Cathy McGowan

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Cathy McGowan (born 1943) is a British broadcaster and journalist, best remembered as the presenter from 1964-6 of Rediffusion television’s ground-breaking rock music show, Ready Steady Go!

Contents 1 Ready Steady Go! 2 "Queen of the Mods" 2.1 A star among stars 3 Impact on the "swinging" sixties 4 After Ready Steady Go! 4.1 Later work 5 Family 6 Notes

[edit] Ready Steady Go!

Ready Steady Go! (RSG) was first broadcast in August 1963, its launch coinciding with the rise of The Beatles as the major force in popular music in the 1960s both in Britain and internationally ^[1]. As one historian of television reflected in the 1970s, "the revolution had the greatest possible effect on television ... and hindsight commentators were to see the year [1963] as a line of demarcation drawn between one kind of Britain and another" ^[2].

With its slogan ,"the weekend starts here" ^[3], RSG was shown weekly on Friday evenings from 6-7pm ^[4]. Its original presenter Keith Fordyce, a stalwart of the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg, was joined in 1964 by the young, trendsetting Cathy McGowan ^[5]. McGowan, who had initially been recruited as an advisor from among 600 applicants, had been working in the fashion department of the magazine Woman’s Own. She is said to have secured the role in a "run off" with journalist Anne Nightingale, later a disc jockey on Radio 1, by answering "fashion" without hesitation to a question from Elkan Allan (1922-2006), RSG's executive producer and Head of Entertainment at Rediffusion ^[6], as to whether sex, music or fashion were more important to teenagers ^[7].

While Cathy McGowan had answered an advert for 'a typical teenager' to come and work as an advisor, it wasn't long before she found herself presenting the show. Her strength lay in the fact that her status as a genuine fan of the artists was evident in her presenting style; stumbling over her lines, losing her cool during interviews and apparent inexperience only made her more popular with the viewers, and by the end she was presenting the show alone. She may have been the inspiration for Susan Campy from The Beatles 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, when George Harrison tells the producer of a fictitious teen television show that Campy is "... that posh bird who gets everything wrong", to which the producer played by Kenneth Haigh replies, "She's a trendsetter. It's her profession."

[edit] "Queen of the Mods"

McGowan seemed totally in tune with the times - "the girl of the day", according to Eric Burdon of the Animals ^[8] - and, through the cutting edge of her fashion sense, soon acquired the eponym, “Queen of the Mods” ^[9]. (This term has been applied to others, such as Dusty Springfield and, in New Zealand, Dinah Lee ^[10], but most frequently to McGowan.) Much of her appeal lay in the fact that she was in the same age group as that to which RSG was primarily directed ^[11]: young women readily identified with her and regarded her as a role model, while men were attracted by her undeniably good looks. Anna Wintour, future editor of American Vogue, was, according to her biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, among the teenagers whom the show introduced to fashion.^[12] Another, Lesley Hornby, who a few years later became famous as the model Twiggy, regarded McGowan as her heroine: "I'd sit and drool over her clothes. She was a heroine to us because she was one of us" ^[13].

[edit] A star among stars

A similar empathy extended to the artists that McGowan introduced and interviewed. The singer Donovan, whose career was launched in 1965 by his regular appearances on RSG, recalled McGowan as the "young Mary Quant look hostess" (Quant being the leading British proponent of the mini-skirt, which McGowan helped to popularise), with whom he developed an "easy-going" style of on-screen conversation ^[14]. Young musicians felt neither patronised nor ingratiated by her and fashionable words, such as "fab", seemed to trip naturally off her tongue. In the words of Dominic Sandbrook, a social historian writing over forty years later:

The show's most celebrated presenter, McGowan was the same age as the national audience; she wore all the latest trendy shifts and mini-dresses; and she spoke with an earnest, ceaseless barrage of teenage slang, praising whatever was 'fab' or 'smashing', and damning all that was 'square' or 'out'. 'The atmosphere', one observer wrote later, 'was that of a King's Road party where the performers themselves had only just chanced to drop by' ^[15].

By Christmas 1965 McGowan's fame was such that her name was coupled with that of rising singer Jonathan King in a roll call of stars on the Barron Knights' seasonal "hit" record, Merrie Gentle Pops:

Andy, Sandie, Pitney, Proby,

Cathy McGowan and Jonathan King ^[16].

The following summer McGowan was among an array of top celebrities - "a more glittering line up of guests could hardly be imagined" ^[17] - that attended the opening in June 1966 of Sibylla, a highly fashionable nightclub close to Piccadilly Circus in London.

[edit] Impact on the "swinging" sixties

McGowan was an early patron of Biba ^[18], whose first store opened in September 1964, and had her own fashion range at British Home Stores ^[19]. She also endorsed a portable make-up set known as "Cathy's Survival Kit". Barbara Hulanicki, who founded Biba, observed that "the girls aped Cathy's long hair and eye-covering fringe and soon their little faces were growing heavy with stage make-up" ^[20]. Julia Dykins, half-sister of John Lennon of the Beatles, recalled how, despite wearing black eye make-up, black polo necks and dyed black jeans "à la Cathy McGowan", she was still unable to convince doormen at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the Beatles first came to prominence, that she was over eighteen, the age for admission ^[21]. It has been claimed that the formation in 1966 of a British Society for the Preservation of the Miniskirt was prompted by McGowan's indicating that she would wear a long skirt on RSG ^[22].

After Fordyce’s departure in March 1965, McGowan continued to present RSG until it ended on 23 December 1966. In 1965 a decision that artists should perform live on the show ^[23] gave it the additional immediacy and edge that its substantially longer-running BBC rival, Top of the Pops (1964-2006), never really acquired; indeed, the latter retained the services of a Mancunian model Samantha Juste - in the context of television, McGowan's own rival of sorts - as its "disc girl" until 1967. Although RSG's momentum had begun to flag by the time of its demise, it had become a "cult programme" ^[24] whose substantial impact on the music scene and, notably through McGowan, on the "swinging" sixties more generally was widely acknowledged. As Sandbrook put it, "Thanks to the enthusiastic salesmanship of McGowan and her fellow presenters, the emerging youth culture that had once been confined to the capital [London] or to the great cities could now be seen and copied almost immediately from Cornwall to the Highlands" ^[25]. The musician and jazz critic George Melly thought that RSG "made pop music work on a truly national scale ... It was almost possible to feel a tremor of pubescent excitement from Land's End to John O'Groats" ^[26].

McGowan, who was a 5 foot 4½ inch (1.63 metres) brunette, also did modelling work during this period and presented a show on Radio Luxembourg.

[edit] After Ready Steady Go!

Once RSG had ended, McGowan's star began to wane. By way of illustration, the Sunday Times, previewing an exhibition of photographs by Patrick, Earl of Lichfield over forty yeas later, has described Queen's use of his shots in 1967:

[Lichfield] was ... a great one for persuading people to join in, even if the outcome was not always the one they expected. In the 1960s he took a series of group portraits for Queen magazine supposedly documenting the movers and shakers of the time - except that some, such as Jonathan Aitken and Cathy McGowan, were deemed not to be "in", and were labelled as "out" in the magazine. But Lichfield, with his impeccable manners, refused to upset his subjects by letting them know that in advance ^[27].

[edit] Later work

McGowan continued to work in journalism and broadcasting. She was a board member of London’s Capital Radio when it was launched in 1973. In the late 1980s she worked for the BBC's Newsroom South East, specialising in stories relating to entertainment ^[28]. In the latter role, as on RSG, she interviwed a range of celebrities, including some she had known in the 1960s and others, such as singer Michael Ball, who became her partner, and Deborah Harry, formerly of the group Blondie, whom she described as the most beautiful woman she had ever met ^[29]. In 1991 McGowan co-hosted with Alexei Sayle and Jonathan Ross a show by British comedians to mark the 30th anniversary of Amnesty International.

[edit] Family

In 1970 McGowan married the actor Hywel Bennett (b. 1944) ^[30], who appeared in such films as The Family Way (1966) and The Virgin Soldiers (1969). They had a daughter, Emma. McGowan was divorced from Bennett in 1988 and, since the early 1990s, has been the partner of Michael Ball, almost twenty years her junior ^[31]. Ball was godfather to McGowan's grandson, Connor, son of Emma.

McGowan's brother John McGowan was a disc jockey in 1965 on King Radio, a "pirate" station broadcasting from a fort in the Thames Estuary ^[32]. In the mid 1990s the death from ovarian cancer of his wife Angela, a close friend of Cathy McGowan since their teens, led to his becoming the co-founder of a charity supporting research into the disease ^[33].

[edit] Notes