The Last Straw: You'd never have had her down as an adventurer when you watched her tip-toeing across the studio floor, pirouetting gracefully, waving her right leg in the air and flapping her arms like a butterfly - to the strains of Black Sabbath's Paranoid. But after some in-depth research, which involved Googling her name, we learnt that Babs Lord later became the oldest housewife in history to visit both the North and South Poles. As the article said: "Remarkable!".
And remarkable's the only word. Babs was evidently made of sterner stuff than we suspected. So stern, she also became an amateur yachtswoman and an explorer "who made several trips to the Himalayas, the Sahara and the jungle in Guyana". You can be sure that when she reached the jungle in Guyana the natives came over all Henry Stanley-ish, took one look at her, and rapturously declared: "Pan's People, I presume?" Because that's how universally legendary the Top of the Pops (TOTP) dance troupe was, there wasn't a soul in the jungle in Guyana, in the villages of Connemara or the outback of Australia who hadn't practised their routines in the hope that, one day, they'd be called up as a late replacement when one of them flapped her arms so violently she disappeared into the skies above Shepherd's Bush.
If Video Killed The Radio Star it also, ultimately, obliterated Pan's People, along with their successors, Legs & Co and, eh, Ruby Flipper. Before then their services were required on TOTP when a band couldn't make it on to the show, and often they had mere hours to interpret a tune and unleash it on to viewers, who rarely knew whether to laugh or cry.
Arguments haven't raged over the years over what was Pan's People's finest hour. Again, exhaustive research has led us to believe it must surely have been their interpretation in 1973 of Gilbert O'Sullivan's Get Down. We don't remember the routine, but we certainly remember the tune: "Told you once before, And I won't tell you no more, Get down, get down, get down. You're a bad dog baby, But I still want you around." Now, we never assumed that Gilbert was literally referring to a dog, we guessed he was alluding, somewhat disrespectfully, to his other half. But Pan's People had the habit of taking things very literally indeed. Their interpretation, apparently, involved placing four large dogs on the stage, around which the troupe danced ("sometimes in a very erratic fashion"), wagging their fingers at the dogs, warning them to "get down". But the dogs had never got up in the first place, so terrified were they of the sight before them.
Accusations that they were taking the lyrics much too literally surfaced again the following year when they danced around red traffic lights for The Osmonds' Can't Stop. Perhaps a little more imagination was required, but at least they never dressed up as Hilda Ogden, as Legs & Co did for Donna Summer's Rumour Has It.
Pan's People bowed out in April 1976 and went their separate ways. Ruth began working for local government, Flick opened a gift shop in New York and Louise married a millionaire from Sheffield with a house in Marbella. The rest of them danced on, but never recreated the magic.
We got to thinking about them this week when the BBC announced that it was axing TOTP - it's our age, perhaps, but when we think TOTP we can't help but think PP. That TOTP lived on 30 years after PP bid adieu is hard to credit, but live it on it did, even if it was never quite the same again. If Dream No 1 was to be a Pan's Person, the runner-up prize was to sing on TOTP, hence all those years practising with a hairbrush in front of the mirror. All that practice, alas, will now come to nothing, in the absence of an outcry that matched, say, the one that greeted RTÉ's threat to replace its weather people with babes, TOTP is not going to be saved.
Granted, the dream began to fade a little a decade and a bit ago, but it was somewhat revived when Orville the Duck and Welsh pensioner Thomas Jones made it on to the show (separately, not as a duet), appearances that made us believe anything was possible, regardless of our species or age.
Most famously, of course, Foster and Allen appeared on TOTP, their costumes widely ridiculed because some felt velvet leprechaun suits in luminous green didn't represent the new and vibrant Ireland. The real pity, though, was that Foster and Allen were available for the gig because it might have been fun if Pan's People had been brought back to interpret: "Then came a lusty sailor, Who chanced to pass my way, And stole my bunch of thyme away." On second thoughts, one dreads to think how they'd have interpreted a lusty sailor nicking their herbs.
