Judy Blume

Judy Blume is an American author for the teen market.

Judy Blume was someone who spoke on your adolescent level, and she understood what you couldn't bring yourself to chat to your nearest and dearest about. Even your own mother didn't seem to know what was happening to you. Compared with the daring, empathetic scribblings of Blume, your own mother was a veritable stranger.

And this is why she was both special and popular. Children aren't Disney characters - they're real, making sense of a confusing world. She was the first to realise this; she knew your mind and she spoke to you accordingly. Her books for children and young adults have exceeded sales of 80 million, and been translated into 31 languages.

Blume's novels for teenagers were among the first to tackle matters such as racism (Iggie's House), menstruation (Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.), divorce (It's Not the End of the World, Just As Long As We're Together), bullying (Blubber), masturbation (Deenie; Then Again, Maybe I Won't) and teen sex (Forever), and as such have been the source of controversy over the appropriateness of such topics for the audience they reached.

But before Jacqueline Wilson took over the teen lit crown, she was your friend in need and a lovely pal indeed.

You didn't want to talk to your sister about breasts and sex, did you? And I know I'm not the only one to have Margaret's mantra, 'I must, I must, I must increase my bust' etched in my brain for evermore. Bust? How quaint.

Judy Blume (née Sussman; born February 12, 1938).

Vashti Bunyan

"Why should you say I could love any man, have his children and still be free? Go on voting, striking and fighting. Go on searching, fighting and loving."

How Do I Know.

As a lyric in isolation, this sums up everything that draws me and concerns me about feminism. Men and women both work these days, and earn roughly the same, but while being born female is fate, motherhood is made the destiny of a lot of women. It's a privilege to have somebody to care for, but motherhood also seems the ultimate prison. All mothers are single mothers at the end of the day. Once that decision to be a mother has been made, there's no turning back. It's nothing less than traumatic. Yet, we're still pretty much expected to make that transition of freedom to non-freedom.

Vashti Bunyan wanted most of all in life to be a pop singer - something she still upholds as being the dream she had for herself. What she did instead was release some folk tunes, then turn her back on what she saw as her ambition failure, to take two years to head to Donovan's commune in the Isle of Skye. It took two years for her to get there, and by the time her and her boyfriend Robert arrived, it had closed down. Still, some spiritual wisdom: it's all about the journey, not the destination - and this inspired an album.

Nonetheless, her and Robert set up home and raised children together, but Vashti didn't sing again for 35 years. The reasons aren't completely clear. Perhaps she didn't feel like it. Arguably she was just content with family life. She busied herself in domesticity - which she enjoyed, but there was still a renunciation in place. Her children knew snippets of their mother's past, but she never so much as sang to them.

Still, it was wanting to share her past with her children, and the advent of the Internet (which made clear to her how much she had grown into cult status in the meantime, and also just how many of those scratchy old tapes were issued in compilations) that prompted her to make a new album, entitled Lookaftering. Making this album was an experience she enjoyed returning to.

And, yes, in her own words, she felt like a flower unfolding after all that time.

Listen to this. Buy this.

Vashti Bunyan, born in London in 1945

Ruth Madoc

Did you know Ruth Madoc went to RADA?

Did you know she played Fruma Sarah in the film Fiddler on the Roof? Did you know she looks and sounds spookily like my Mum (especially in the 80s when Mum had her trademark short, straight hair, and her accent was at her strongest)?

We remember her as the 'vamp from the valleys' in Hi de Hi, of course, and the Wispa ad - with her longed for love object, Jeffrey. Actually looking again at that ad, she's hot - what was Jeffrey thinking? Jeffrey, the gauche, bumbling Hugh Grant of his time - with all the passion of a wet Pontins' tea towel, was an unworthy longed-for suitor. Was he really worth hanging around in a banana coloured uniform for?

On stage, Ruth has done everything from Shakespeare to musicals - co-starring with the late Harry Secombe in Pickwick, and even portrayed an 80-year-old Jewish mother in Gypsy.

She played the daughter's role in the stage version of A Taste of Honey, and while no Tush, I bet she was great, and was less of a mousy victim than Tushingham's foray. It would have been interesting to see.

In 2000 she played the role of Mrs. Ifans in Very Annie Mary alongside fellow Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce.

But life was not always smooth for Ruth. She was brought up by her Grandparents in a small Welsh town near Swansea because her parents were nomadic and couldn't settle to a life of child-rearing.

She was, and still is, greatly loved as a symbol of Welsh freshness with anyone old enough to remember balancing a French Fancy on their knee, while tuning into Hi-de-Hi.




Ruth Madoc, born 16 April 1943 in Norwich but brought up in Llansamlet, near Swansea.

Floella Benjamin

Did you know Floella was the first to appear fully pregnant on British TV (in Play School)?

For a woman whose ambition was to be Britain's first black bank manager, her life took a totally different course. There just weren't black bank managers back then, but ethnic minorities were accepted into the theatre, and so that's the way she went.

There weren't many black people on TV during the 70s and 80s. The TV channels were becoming more senstive to the fact - especially in representing children - firstly in the 60s and later on with Derek Griffiths, but in the main, they were vastly outnumbered. Notwithstanding, she thrived on television. The main allure of her was that she genuinely loved being around children. She wasn't merely adorning the shop floor for the career bump-up.

Sourcing pics for this post, there were hundreds of her, and not one without her beaming.

Floella starred in two of the upper echelons of Play for Todays, from one of its golden eras (the late 70s). In 1979, she starred in A Hole in Babylon, about a seige in an Italian restaurant that goes wrong. Waterloo Sunset, (also 1979, the year that brought us the dazzling
performance of Jonathan Pryce in Trevor Griffith's 'The Comedians') is a play about racial disharmony in a poky London flat. A young man and his elderly relative live on a mostly West Indian London housing estate and the pivotal scene involves the naive old woman dusting her face with cocoa in order to fit in, but they take it the wrong way.

A few years prior, in 1975, she starred in another Play for Today, The Floater - where she was lucky enough to appear alongside Richard Beckinsale (who played a solicitor's clerk acting for his sick wife).

She also appeared in many films (mainly playing a nurse) but 'Black Joy' is a film of note about a naive African immigrant arriving in Brixton - with Norman Beaton as the wise-arse, no-good rude boy she falls in with. Floella plays Beaton's non shit-taking wife. Vivian Stanshall's in it
too, as a pervy vicar.

In more recent years, she was cast in Doctor Who and there's the Floella Benjamin Award at Exeter University (which also gave her an honoury doctorate), where up to £1,000 is given to promising students to help improve their future job prospects.

Predictably, but admirably, she runs a lot for charity these days.

Floella Benjamin OBE (born in Trinidad, 1949)

Pam Ayres

Pam Ayres was born at Stanford in the Vale in Oxfordshire.

She went to same school as my younger brother in Faringdon, and to this day lives down the road from where my family live.

As kids, my older sister was mad about her poems, and being a younger sibling, whatever tickled my sister's fancy, piqued my interest. 'I wish I'd looked after my teeth' prompted me to brush regularly, morning and night. This poem was also voted into the Top 10 of a BBC poll to find the Nation's 100 Favourite Comic Poems.

I discovered poetry at around the age of eight, thanks to her, and I learned to write poetry by reading her, basically. I used to write volumes of the stuff.


Her feeling for rhythm and wit was inspired by Lonnie Donegan.








Pam Ayres MBE (born 14 March 1947)

Claire Grogan

Some personally related facts about Claire Grogan:

1. I have her name as a middle name.

2. I once wrote to Jim'll Fix It to meet her and perform on stage with her. I wrote in my best handwriting and got my Dad to proof-read it, but two weeks after depositing in a shiny red letter box, another little girl from the Bristol area was selected instead of me. Watching TV that night, I think that was my first, heart-sink, kick-in-the-teeth moment. But of course, that's life, and so thanks to Ms Grogan for giving me the first tangible taste of NOT FAIR.

3. Gregory's Girl is one of my favourite British films. Grogan's also starred in Irish favourite Father Ted, of course, as the Sinead O'Connor pastiche - and not a bad Dublin accent too - could even rival mine at a push.

4. And what's this I hear about a story of a marriage between her and David Hepworth? Somebody please clear this story up for me.


Claire Grogan (born, 17 March 1962)

Hanna Schygulla

The first of my German heroines here. Fassbinder is of course, a genius, and I couldn't imagine any other actress being cast in these films - and making them come alive in the way she did

Hanna Schygulla met Rainer Werner Fassbinder while taking an acting class in Munich, and began working with him at the Munich Action Theatre.

Fassbinder casted her in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) - as an insolent working-class girl, confident in her ability to break hearts of either sex - using her looks to get ahead while refusing to surrender her independence.

But it was her role in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) which finally brought Fassbinder the acceptance he sought -confirming Schygulla as his ideal actress.

She's in other Fassbinder films too, and she's in Wenders' Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Movement) but it's her role in The Marriage of Maria
Braun which resonates (first picture above). She was perfectly, ever-so-slightly wooden and fitted Fassbinder's haughty, vaguely grotesque role amazingly well. She is so synonymous with Fassbinder for me, it's as if they were meant to meet.

Despite Fassbinder's amazing talent, these films would have been a lot poorer without her, and no doubt her strong character was an asset. He was a spoiled, tempestuous drama queen to work for, by all accounts.

Hanna Schygulla (born 25 December 1943)