I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me

But who am I to judge? Even though I knew every inch of what they were up to, how sex was and wasn’t meant to be done, who to do it with – ideally – and when, what you should and shouldn’t need to wear to get it, there was nothing much happening with me in that department in real life. It was, shall we politely say with a cough, ‘theoretical’. That is, until I went to my first hip hop club in London, far from home, far from church, with a group of new and exciting friends I had met at a drama club.

I had always liked hip hop, rap, R’n’B – I can’t say that I was particularly knowledgeable about them, or that my tastes within the genre were sophisticated, but they were unusual for the time and place I grew up. I went to a comprehensive school in Hertfordshire. It was mixed socially, but predominantly white. Most people were into guitar music and pop. I found bands such as Radiohead and Nirvana made me semi-suicidal, and instead hoovered up the likes of Arrested Development, The Fugees and Blackstreet, which were the bands in those genres that made it to the Top 40 in the 1990s. So although my tastes were uncommon in my little part of the Home Counties, I was still well within the parameters of what was available to buy from the music section of Woolworth’s in town. There was nothing especially cool or underground about me – I just liked what I liked.

Dancing to Nirvana in a nightclub is very, very different to dancing to Blackstreet. Very. Different. The first time I went to a club playing this sort of music I was 17 years old, and – thanks to Dirty Dancing – I thought, ‘Yes, this is it – this is what I want. I know how to do this.’ And I dived in.

And it was here that I had my second ever snog, and let me say it was very, very different to the first one. Very. Different. It had started with dancing, some very, very dirty dancing, which resulted in a stern word from a friend as she pulled me away, looked me beadily in the eye, and told this naïve, ‘watermelon carrying’ suburban bumpkin that the ‘only rule in the club tonight is you leave with who you came in with, OK?’ I nodded dumbly, not quite understanding – of course I would leave with her, I didn’t have anywhere else to stay … woaahhhhh, I see, I get it. She thought I might leave the club with this man I was dancing with, and stay at his house and have sex with him, and fuckinghellimonly17and immeantobeachristianbutgodknowsidontfeel verychristiantonight andohgodimdancingwiththis managainanditsjust.so.sexy.

Then he snogged me. And this man snogged me good and proper. There had been some fairly full-on dancing going until this point, but now some serious shit was happening. We weren’t even dancing anymore, I was somehow just sitting on his lap at the side of the room, snogging his face off. He even put his finger in my mouth as we snogged, and somehow made it work. I have tried to recreate it since with other men, but generally it’s an awful idea. Don’t try it. I think you have to be drunk and recently dancing to Ginuwine’s ‘Pony’ to pull it off.

This was a mini-epiphany for me. Actual sex wouldn’t happen for another three years, and actual good sex a little time after that. But this was as close as I could imagine getting as a frigid, evangelical Christian virgin who didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Was this my Johnny Castle, at last? I can’t remember the man’s name. I think he muttered something about being a ‘driver’ and that he would ‘take care of me’. I’m not going to suggest that this was a marriage proposal, but it certainly felt romantic. He was a nice man. And a truly incredible kisser. He was quite a lot older than me. I don’t remember any sense of feeling pressured by him to go somewhere else, so perhaps I was lucky, or unlucky. We could be happily married now – him doing his ‘driving’ to support us, and me at home with nine kids, still totally captivated by his ability to make putting a finger in your mouth while kissing an enjoyable experience. Who’s to say what could have happened? Either way, I left the club with my friend, who practically body-checked me out the door, and as the hot sweat cooled onto my body in the night-time air, I felt heated from the inside. I felt like Baby. I felt like a woman.

You can do a lot worse than use Dirty Dancing as your guide through the sexual shenanigans of early youth. Baby is not a silent, smiling, swishy-haired princess. She is outspoken, noisy and casual in her appearance. She finds a man in Johnny who respects all of that, likes it, loves it, even. He only wants to lift her higher. Literally and figuratively. This film says, ‘Find a man like Johnny, and go get him. Don’t change yourself, change the world. Change the man if necessary. But remember: you’re pretty in your own way. You don’t have to change a thing.’ It’s a decent message for a teenage girl, better than ‘drink fruit-flavoured laxatives to be thin’, or ‘shade your nose away with this beige pen’, or ‘take more clothes off to be noticed’. It’s sexy, but it’s equal. Everyone’s at it, for good and bad reasons. It’s messy.

But that’s life, and that’s sex. You can’t make it tidy, so you might as well enjoy it.

7.30pm, 13 March 2010.

The show is Let’s Dance for Sport Relief, a charity that raises money for African and UK aid projects, and it’s going out live to an audience of 8 million people.

I am stood on the world’s shiniest floor, behind two large sliding black doors, beyond which are nine TV cameras, a live studio audience, a panel of judges, presenters Mel and Sue and my new fiancé.

Thirty seconds to performance.

I am wearing a black leotard, a glove made of shards of mirrored glass, three pairs of tights, a pair of strappy heels and a lot of gold body make-up.

Twenty seconds to performance.

I can hear Mel and Sue begin my introduction. Standing in front of me are two professional dancers, wearing the same leotard as me, minus the glove, each with about 70 per cent less thigh than I have.

Ten seconds to performance.

I can hear the end of the video clips package. I am shaking uncontrollably. It’s fear, yes, but also adrenaline. More adrenaline than I have ever felt running through my body in my entire life. I wonder if this much adrenaline is actually safe. I wonder if I might need a paramedic.

Five seconds to performance.

They are saying my name. The music starts. The doors start to slide back. And I can see only bright lights as we move forward in line. I’m supposed to be strutting sassily, but I can barely walk because I’m shaking so much. Am I dying? Possibly. But it’s too late to stop now. Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ starts playing and the rest is noise. Blur and noise.

Oh god. I still feel sick now, and I’m only writing it down.

At the time of writing, the YouTube video of me performing the ‘Single Ladies’ dance has nearly 40 million hits. Every year, a TV company in Japan enquires about my availability to perform on Japanese national TV, competing against their leading Beyoncé impersonator. Every year, I say yes, and then ask for a fee so ludicrous that I never hear from them again. Until the following year, when a fresh enquiry is made. They truly believe that doing the ‘Single Ladies’ dance is my main occupation. They think I am the UK’s leading Beyoncé impersonator, and therefore a worthy opponent for their own home-grown Queen B. And with YouTube numbers like that, who can blame them? They do not know that between then and now I have lived through a somewhat gritty labour, and giving birth to a baby with an unusually large head has left me rather less able to slut drop suddenly or convincingly.

The ‘Single Ladies’ dance is still usually the first thing anyone says about me on introductions to panel shows, live events, and other appearances on TV, radio and the stage. It’s in my official CV. People put the song on at weddings, meaning I am forced to hide until it’s over, otherwise all the other guests form a circle around me and clap until I drunkenly agree to attempt as much of it as I can remember. I performed a version of the dance on my 2010 tour, dressed in full military gear as a butch soldier character I invented called Captain Rosie, closing the first half of the show to a standing ovation more often than not. Years after the event, a man booked me for a gig on the basis that I would perform ‘Single Ladies’, but he didn’t tell me that in advance, and even though I explicitly said I would be doing normal stand-up, he didn’t listen and was so furious that my act was ‘Single Ladies’-less, he didn’t want to pay me.

In terms of reach and endurability, nothing else I have ever done comes close. I had three series of an award-winning sketch show, I was in the very episode of Peep Show which was voted the most popular ever, I’ve written a novel – A WHOLE NOVEL, FOR PITY’S SAKE – I’ve met Prince Philip and Dame Emma Thompson. I’ve met THE POPE. And yet all these things might as well not exist, when set alongside three minutes of ‘Single Ladies’-based exertion in 2010.

And I don’t even mind. My greatest triumph was expressed through the medium of dance, and I sort of love that. And it was a really fucking difficult dance at that. I’m not going to lie – it nearly killed me. We had five days of rehearsal: that was the rule. Everyone in the competition was only allowed five days of rehearsal, no matter what dance they were doing. Which is both fair and not fair at the same time.

I turned up to the rehearsal room on the morning of day one feeling nervous, but certain that the choreographer and two professional dancers would have the whole routine worked out, and they would simply teach it to me. It would be tough – I wasn’t really fit enough to do it justice. But it was a comedy show, and so long as I learned the basic steps and messed about a bit in the middle, we would be fine. We had loads of time …

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