Margaret Lockwood

Isn't she gorgeous? Sigh. Liz Taylor and Marilyn have never captivated me the way she has done.

The first time I saw Margaret Lockwood in film, I was around 15, staying at home with flu from school and miserably tucked up on the sofa watching The Wicked Lady. (Click here to read me gush on about it in TV Cream).

As a young girl not only did I think she was eerily beautiful (and yes, she was) but I loved the typecast roles of a gold-digging minx she played in this film and others, which were a disappointment to her own acting ambitions, but which actually suited her alarmingly well. Some people just have a naughty face, after all.

Recently there has been a Lockwood season at the BFI and I have indulged in a couple of afternoons watching 'The Man in Grey' (another glorious costume romp where she plays a poor girl who thinks outside the box, so to speak) and 'Jassy', where she plays a gypsy girl with a propensity for seeing into the future. The former film is actually a hugely enjoyable film, with a script amusingly identical to The Wicked Lady, but that's ok because if she had been in twenty films that are a variation of The Wicked Lady, I'd be happy. The Wicked Lady was the best film of hers and my goodness she made some dreadful films too. The second film, Jassy, is a bit daft and unfortunately shot in colour, this doesn't detract from her beauty but she seems less mysteriously mischevious somehow.

The woman should always have played a gun-toting social climber. In her acting career and in her personal life she was pretty uncompromising. As Phil Norman notes in his book 'TV Cream's Anatomy of Cinema', 'at RADA, she refused to kowtow to the strangulated 'how verreh verreh love-lay' diction drilled into the other pupils'. Apparently too, she had a very filthy, unpolished laugh and a crude tongue that would make a naval officer blush. Less of a wicked lady, more of a minx, in my opinion.

And so...until our next merry meeting, heroine lovers....

Margaret Lockwood (born 15 September, 1916 )

Jilly Cooper

In the 70s, there was only one Queen of the columnists and this was Jilly Cooper, and what a sexy young filly she was too.

Bear with me on this one, I've recently read 3 of her books from the 70s/80s, not those nonsense novels about being horsehipped by a man in a tuxedo, but the whimsical guides she writes, covering topics from the secrets of a long marriage (believe me, there are some real pearls of wisdom in there), how to survive being a step-mum (very candid, that would rival anything being published now), to how to have an 'affaire' and get away with it. Class!

Jilly on men: ' I find I resent the fact that I can't live without them, that they hurt me emotionally, that I hate yet secretly enjoy being bullied by them, that they can do tasks domestic far better than I can, that they enjoy the company of other men so much, and on the whole prefer a bat to a bit on the side'. (Super Men and Super Women, Magnum Books, 1977). I can't say I agree with her on the last two points though, I enjoy male company and Mr Norman, as many men I know, has no time for sport.

She is for the most part, a woman after my own heart, before landing a job as a writer, she worked doing umpteen office jobs, and she writes with clever wit and class-consciousness about the horrors and benalities of office life.

A full list of her non-fiction, many of which I've read and enjoyed hugely, is here.

Jilly Cooper (born 21 February, 1937)

Paula Yates

I kid you not, I absolutely adore Paula Yates, always have done. The other night I ploughed through hours and hours of Tube footage, some good tracks were unlocked from the memory but what really got me aghast were those dresses. I want every single one of them, without question.

Well documented, is some confusion over her origin. Until May 1997, she believed that her father was her mother's husband, Jess Yates. However, a DNA test proved that her biological father was Hughie Green, presenter of 'Opportunity Knocks' (1956).

For me, she'll always be a delicious epitome of girly randomness but also the perfect madonna (she took her children absolutely everywhere with her). I don't even hold a grudge for her bagging a young Geldof and fathering a cartload of kinder with him. (Wouldn't want to now though). Her death was a really sharp intake of breath, 'WHAT?' moment. What a shame she died so young. A total heroine of the first order. Who else would have persuaded rock stars to pose in their underpants?

Here she is getting down and flirty with Simon Le Bon.

Paula Yates (born 24 April 1959)

Toyah

I've always been a punky kinda chick, liked people who are a bit different from the rest and I've always admired strong women with multi-coloured, back-combed barnets (well, I did when I was 7). The first album I ever bought with my own money was Anthem. This was Toyah's most successful album with hit singles of "It's A Mystery" and "I Want To Be Free" contained within. The other songs contained within are mindfully awful, but that's ok, what 7 year-old girl was really listening anyway? I was just led belly-down, feet-up in the air, on the rug in our old council house, gazing admiringly at her looking determinedly into the future on the cover of her album, dreaming of a day when I could get away with hair like that (I never bothered of course). Toyah was the woman I dared never be, but there were to be plenty of others too ...

Toyah Ann Willcox (born May 18, 1958)

Joanne Catherall

I had to choose Joanne over Suzanne Sully, which is odd because my name is Suzanne but Joanne is a brunette like me and this wins hands-down (every time) in the role model stakes. Now there's a female thing! Do men like other men because of their hair colour?!

Joanne was a teen singer in the group the Human League. Plucked from the streets of Sheffield by father-figure Phil Oakey, the girls rose to fame by smearing on the blusher to nuclear effect and by, well, merely looking so bored. This was ultimately their appeal because their singing was flatter than average, but still, maybe this was their appeal too.

Here is a wonderful clip of the Human League in the first episode of OTT singing 'Do or Die'. Look out for Joanne's Siouxsie Sioux type eye make-up under that uncompromising fringe.

Joanne Catherall (born 18 September 1962)

Long Distance Clara

As a kid of around 6 or 7, I used to really look forward to Pigeon Street coming on, not for Mr Macadoo and his pals mind you, no, for Long distance Clara. Long distance Clara was a woman on a mission, in a strictly male dominated world of trucking, she was a red-haired, no-nonsense, can-do kinda girl, 'picking up and dropping off her heavy loads'. I always knew I wanted to go far, to travel and to succeed at work and so I identified with Clara as a metaphor for 'one day in the future I want to live my life just like her'.

'She can drive across the Sahara, nothing's too far away'. Well, exactly.

Like Clara too, I've always been a conscientious, on-time kind of person. 'Always on time, she's never late'. A tip-top role model.

Long distance Clara appears between 06.12 and 07.52 in the clip below.