furore surrounding John Sergeant’s subsequent resignation. Reluctant to add more controversy to a news story she thinks has run its course, she is cautious when talking about the co-contestant whose popularity – rather than his dancing – prompted her departure. ‘I don’t really want to get involved in the circus. People seem to think there is ill-feeling between myself and John Sergeant but there absolutely isn’t. ‘John came up to me after the dance-off and said, like everyone else, “I am sorry you are going.” Not that he was responsible. He wasn’t, it was the voting public. 'But, you know, there are no losers on this show.

I am looking forward, not looking back and feeling sorry or angry,’ she says, before adding, ‘John’s career has benefited hugely from this – he got what he wanted.’ A friend for life: Cherie's Strictly dancing partner, James Jordan Cherie believes that she, too, has gained enormously from an experience she thinks has had a rejuvenating effect on her looks (she is fitter and slimmer than a year ago) and her career. Indeed, despite the fact that she has never bothered with diets, and that she smokes and has the occasional drink, she appears ten years younger than her real age (without either surgery or Botox). ‘I am resigned to ageing. You can’t fight the inevitable. It’s foolhardy to struggle to nip and tuck and inject time away.

'Anyway, when you get to your 40s and 50s – after a lifetime of being driven by biological urges to attract the opposite sex to get a mate to reproduce – it’s rather a relief when that eases off and it starts to be about what’s on the inside, because there is no longer any point in worrying about the outside,’ she says, with a cheery smile that reveals the tiny laughter lines around her bright blue eyes. It’s perhaps ironic that it is dancing that has propelled one of Britain’s most hard-working actresses from a TV face into an A-list celebrity (she is rather bemused by the way in which fans come over to greet her enthusiastically during our interview). Raised in London by her mother, her aunt and her grandmother (her Italian-born father left the family when she was two years old and had little involvement in her upbringing), she had her first taste of performing in the ballet classes she started at the age of four. ‘They talk about me as if I were a jar of pickled onions.

“Well preserved!” I am not trying to preserve anything – I’m just leading my life in the best way I can, and I am not going to worry about ageing until I am 70' Her professional acting career began in the late 1970s after she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where several high-profile roles led to a brief foray into film. In 1986 she gave birth to Nathalie (also now an actress, with films including Layer Cake to her name), her daughter by film maker Roland Joffe (who directed Cherie in The Mission), and relocated to Los Angeles. Rarely off our television screens (even when she was based in LA she was visible in the long-running 90s Kenco coffee ads), Cherie was probably best known – until Strictly Come Dancing – for her role as football manager Gabrielle Benson in Channel 4’s drama series The Manageress. But Cherie doesn’t for one second resent the fact that she has become more famous as a reality-show contestant than she is as an actress.

‘Acting is a career that goes up and down, and you know at the outset that there are going to be lean times, slow times, times when you are not the face or the age [people want], and then other times when suddenly the sun shines and you make hay. 'It would be nice if this opened a few doors and broadened the possibilities. I'd like to break some new ground, maybe in TV presenting, rather than just be an actress,’ she says. Her initial success in Strictly Come Dancing didn’t just bring her a legion of male fans, it also gained her a strong following among middle-aged female viewers who, I suggest, regard her as a great role model. ‘I do hope so. Not in a way that makes them feel inadequate, or feel they’ve got to struggle to be beautiful and thin and all of that – I don’t want to be that kind of role model. 'I just want to say to women, “Be yourself – it’s the inner beauty that counts.

You are your own best friend, the key to your own happiness, and as soon as you understand that – and it takes a few heartbreaks – you can be happy.”’ Cherie is just a little mysterious about her own heartbreaks, admitting she has truly loved ‘three times’ but is totally fulfilled living alone. A third-generation single mother (her grandfather died in the First World War, leaving her grandmother with three daughters), she never imagined that finding the right man would solve all her problems. ‘The model when I was growing up wasn’t to be dependent on a man, or to put a man on a pedestal. ‘A lot of the marriages I observed as a child were very traditional; the women tended to be subdued while the men were often quite bad-tempered. 'I think being raised by a single mother put me on the outside, and I would watch my mother’s married friends and think, “Why does she put him down in public?” or, “Why is he so rude to her?” It seemed to me that there were very few marriages where the couple were genuinely in a supportive, loving partnership,’ she says.

She is just a little mysterious about her own heartbreaks, admitting that she has truly loved ‘three times’ but is totally fulfilled living alone There have been, though, a number of interesting men. She married a South African fellow drama student at the age of 23 (allegedly to get him a passport), had an eight-year relationship with Joffe, and a three-year association in the 90s with the actor Mark McGann. Her most recent relationship – with Yo Sushi! founder Simon Woodroffe – broke up earlier this year (they remain friends). She once said that she would consider living with a man if she found one who ‘provided company that was as good as my own’. Does she still feel that way? ‘Oh dear, that sounds so damning now. It’s not like that door is completely closed – it’s just that I am not looking and I am not waiting. I have had big relationships. Three times in my life I have felt a special connection, but people talk about looking for love as if it’s just like walking into a Starbucks and buying a coffee when you feel like it. It’s rare, that special connection,’ she says pensively.

Cherie with daughter Nathalie Cherie admits that, as a single mother, the whole business of having male friends was more complicated, and that raising Nathalie, now 23 and living round the corner with her boyfriend, was much more of a priority than finding the perfect partner. ‘It’s tough being a single parent. I had more than 20 years of juggling, and now that my daughter has flown the nest I am enjoying the freedom of not being tied to anyone. I am never lonely and never bored.’ Cherie says that everyone involved in Strictly Come Dancing (including John) was a part of one ‘big family’ and that her partner James Jordan is a ‘friend for life’. She is cagey about the judges, saying that there was a carefully maintained ‘membrane’ between them and the contestants. The women on the show, she says, are hugely supportive of each other and there is a big sense of camaraderie. ‘It’s tough being a single parent. I had more than 20 years of juggling, and now that my daughter has flown the nest I am enjoying the freedom of not being tied to anyone’ ‘I loved them all.

Heather was fabulous, Christine and Jodie are lovely women – I couldn’t possibly pick any of them out as a favourite,’ she says, before adding with a grin, ‘the men are much more competitive. Their preoccupation with physique – “Are my pecs bigger? Is my bum tighter?” – is hilarious.’ Leaving the show before she was quite ready was almost like ‘a grief’, but being a part of the UK tour and appearing in the group dance in the final means that she won’t be hanging up the dancing shoes for a while. ‘The party’s not over for me. It has been an extraordinary experience. A few evenings after I was voted off the show, I popped into a local restaurant and a friend of mine happened to be in there. When he saw me he started to clap. Within seconds the entire restaurant had joined in! 'As I said, there really are no losers on Strictly Come Dancing.’ The final of Strictly Come Dancing will be shown on BBC1 on Saturday 21 December. Strictly Come Dancing: The Live Tour runs from 16 January to 22 February 2009.

For tickets, tel: 08700 112626 or visit strictlycomedancinglive.co.uk Actress Cherie Lunghi: I'm Strictly single - and loving it! | Daily Mail Online comments On a rare day off earlier this week, Cherie Lunghi nipped into Peter Jones in Chelsea's Sloane Square to buy some bed linen. The assistant took one look at her. 'What are you doing in here?' she said. 'You should be rehearsing.' Cherie - she pronounces it like the fortified wine rather than the former Prime Minister's wife - laughs happily. 'There's something about Strictly Come Dancing,' she says. 'Everywhere I go, people wish me good luck, cabbies toot their horns. It's lovely. I have a theory: in straitened times, there's nothing like a bit of unapologetic escapism.' But no one could have been more surprised than Cherie when she was first approached by the BBC to see if she'd like to take part. 'I'm afraid I wasn't remotely cool,' she says. 'I told them I really wanted the job.' Not that she had any idea what she was letting herself in for.

Star turn: Cherie Lunghi with her dancing partner James Jordan 'The reality is so much bigger than what I was expecting - the training, the pressure, the costumes. This is the hardest thing I've ever done - and the most fun. It's a bit like speed-learning Japanese, the Berlitz of ballroom.' Certainly, she's never been so fit in her life. 'But then I'm lucky with my partner, James Jordan. He's 30; I'm 56. He'd no idea who I was, of course, when the producers told him who he'd be dancing with. Why would he? He doesn't have time to sit down and watch television.' James is a perfectionist, says Cherie. 'And I respect that. We clicked from the word go. He's very direct, but with a playful sense of fun. All of which is good because you have to acquire an instant relationship when you dance, a chemistry. You get very close very quickly. Well, your hands are all over each other.

It's a short cut to a form of professional intimacy.' RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Sitting in the bustling bar-cafe not far from her King's Road apartment, the words tumble out as she describes an experience that has taken over her life wholesale. 'Really,' she says, at one point, 'I feel like I'm on fire.' She is the oldest female contestant on Strictly, but she is still a strikingly good-looking woman. The shoulder-length brunette hair frames those killer cheekbones, those piercing blue eyes, that continually amused mouth. Judge Arlene Phillips has described her body as 'stunning, absolutely gorgeous', and Jordan calls her 'extremely sexy'. 'I'm lucky,' she says. Her Italian father, Alessandro, was tall and lean. Her mother, universally known as Gypsy since she sold fortunes one summer on the pier at Whitley Bay, was tiny. 'I walk everywhere. I gave up my car ten years ago. I use the stairs, never lifts.

I spent time in the gym for a couple of weeks before rehearsals started and I do Pilates and a bit of yoga.' She's eating meat now - 'usually, I only have chicken and fish' - because she needs the protein, and allows herself one glass of wine at lunch the day after the show. 'I have to be careful. Alcohol always makes me feel a bit rusty the next day.' Whatever she's doing, she's obviously getting it right. Her first trot round the ballroom floor was rewarded with top marks from the four judges. It makes the reported comment of the head judge, 64-year-old Len Goodman, about Cherie being 'too ancient' to win the competition all the more mystifying. 'Did he really say that?' says Cherie. 'Personally, I have my doubts. But it's a shame if he did.' She stirs her cappuccino. 'You know something? I don't care. I feel immune to that kind of comment. I'm putting in the same hours as everyone else. I don't think I'm more out of breath than the others. My age should be a cause for celebration.

I like to think I'm striking a blow for the older woman.' While we're about it, there's a bit of a whispering campaign that suggests Cherie is not the dance novice she claims. 'Do they think I've been moonlighting at the Royal Ballet while I've been doing my acting?' she asks, and she's only half-joking. Unattached: Cherie says she never gets lonely and is happy to stay single At Arts Educational, the college where she trained, students could choose to concentrate on dance or drama. 'And I chose acting. I've never danced professionally. But I have a natural rhythm.' When she was growing up, she'd go to ballet classes once a week. 'Lovely Gypsy! She'd slave away in an office all week and then get up early each Saturday to take me on the bus to classes in Notting Hill.' It makes her smile when people imagine she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. 'Things are never quite what they seem,' she says. She didn't know any of the other contestants when she agreed to take part in Strictly. 'But there's a wonderful camaraderie among the girls.

I know everyone wants to read reports of us scratching each other's eyes out. But it's just not true. Yes, we're rivals, but it's an incredibly bonding experience.' Cherie is already missing Gillian Taylforth, the first of the female dancers to be voted off. 'Gilly was such fun, constantly cracking jokes and with that fabulous throaty laugh.' So who does Cherie think might win? 'Rachel Stevens is a good little dancer,' she says, 'and very pretty. She looks like an obvious contender. And Jodie Kidd may be tall, but she's graceful. She could prove to be a bit of a dark horse. Christine Bleakley has a terrific figure and a personality to match, but so does Lisa Snowdon. Heather Small has a great sense of rhythm.' Of the men, rugby player Austin Healey and Tom Chambers from Holby City have caught her eye. 'Why can't I have a name like Austin's? Perhaps I ought to call myself Cherie Lamborghini.' She laughs. 'Those two seem very confident; most men reveal their inhibitions when they dance.' But she has a special word for veteran political reporter John Sergeant.

'He's the Paddington Bear of the group, isn't he? Just so lovely. And hats off to him for having a go.' Part of the joy of taking part, she says, is the dizzying array of frocks she gets to wear. 'I was astonished. My initial meeting with Sue Dunn and Monica Elbs who design the dresses lasted seven hours. They took me through each week, as they did with everyone, in case I got to the final. At home: Cherie with her daughter Nathalie, who is also a successful actress 'We discussed colour, cut, fabric, everything.' Tomorrow, Cherie will dance the rumba ('you can't choose; you're told which one you have to dance'). Her dress is white, slashed to the thigh and covered with a black spangly trim. 'Fabulous!' she says. Cherie Lunghi is no fool. She's well aware of what involvement in this show is doing for her professional profile. But then she does seem to be on a bit of a roll. On October 19, she co-stars with David Jason in a brand new Touch of Frost, called Dead End.

'And there's more than a touch of frost to my character's relationship with Frost,' she says. 'I am DS Marsh who blew the whistle on him during an investigation some 15 years earlier.' Of Jason, she says: 'He's very sharp, very unstarry, a great team leader.' Later in the year, she'll be seen opposite Martin Shaw in the new ghost series Apparitions. Then, she's making six more episodes of the Edwardian hospital drama Casualty 1908. It leaves her little time for anything else. 'I've had to abandon my art courses.' Nor is there any question of romance. A relationship with Simon Woodroffe, millionaire boss of the YO! Sushi chain and former Dragons' Den judge, fizzled out earlier this year. 'We mutually uncoupled. It wasn't horrible. Simon lives on a houseboat on the river, just seven minutes from me. 'We've remained friends. The fact is, being an only child I've always been self- sufficient, and I've never been busier.' Cherie's parents divorced when she was a toddler. 'I come from a strong matriarchal line,' she says.

'I was raised by Gypsy, her sister, Mary, and my maternal grandmother. The result of not having my father live with us meant that, when it came to understanding the opposite sex, it was like working without a map.' Not that she's opposed to marriage. 'I remember standing in the wings of a theatre in Newcastle and the actor Tom Wilkinson was talking to me about freedom through commitment. That made a deep impression on me, a very good way to describe a successful relationship.' Cherie has a 22-year-old daughter, Nathalie, from her eight-year relationship with director Roland Joffe. 'When Nathalie was two, Roland made it clear he was going to settle in America, and I realised we weren't destined to walk the same path.' (Cherie was married briefly many years ago to a fellow drama student about whom she never talks.) 'I've been a single parent for a long time,' she says. 'It reminds me of being a waitress. As you walk back to the kitchen, requests come at you from all sides. You're doing the job of two - you have to be highly organised.' She's proud of Nathalie, an actress seen recently in ITV1's The Palace.

'There seems to be this idea that you are defined by your partner and by not having one, there must therefore be something missing from your life. It shouldn't be such a big deal if you're on your own. I am on my own and completely unattached. I never get lonely - and I mean never - because I have such a busy life. Cherie will be starring alongside David Jason in a Touch Of Frost 'I don't mean that I am frantically busy trying to fill a void left by not having a partner to spend my time with. I just happen to enjoy a genuinely fulfilling life.' So does she anticipate remaining single? 'Quite possibly. To make that marvellous link with someone special is rare and may not happen to me again. It's the X factor, it's that indefinable connection between people who are special to one another and I think I've probably made that connection three times in my life. If it happens again, wonderful, if it doesn't, then I accept that. 'Listen, I wouldn't turn a man down if he provided company that was as good as my own, but quite honestly my own company is hard to beat! I have that precious commodity - freedom.

I can live my life a day at a time and I am open to whatever the next day brings. I know I sound as if I have been off with some guru in India, but I haven't. I've come to realise the value of being able to decide for oneself.' There's no more testing a time for an actress than when she reaches her middle years and finds herself too old to play the ingenue, too young to be the spirited old bat. In the Nineties, following the high-rolling years first with the Royal Shakespeare Company and then as TV's The Manageress, she felt the need for pastures new. In the knowledge that all those Kenco coffee ads would still be shown in her absence (the generous fees paid for her apartment), she upped sticks and, with Nathalie in tow, decamped to LA. Four years later, she was back in Britain. She'd got Hollywood out of her system and Gypsy was dying. 'I wanted to be with her at the end.' Now her attitude to work, as to life, has subtly but significantly shifted. 'I feel comfortable in my skin. I do not have a problem with being in my mid-50s.' But there's a trade-off.

'You sacrifice your pristine youth, but you acquire wisdom and knowledge.' She's not worried about the lines that have appeared on her face. 'I never put on my glasses before looking in the mirror! I'd like to think my self-worth was based on more than how desirable I am to the opposite sex.' Try telling that to the male half of tomorrow night's audience for Strictly Come Dancing. • Strictly Come Dancing is on BBC1 tomorrow at 5.50pm and on Sunday at 8.10pm. A Touch Of Frost is on ITV1 on Sunday, October 19.

Question: In the 90s, who starred in the tv series ‘The Manageress’ and several Kenco adverts? (She
Answer: CHERIE LUNGHI