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The Girls Who Add
Shape to The Show
There’s one bad habit they’ve got, when the six lovely girls from Legs & Co
are travelling together, on an out-of town gig away from the TV show – “We
all eat too much,” they say.
”We stuff ourselves silly. From cream cakes, chocolate bars and crisps, to
hamburgers and chips, Chinese meals – everything. We just gorge ourselves.”
And if you think that eating too much would be bad for the girls’ shapely
figures, forget it. They use up so much energy when they are dancing, that
none of them ever has a weight problem.
The amazing thing about Legs &Co is that they are now one of the busiest
‘acts’ in show business. These days they are not confined solely to appearing
on Top of the Pops every week.
Although, naturally, Top of the Pops is their first priority –
and this is their national TV shop window – the girls are now very much in
demand as a dancing cabaret act all over the country. So consequently, when
they are not appearing on TV, there are usually dashing about doing one night
cabaret shows.
Quite often this means they are busy working seven nights a week. It’s
frantic, they all admit. But they love it.
Legs & Co have been providing the glamour on Top of the
Pops for
more than three years. They took over from Ruby Flipper, a mixed dancing
group who appeared on the show for a short time, after the famous leggy Pan’s
People girl group was disbanded.
And the six girls who make up Legs & Co all get along surprisingly well
together. “We have to, otherwise we couldn’t carry on,” they all agree. “We
spend practically all our time together, either working or travelling and it
is essential for us to all hit it off, on a personal basis, because it would
be impossible for us to work together if we didn’t.”
Susan Menhenick is the head girl in the troupe, and she’s the only dancer who
was previously with Pan’s People. Sue, a vivacious blonde with a stunning
34-24-34 figure, joined Pan’s People straight from school when she was only
seventeen.
She admits that she enjoyed the short spell when Ruby Flipper danced on Top of the Pops – “because with boys dancing with us, it gave us much more scope to
do special routines – with the guys throwing us around, and that sort of
thing.”
But she appreciates, of course, that there is a great sexiness and glamour
aspect to the appeal of an all-girl group – and that is what she and the
other girls in Legs & Co now try to cultivate.
Two of the other girls, Lulu Cartwright and Patti Hammond, both danced with
Ruby Flipper, too, before Legs & Co were formed.
Lulu, the petite blonde and the “baby” of the outfit, is only nineteen. She
comes from Haslemere is Sussex, and went to stage school, for six years. She
joined Ruby Flipper straight from school, when she was sixteen, after reading
in The Stage trade paper about auditions for the new TV dance
team.
”I was very lucky. I went for an audition, the choreographer Flick Colby
obviously liked me, and I was told I was in the group,” said Lulu.
Brunette Patti Hammond, who is twenty-nine and married (her husband is a
sound technician) was trained as a classical dancer. She was a dancer with
the Royal Ballet and later the Festival Ballet Company. She started at the
Royal Ballet School at the age of nine.
”I spent five years as a ballet dancer. But I felt I’d achieved all that I
was going to achieve in the ballet world,” said Patti. “I was not going to be
a prima ballerina. It’s a very dedicated profession, and although I love
dancing, I was never that dedicated.”
”Ballet means spending your whole life dancing. It took too much time out of
my life. I didn’t mind how hard the work was, but I found it eventually all
too time consuming. It was just work, work, work, and there was no time for
living. I thought there was much more round the corner.”
So she quit ballet and transferred to more modern dancing, joined the Dougie
Squires dancers and worked on TV shows with Rolf Harris and other artists.
”It was very difficult adapting to modern dancing after ballet,” said Patti.
“I was terrible at first. I had to do a lot of practice to get it right.”
”I’m certainly not sorry I spent so long in ballet. It was a marvellous
experience for me. Ballet is still the basic training for all dancers.” The
other girls in the group agree with her. They would like to have had some
ballet training.
It wasn’t all easy going, though. Like most dancers, Patti had spells when
she was out of work. “I was hustling around, looking for fresh work. I saw an
ad. in The Stage that Flick Colby was looking for new
dancers, so I applied, went along and met Flick, and finally got the job,”
said Patti.
”To be out of work for months is demoralising. More and more girls are trying
to become dancers. But it is still a very overcrowded profession. There is
more work for dancers these days – but there are still lots of dancers who
are unemployed. Dancing has now become like the acting profession – with a
lot of unemployment.”
”Shows like Chorus Line and the film Grease helped to revive an interest in dancing. Dancers are now regarded
much more highly than they used to be in show business.”
Pauline Peters, twenty-seven, the dark-skinned lovely who was born in Burma,
didn’t get into dancing, “until quite late”. After leaving school, Pauline
worked in an office in London. But she took dance lessons at night school,
and then gave up her office job and turned full time dancer.
She toured with a company for a couple of years, worked with the Second
Generation for a short time and did odd bits of TV work. She was also in the
chorus of the West End hit musical Mardi Gras for seven months.
”I had a tough time, in between jobs, and spent time out of work,” said
Pauline. “It isn’t always the glamorous job it’s cracked up to be. It’s very
tough getting work, sometimes. And there are far too many dancers chasing too
few jobs.”
Rosemary Hetherington, nineteen, from Surrey, was first spotted by choreographer
Flick Colby at London’s Dance Centre. Rosemary was a pupil at the Italia
Conti stage school, studying acting, singing and dancing.
”I suppose I was very lucky, really, joining a team of TV dancers straight
from stage school,” she said. “Some girls, I know, have to wait years for the
break I got. But it’s all great fun – as well as a lot of hard work of
course.”
Gillian Clark, twenty, a tall blonde with statistics of 35-21-35 was also
lucky. She joined Legs & Co straight from school. She was due to do
another two years at school, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do in
life. When the chance to dance with the new Legs & Co line-up came up,
Gillian went for an audition.
”Sue, Patti and Lulu were all present at the audition, and although I didn’t
know it at the time Pauline and Rosemary had already been chosen,” said
Gillian. “They went away and discussed it, and I was called back in and told
I was in, if I wanted the job.”
Even then, when she was offered the job, she had second thoughts, she admits.
”I was only 17 and I didn’t know whether I should stay on at school or not
and finish my training.” Her father wanted her to stay at school, her mother
encouraged her to take the dancing job – so Gillian took the plunge, decided
to join the TV dancers, and has absolutely no regrets at all, she says now.
”We are very lucky that we work in TV, and we also get the experience of
doing cabaret work as well,” said Gillian. “We have the best of both worlds.”
One important rule that they adhere to, with Legs & Co, is that the group
is run very much ‘on committee lines’. When a new girl is chosen to join the
group, all the other girls have to vet her, and they all have to agree that
she will fit in, before she is offered the job.
”This is absolutely essential,” explained Sue Menhenick. “It is vital that we
all get on well together. Now matter how good a dancer a girl may be, if her
personality is going to clash with the rest of us, then it just won’t work.
She is not for us.”
This has always been the way the Top of the Pops dancers have worked, ever
since the days of Pan’s People.
Sue said, “When we started out under the name of Legs & Co we were all
working under something of a handicap. A lot of viewers obviously still
remembered Pan’s People and still associated them with Top of the Pops. It took us a long time to become freshly identified as Legs &
Co.”
The girls now travel quite a lot. They go as far afield as Glasgow for a
one-night cabaret show – but they must always be back the next day for
rehearsals for the TV show.
Their week usually works out something like this...Monday and Tuesday, they
spend all day rehearsing their dance routines for Top of the
Pops.
Wednesday, they are in the studio for camera rehearsals and then they record
the show in the evening. Thursday and Friday they spend rehearsing new dance
routines for their cabaret act. And they are actually working in cabaret
dates several nights a week, often including Saturday and Sunday.
”During the summer, we are busier than ever,” said Sue. “Because we are in
great demand for summer holiday camp shows as well.”
Their cabaret act consists usually of a half-hour of non-stop dancing. The dancing
is done to their own tapes – a complete musical package. They are also in
demand these days to make personal appearances, open new shops, and do their
dance routines on fashion shows and such.
Ruth Pearson is the group’s manager and agent. Ruth herself was one of the
Pan’s People group for many years on the TV show. Ruth is consistently busy
getting the work for the girls, while Flick Colby is their choreographer.
”Flick is a tough task mistress, but she’s very fair,” say the girls, almost
in chorus.
”She knows what she wants, and there is no slacking when Flick is around”,
said Lulu. “Flick works out all the dance routines for our appearances. She
is marvellous at actually working new routines. She has such a vivid
imagination.”
Indeed, Flick is now one of the most experienced choreographers on TV,
because she has been setting up the dance sequences for Top of the Pops, week in and week out, since 1968.
For the TV show, Flick is given two records from the charts each week. She
then works out a new routine for the girls to dance to the numbers. But if
either of those particular records goes down, instead of up, when the charts
come out on Tuesday, then the number is scrapped completely, and Flick has to
hastily dream up a new routine to another record – and the girls have only
one day to rehearse and get it right.
”Working as we do, it really is very exhausting. We work at a terrific pace,”
said Sue
All the clothes they wear on stage are chosen for them by Flick. These are
specially designed to fit in with the mood of the song they are dancing to.
”Once we have been given a record to dance to, and we’ve rehearsed it for a
couple of days, we all keep our fingers crossed and just pray that the record
doesn’t go down in the charts before we record the show,” said Patti.
The girls’ hair styles vary. They are not one of those groups where the
choreographer likes so many blondes and an equal number of brunettes and they
must all have the same hair style.
”We can have whatever hair style we choose,” said Lulu. “Flick says that our
hair styles should simply match our own personalities. We never wear wigs –
unless it’s for a special dance routine involving a ‘Cleopatra’ scene, say,
or a ‘period’ dance piece, that’s different.”
Although the six girls are all on the same wavelength when it comes to
dancing, their individual music tastes vary considerably. “I hate Reggae
music,” said Sue with a smile. “I like funky soul, and I also like some of
the groups that have come up out of the punk rock scene – like Ian Dury, the
Boomtown Rats, the Jam, and the Stranglers. Most of the girls like some kinds
of classical music, and generally we are very liberal in our tastes. There
are some records, of course, which become very tiresome and boring after
we’ve danced to them over and over again for weeks and weeks.”
Yet the standard of pop music, they all agree, has improved a lot over the
last few years. “Punk helped to revitalise the whole music scene,” said
Patti. “Now, a lot of groups are using more synthesisers and other
instruments and are creating very new and different sounds. There’s a lot of
musical experimentation going on, which is good for the business.”
Naturally, the girls get hundreds of fan letters from viewers – from offers of
‘dates’ from guys who fancy them, to little girls with ambitions to one day
become professional dancers, all asking the most important question of all:
how do you become a dancer?
It isn’t easy, they all point out. It means a lot of hard work, long hours, a
lot of dedication. “The travelling wears us out more than anything,” said
Patti. “It means travelling back in the early hours of the morning. Eating
motorway cafe meals, and arriving home dead tired. But we do have a lot of
laughs, I must admit.”
There is no particular ‘joker’ in this glamorous pack. “There are six nut
cases here. We’re all pretty potty,” laughed Sue.
But one thing the girls do have in common is much the same taste in clothes.
“We all borrow clothes from each other – particularly at holiday times,” said
Sue. “If one of the girls wants some holiday gear, then she just borrows it
from one of the others, instead of going out and buying it. We swop around
with clothes quite a lot. It’s marvellous. We are all more or less the same
size. It’s just like having five sisters at home, we can borrow items of
clothes from each other from time to time.”
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