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the end of her first summer season in Blackpool, Melanie enrolled at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Chapeltown Road. The college had been up and running for just six years but already had a growing reputation as the nearest thing to Fame in Leeds.

      She did not thrive at the college, though, impatient after her spell in Blackpool to get on with her life in show business. She had some money saved from her dancing wages but that soon ran out and she earned some much-needed funds for bus fares and lunches by teaching an aerobics class at the nearby Mandela Community Centre.

      She also entered the Miss Leeds Weekly News contest in 1992 and won, much to her surprise, although not to anyone else’s because she was a very striking young woman. She was now a Blackpool veteran, a beauty queen and still only seventeen.

Not everything was going so well, however. Like many of her contemporaries, Melanie had to trudge around to auditions, hoping that the next might be the one. She soon developed a tough skin when it came to rejections. Her future might have been entirely different if she had won the part of Fiona Middleton, a young hairdresser in Coronation Street. Despite getting to the final four, she lost out to another aspiring actress from Leeds, Angela Griffin, who had also been at Intake High. They were never best friends because Angela was in the year below but they once performed a duet in a school production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

      Angela was also mixed race so, inevitably, she and Melanie often went up for the same part. Usually, neither of them was hired, but on this occasion Angela’s success would lead to TV stardom. She started playing Fiona in December 1992 and stayed for six years, appearing in 257 episodes. If Melanie had been successful, there would have been no thoughts of cruise ships, Blackpool or auditions for girl bands. Ironically, Angela impersonated Mel as a Spice Girl in a 1998 celebrity special of Stars In Their Eyes.

      Melanie, meanwhile, had to be content with some work as an extra. She made several fleeting appearances stacking shelves in Bettabuy’s supermarket in Coronation Street and had a walk-on role as a policewoman in the locally filmed A Touch of Frost.

      Closer to home, she took a part-time job in telesales and another as a podium dancer at the Yel Bar in a side street off the city centre. It certainly wasn’t a lap-dancing club or anything remotely similar – just a fun night spot where the waiters and waitresses wore swimwear.

      Melanie picked up £20 for four hours of dancing on a Friday and Saturday night in front of a mainly male audience. The moment her shift was over, she changed back into an old sweatshirt and jogging bottoms, collected her wages and went home. This was a paid professional job.

Of course, Melanie was very popular with the lads but seemed unmoved by the attention. Lisa Adamczyk, her manager at the club, observed, ‘She was a great mover, a very professional dancer, but it was all just an act. At the end of the night she’d be off like a shot to get back to her boyfriend, Steve, who she loved dearly. She’d come across as the wildest girl you’d ever meet but underneath the image was a hard-working girl who was faithful to her boyfriend.’

      She was still very much a dancer, never having bothered much with singing, although she started having some lessons to broaden her chances of landing better roles. She danced on The Bonnie Langford Show and on Keith and Orville’s Quack Chat Show, starring the popular ventriloquist and his green baby duck.

      Her friend Rebecca had moved to London and Melanie was feeling constrained by Leeds. She was hired for another summer season in Blackpool, this time on The Billy Pearce Laughter Show at the Grand Theatre. Billy, the son of Melanie’s old dance teacher, was one of the most popular old-school entertainers in the north of England.

      This time she would be away from home for four months and so, reluctantly, decided to split up with Steve. She opted for a clean break rather than keep things dragging on when she had ambitions to see the world and be a star – or, at least, a headliner in Blackpool. She did not want to settle for a cosy, settled life in Leeds.

      Melanie was very fond of Steven and is nice about him in her memoirs, but she acknowledged that his life took a few wrong turns after his football career was wrecked by injury. He was sent to prison for nine months in 2002. Now working as a decorator, he had been convicted of affray after attacking two men in the street with a machete.

In Blackpool, Melanie enjoyed her new freedom. She was more independent than she had been during her first summer there and enjoyed dating as a single woman, as well as acting as understudy to her show’s female star, Claire Cattini. As far as Melanie was concerned, Claire was the epitome of a big star and a role model for the teenager from Leeds, even though she was only a couple of years older.

      Melanie fell for another sportsman – this time a professional snooker player from Iceland called Fjölnir Thorgeirsson. Fjöl (pronounced Fee-ol) was very Nordic looking – tall, blond and well built. Melanie fancied him as soon as she saw him in a café on the promenade near the Norbreck Castle Hotel where he was competing in a number of qualifying tournaments for the big professional events.

      Blackpool had become an important centre for snooker. The future world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan won an amazing seventy-four out of seventy-six matches at the Norbreck in 1992.

      Fjöl wasn’t as successful but he did win through to the European Open held in Antwerp in September. He had a walkover in Round 2 and lost in the next. Melanie knew nothing about snooker but she came to watch him whenever she could get away. She enjoyed a summer of love in a boy-meets-girl sort of way. The chances for any future relationship seemed slim when Fjöl returned to Iceland and promptly suffered a serious motorbike accident, which meant he could not travel.

In fact, it was Melanie who hopped on a plane, as a dancer in a troupe entertaining the armed forces in the Falkland Islands, Bosnia and Northern Ireland. Her last show business job before her life-changing audition was in Lewisham. She had one line in the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk starring Saracen from the hit TV series Gladiators – he eventually became a fire-fighter. Her heart wasn’t in it and she was sacked for skipping rehearsals, so it was back to Leeds and scouring the ads again.

      Melanie had a habit of landing on her feet but her career to date seemed to be one step forward and one step back. She was still just eighteen but she badly needed something to happen.

2

       Casting the Net

      Imagine you were casting a sit-com. That was what Chris Herbert did. He wanted characters who would appeal to everyone. The series Friends wouldn’t start until later in 1994 but his idea of throwing together a group of young people with different personalities, characteristics and quirks was very similar to the thinking behind the classic comedy.

      He wanted to cover all bases: ‘I approached it as if I was a casting director, finding characters that appealed to every colour in the rainbow – finding a gang of girls everyone could relate to. We were looking to create a lifestyle act.’

      In the early nineties there was no The X Factor, The Voice or Britain’s Got Talent. The new millennium celebrations would come and go before Pop Idol heralded a new era of Saturday night TV in 2001. There was no quick fix to becoming a pop star. None of the young women who became the Spice Girls was likely to thrive in those competitions.

      The era of the Spice Girls was closer to Opportunity Knocks than one of the new reality talent shows. The old favourite, originally hosted by Hughie Green, left our screens for good in 1990.

Instead, young hopefuls would rush to buy the Stage newspaper every week. Chris Herbert, too, would go to auditions, not to grab a spot on a cruise ship but to hand out flyers about his new group and see for himself the sort of personalities who were out there seeking work.

      He decided not to limit his search. He went to pubs, clubs, open-mic nights, dance studios – anywhere he could get his message out: ‘My number-one focus wasn’t looking for singers. I was looking for young girls seeking

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