The Young Generation
One Sunday morning each month, Fulham’s Dance Attic fills with attendees ready to back twist, turn, pirouette, and dish on what superstars get up to behind closed doors. This class is a little different to the rest on the studio’s schedule: most in attendance are in their seventies, having five decades ago spent their Saturday nights dancing on primetime TV. “We go right back to it,” says 74-year-old Joan Golden, a former member of the Second Generation. “As long as we don’t look in the mirror.”
TV dance troupes hit their peak in Britain from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, thanks to the Young Generation and the Second Generation’s starring roles alongside the Jackson Five and Elton John, ABBA and Olivia Newton-John. Pan’s People and Legs & Co were making a name for themselves on Top of the Pops during the same period, with 15 million people tuning in each week. “I couldn’t walk down the street without somebody saying, ‘oh my God, there’s Jackie from Seaside Special,’” Jackie Travers, 70, recalls of the Saturday night show she appeared on from the mid-Seventies to the early Eighties. “I just loved the adoration, and it felt so good.”
Travers was at a dance and drama college in the early Seventies when she heard that an audition was going for the Young Generation, a troupe created for the BBC by choreographer Dougie Squires. She auditioned along with 400 other girls, desperate to win one of four places that would ultimately lead to dancing on multiple episodes of The Two Ronnies (“just the best people on the planet”), a string of specials Young Generation Meet Lulu and The Young Generation Meet Shirley Bassey), and alongside ABBA in Switzerland. That episode of Snowtime Special (a riff on their hit seaside show) “was probably the highlight because ABBA introduced us,” Travers says, so big was the troupe’s cachet. Then, they took the Swedes to a nightclub for a “burger and chips” and a dance.
Squires’s acolytes remain buoyed by memories of their time cavorting with megastars; the stints in Hong Kong and Canada, across Europe and performing to royals at the London Palladium. But the return of Strictly season also serves as a reminder of how life for professional dancers radically shifts once the lights go out. For Travers, that has become all the more acute following the headline-grabbing exits of Giovanni Pernice and Graziano di Prima: hurtling from TV adulation to the abyss is one she knows well.
“I have never, ever been as happy as I was when we were performing on the TV,” she says. Leaving the troupe, however, was “awful… once that’s taken away from you, you can actually get quite depressed.” While the majority of the women left to start a family, being without the glow of the spotlight proved harder to manage than they anticipated.
Lee Ward and Mary Corpe of Pan’s People in 1975 - Paul Fievez/ANL/Shutterstock
Strictly season is also bittersweet for Golden, whose husband is the musical director of its live tour. She frequently drops him off at shows (she jokes that she is “the oldest roadie in town”), but says his involvement can feel like a “double-edged sword” – excitement “tinged with slight envy that I always want to be involved. I’d love to be on stage and be part of it.”
The reunions offer a chance to compare notes on where the dancers have ended up (for Travers, that has included teaching dance classes, and appearing on Big Brother in 2013). “It’s amazing how the dancers all went to different elements of work; we had a porn star. We had a vicar,” Antony Johns, the choreographer who runs the classes (and partner of Squires, who died last year) says of the attendees, who also include retired air hostesses, solicitors, producers and presenters. Others went from being in a primetime juggernaut to creating their own: Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick were members of the Young Generation before helming the likes of Pop Idol and American Idol.
The first reunion took place in 2016, but became a proper fixture the following year, when the former dancers came together for Dame Vera Lynn’s 100th birthday celebration at the Palladium. (“The Queen came in her civvies; she sort of snuck in the back door with no escort and her handbag and sat in her royal box unannounced. They were great friends,” Golden recalls.)
Dancers from 1965-2024 during a rehearsal: (left to right) Joan Golden, Jackie Travers, choreographer Antony Johns, and Martine Howard - Clara Molden
Johns admits that he was originally sceptical about running the classes. “There’s nothing worse for me than going to a drinks party and going, ‘oh my God, you look terrible,’” he says, having assumed that seeing dancers so many decades after their heyday might prompt a similar reaction. When the first reunion date was set, he imagined 30 people might show up. “One hundred and sixty people arrived. And it was just an incredible feeling,” he says. That has carried them through ever since; former dancers tell me that the high of those two-hour classes is “like therapy”, scratching the itch of stardom past.
While the classes have brought many former pals back together, it has also allowed some dancers to meet for the first time. So says Martine Howard, who danced with the Young Generation for two years before going on to earn two top 10 hits with Guys ‘n’ Dolls. Switching from dancing to singing yielded the chance to escape being seen as “the fluff,” the 68-year-old remembers – and entry into a world of far harder partying.
“We didn’t get to bed until four in the morning, because by the time you’d done the show, you were quite wound up,” she says of performing with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and the Bay City Rollers. “We all used to get together and have a bit of a laugh, and then wake up the next morning at about 11, 12 o’clock, because we were exhausted. That was the life back
The Second Generation in 1973: ‘We didn’t get to bed until four in the morning’ - Tony Weaver/ANL/Shutterstock
For those with a toe still in the showbiz world, today’s gigs are a little less heady. Golden says she’s managed to secure some “old lady type-jobs” – including donning a nun’s habit and dancing alongside Olivia Colman in the upcoming Paddington in Peru – “and
