So popular that in 1955, Jean Renoir decided to make a film based on those shows. The result was the film French Cancan, with Jean Gabin playing the role of Danglard. This was, lest we forget, the man who went on to open a joyfully outsized hotel “for over-eaters” called Fatty Towers, complete with extra large beds and baths, an annual Belly Of The Year contest, and a restaurant whose specialities included the candidly-named Lard Arse Pudding. years later, Charles Morton, the inventor of the modern Music-Hall, presented this surprising dance on the Oxford stage. He renamed it the French Cancan because it came from France and caused a stir. Soon after it appeared in Oxford, the socially aware dance was banned for being too daring. Here is the scene, in my time travel novella, The Can-Can girl and the mysterious woman in pink, where the protagonist, Adrienne, first arrives at the Moulin Rouge. The brilliant thing about Buster Bloodvessel was that, like Divine, he completely owned his obesity and made his fatness absolutely fabulous.

After myriad performances that included dressing up in a grass skirt and as Henry VII (not at the same time), Bad Manners became TOTP’s most regular guests after the Welsh wonder Shakin’ Stevens.The Can-Can dance was raucous and risqué, reaching its height of popularity in 1900 during the Belle Époque. Parisian cabarets promoted the dance and Jane Avril and La Goulue popularized it in the night clubs of Montmartre. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec depicted it in his famous painting, At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance. And, Jacques Offenbach left us with that joyful, if not nagging tune: da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da . . .. You know the rest. Frenetic music, twirling petticoats, surprising acrobatics… the dancers of the Moulin Rouge know the art of the cancan. It’s a true phenomenon, but it hasn’t always been as it is now. It was a famous dancer known as La Goulue who established the definitive rules, which were then passed on orally until Nini Pattes En L’air (Nini Legs in the Air) decided to start a specialist school teaching the explosive quadrille.

Author Pamela B Eglinski studied the life and times of the can-can dancers in Paris and has written a fabulous book about it, a time travel romp through Belle Epoque Paris… The Moulin Rouge: Life among the can-can dancers When writing The Can-Can Girl and the Mysterious Woman in Pink, I knew that I had to draw my readers into the amoral world of the Moulin Rouge. I needed to “paint with words” the ambiance of the dance hall – depicting not only the dancers, but the rowdy men, curious-but-tipsy women, the smell of unwashed bodies, and the musky odor of oil lamps and cigar smoke. The Can-Can GirlBad Manners were always good fun to watch on TV, and one of the main reasons for the band’s notoriety was their outlandish, eccentric frontman Buster Bloodvessel. It remains one of my favourite appearances in the show’s long and rich history. In fact, I don’t recall anything as visually arresting as that on TOTP again until – be still irony – Divine’s headline-grabbing turn three years later with You Think You’re A Man. The can-can dancer laughed, took Adrienne’s hand and escorted her to a table where the noisy dance hall was a little more muted…