50 years - and Su Pollard's only just getting started! Eastbourne date

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Hi-de-Hi! legend Su Pollard looks back at half a century in showbiz on her latest tour.

It takes her to the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne on Tuesday, October 22; the Pavilion Theatre, Worthing on Sunday, November 10; and Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre on Sunday, November 17.

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From humble beginnings on TV’s Opportunity Knocks, where she came second to a singing dog, through her years as Maplin’s chalet maid Peggy in the hit BBC TV series Hi-de-Hi!, to her West End and national touring roles in Godspell, Annie and Little Shop of Horrors, and her more recent TV appearances on Celebrity Masterchef, Gimme Gimme Gimme and Would I Lie To You?, Su will look back on an action-packed half-century of entertainment. And she insists she’s only just getting started…

“I date the 50 years from my first professional performance in 1974 in John Hanson’s The Desert Song, and I was in the chorus. We went to Llandudno and there was a great big poster outside saying ‘John Hanson’s Dessert Song.’ He said ‘Everywhere I go I am a matinee idol but in Wales I am a pudding!’”

Opportunity Knocks had come two or three months before that: “In a way it doesn't seem like 50 years but in a way it does. These are distant memories but luckily there's usually something in one year that helps you remember when you were growing up and I can remember the years with the shows that I have done but I always have my big mantra. I always say ‘Don't look forward to next November. You've got this November first.’ You've got tomorrow. I'm very mindful of that. I like being in the here and now. There’s no point looking forward to things that are months away or looking forward to a holiday that isn’t going to happen until 2026. You've got to concentrate on now.”

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But equally it is lovely to look back: “I know I was never going to have a golden anniversary of being married but I thought that I could have a golden anniversary of something else which I'm passionate about which is show business but I'm absolutely clear that this is not an evening with type show. Every show it's just me and my accompanist and we do all sorts of things from all sorts of shows and talk about the musicals and the sitcoms and the adverts.

“I sat down with my director and said ‘Look we are going to have to really think long and hard about this as to what we include.’ I didn't think we could really involve anything that included too much radio script. People wouldn't want to listen to that but I do talk about the sitcoms and they have to be celebrated. There are so many memories. So I have lots of different clips from Hi-de-Hi! and I show the clips. People often ask ‘How did you get cast in certain parts?’ and a picture comes up with people like Ruth or Simon (from the series) and I show little vignettes such as what they were like just so people can remember them. For the first half I do an hour and one minute and then there's a 20-minute interval and then it's 40 minutes of act two.”

We are not so very, very far away now from the half centenary of Hi-de-Hi!: “We made the pilot in 1979 and so many people still mention it. Sometimes you see the younger people come along and sometimes people remember watching it when they were ten with their own families and they bring their own children along. I'm so proud to have been involved in something that even all these years later is something that people look back on with real affection. It was real high comedy. It was a lot of silliness but the point is that (writers) David and Jimmy were both redcoats and all the characters were based on people that they had worked with. In all honesty the point is that these characters were truthful. I don't think that you could run for ten series without the characters being really good, and I love it when people say Hi-de-Hi! to me. Maybe I guess it’s 50 times a day but I love it and it's something that I'm really grateful for, just to have been part of that.”

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