BARBARA DICKSON LOVES TO SPEND SPEND SPEND
When the hit musical Spend Spend Spend comes to Manchester, star Barbara Dickson admits she'll have ambiguous feelings about it.
''It's a show I really, really love doing,'' she says.
''And the idea of doing it in Manchester is very exciting, of course. It's a real Northern story and it's been lovely to do for the last couple of years. But there is a degree of sadness to it all because, when we finish our run here on December 8, that will be the end of it, at least so far as I'm concerned.
''I started in August 1999, for what was supposed to be nine months, and it has just kept going and going from there I'm happy to say.''
In the show, the 53-year-old actress plays Viv Nicholson, the Yorkshire miner's wife who in 1961 won £152,319 - the equivalent of scooping more than £5m today - on the Pools and famously vowed to ''spend, spend, spend''.
But her pursuit of the champagne lifestyle brought her little in the way of happiness. Not long after, her beloved second husband Keith was killed in the Jaguar car he bought out of the winnings and her own subsequent life took her through another three husbands, more fast cars, bankruptcy and alcohol, before finally leaving her working, nearly penniless, as a stripper in a Manchester club.
''I know it sounds like a dreadful cliche, but the moral of the story has to be that money does not bring happiness. The story highlights what can happen to people if they are not careful,'' says Dickson, who is herself happily married with three sons.
She freely admits to herself being ''comfortably off these days, although I still have to work, of course''.
But she came from a working class family in Dunfermline, Fife, and says that one of the reasons why she loves the show so much is because it's relatively easy for her to identify with Viv.
''I feel like I really understand it,'' she reiterates.
''My mother taught me to respect money but, who knows, if I was 25 and married, struggling with four children, I might have done the same thing,'' she says.
''You have to imagine, Viv and her husband were coming from a situation where they had £7 a week wages, struggling with a family to feed and then they had the most extraordinary windfall.
''When I was young,'' she remembers, ''Yo-Yo biscuits did a competition where the child who won could go into a toyshop and take out anything they could carry. I think that's what this couple were like, except the toyshop for them was Harrods!''
When the show finishes here, she has, she laughs, ''a vague plan for next year that hinges on taking a long break! Of course, immediately afterwards my boys will be back from boarding school so we're planning on some general family bliss over Christmas.
''Then I'll be doing a proper long tour with my band from May. I love going out with my band and you may very well ask whether I would ever choose playing live with them over working in shows like this one, or vice-versa but the truth is that I think one is very good for the other.
''I have still to reach the highlight of my career. There is no room for nostalgia in this business.''
