Louie Spence - Still Got It, Never Lost It! - The Hilarious Autobiography from the Star of TV’s Pineapple Dance Studios and Dancing on Ice

Cover

Title Page

1 Nanny Downer and Nanny Twinkle

2 Me and Mr Whippy

3 Doreen Cliff School of Dance

4 Italia Conti

5 A Big Wrench

6 Heaven … and Beyond

7 Panic

8 London Studio Centre

9 Piero

10 Miss Saigon

11 When in Rome …

12 La Dolce Vita

13 Take That

14 Falling Out of Love

15 I’ll Tell You What I Want

16 Spice Boy

17 Cats

18 Angel Eyes

19 Pineapple

20 Bump’n’Grind

21 Cirque de Celebrité

22 The Seven-Year Hitch

23 Celebrity Circus

24 Thirty … Forty

25 TVWs

26 Straddle-him

27 Pineapple Chunks

28 Riff-raff with a little je ne sais quoi

Epilogue

Photographic Insert

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

I’ve never been backward in coming forward, if you know what I mean. I’ve always been able to express myself and get my point across in any way necessary. I suppose I get that from my mum Pat – or Patricia Pamela Spence, to give you her full title. One of my strongest memories of Mum is that she never held back from expressing herself – if she had anything to say, she would just say it, especially when it concerned us kids. Pat was fiercely protective of us when we were growing up – not that she thought we were angels; by no means. There’s me, who you know, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this little book; my sister Rennie is the eldest, then there are 11 months between her and Tania; then I am followed by the youngest girl, Kelly.

Mum had Rennie, Tania and me in the space of three years, and after the birth of each one of us she had a nervous breakdown. It’s not that we were bad babies, you understand – it’s just the family genes. I have never had a nervous breakdown, but I have been on the edge of one all my life! We’ll get to that later in the book – the panic attacks and the hypochondria. It’s really a wonder that I’m still alive, as I’ve had every disease under the sun. I’m a walking miracle.

Thinking about it, considering Dad worked two jobs day and night when we were babies, he must have come home just to do the deed with Mum. I think I must take after him in that respect; it’s a good thing I’m gay and don’t procreate. Honestly, I would be fathering kids left, right and centre. I’m ready at the drop of a hat.

At this time my parents lived with us three children in a two-bedroom maisonette called Keyes House in Enfield, London – Ponders End, to be precise. No wonder Mum had a nervous breakdown after each birth. Did I mention that she had her first child when she was just 17? And each one of us was a home birth.

I was born at 12.01 exactly. There’s a story behind this that Dad always tries to tell, but Mum always chips in with her penny’s worth. I was born on 6 April 1969, and before you try to work it out, yes, I do look good for my age. You can figure it out – I was always crap at maths.

I don’t know if this still happens – I don’t have any kids, so I’m not up on this kind of thing, but never say never. If I were born on 5 April, Dad would have received some kind of tax rebate. As you can imagine, what with having a young family, already with two toddlers, and only 11 months between them, Dad was practically trying to pull me out so that he could claim his rebate. While Mum lay there screaming in labour, Dad was shouting at her like she was some thoroughbred about to win the Grand National.

‘Go on girl, you can do it, push, push, get it out!’

I don’t think you’d get a thoroughbred in a council flat – you wouldn’t fit them in, all that straw and hay, but anyway.

So, she’s pushing and he’s shouting – ‘Push, shout, push, shout!’ – and in the middle of all this Dad’s begging the midwife that if I came out on the sixth, could she backdate me to the fifth? The midwife, a large West Indian lady, who, even though I’ve never met her, I like to think of as my second mum, firmly replied no. So Dad thought, the direct approach isn’t working. Try and charm her, ask her about her family, her husband, children, their names – anything he could think of to get me signed off for the fifth.

Being the bright spark that Dad is (not), he decided that he would name me after the midwife’s husband, having known her only two hours. He figured this would convince her to backdate my date of birth. She was very flattered, apparently, but her professionalism didn’t wane. I finally came out, as I said, at 12.01, a breech birth with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck like a feather boa. I must have been doing a show in there. I’ll perform for anyone and anything, intestines, kidneys – an audience is an audience. Ever the ultimate professional, like the midwife, I wasn’t about to compromise my integrity by arriving early on the stage.

By now Mum had collapsed with exhaustion but Dad, undeterred, was still trying to work his charm on the midwife, who was busy trying to save me from strangling myself with my umbilical boa.

‘So, can we put that as the fifth then?’

He thought it was like delivering Coca-Cola, which was his second job – you could backdate the invoice. Well, no, the midwife was having none of it. The sixth it was, my name had been declared – Louis.

Or it would have been, if Dad could spell. He was the one who registered my name, and I ended up with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘s’. Mind you, if I’d had both, I would have been Louise, which I could have worked, and I have actually, many a time. Well, thank Kylie, I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, the midwife’s husband’s name wasn’t Alfred. I don’t think I could have worked that. Alfreda, Alfrena? No, it just doesn’t work. In fact, I love my name, and I’m glad that Dad made the lucky mistake with the ‘e’, by choosing a letter I could actually pronounce. With my lisp, being born on the sixth of the fourth, ’69 is enough of a challenge. It’s far more unique, and it makes me feel special; I know what you’re thinking, I am special. Special needs – I do have some of those, but I’ll get to that soon.

I REMEMBER crawling on the concrete outside the maisonettes, where there was a lingering smell of stale wee. Maybe that’s why I have an obsession with clean toilets now. I always make sure I don’t sprinkle when I tinkle; I’m always a sweetie and wipe the seatie. I think having three sisters in the house probably had something to do with that as well.

The four of us kids used to share the bathwater. Once, after a trip to the seaside where I collected some shells, I took a wee in my little shells while I was in the bath. I thought it was OK because I was using the shells, but my sisters were not happy to be bathing in my piss. Another memory I have of my time in Keyes House is of crawling into the flat of a neighbour who had purple walls and a black leather sofa in her living room. She also had a Sixties beehive, even though we were well into the Seventies at this point.

When I was about four, we moved from Enfield, to Braintree in Essex. We were a part of the mass evacuation, which was called the London Overspill, which started in the 1930s and continued into the 1970s, to relocate families from Inner London to new and expanded towns, like Braintree. Although we loved living there, from the first day we arrived it was always so much cooler, when people asked where we were from, to say we were from Braintree but born in London. Truth be known, apart from the smell of piss and leather, some of my fondest memories are from number 19 Goldingham Drive, Braintree, Essex.