The Winter Gardens has a taste of its former glory

To the beautiful, slightly-seen-better-days, but BEAUTIFUL Morecambe Winter Gardens for the Morecambe Variety Festival. Great fun, lovely people, amazing venue and one of the longest shows I've ever been a part of!

I really need to work on what my face is doing when I'm performing my finale, huh...

The plans are to restore the Winter Gardens to its former glory, but of course that'll take time and money. They've made a good start, and its great that there's variety being staged in the place, even if its only for one weekend a year at the moment. I hope I get to come back and work it many more times in the future.

Check out some of the names on this poster - Sarah Vaughan! The great Chick Murray! Dancing! Game shows! Bands! Must have been quite the place to be, in its prime. Oh, and look, every Thursday - professional wrestling! One of the fun things I got to do between shows, was look through some of the albums of old promo 8x10s of some of the people who had performed there back in the day. Found a few gems, too...

Oh yes, that'll be the legendary Exotic Adrian Street. One of the most famous bad guys in British Wrestling in the 70's and 80's. He started wrestling in 1957. Care to guess when he wrestled his farewell match? Last bloody year. Also note how, when he signed autographs, he made the "A" of his name look like a cock and balls. Naughty Adrian. Naughty.

I'll be brutally honest, what drew me to this promo card was the achingly 1970's image and name, but then I did a little googling. You're looking at the act that won New Faces in 1977 & appeared on the Royal Variety performance. Pretty good, no? Oh, and if you want to play the "Where are they now" game, well, the guy goes by the name of Lance Ellington, has written songs for quite a few of pops biggest names, and can be seen as one of the lead vocalists in the Strictly Come Dancing band. How cool.

And then there's this fellow. Yep, dollars to donuts that's a very young Charlie Chuck, right there. Hasn't really changed a bit.

Josephine, shaking it

I'm currently on tour with Brian Conley, which is, frankly, a hoot and a half.

I'll be bringing my hit one man show, "Showman" - fresh from a sold out West End run (Still can't quite believe that when I type it) to Dorchester Arts on the 24th of May, (with special guest Sarah Bennetto), so if you live in the area, or know someone that does, then get yourself a ticket and help show that there's an audience for my flavour of variety!