A Celebration of Denise

 Have recently become obsessed with the actors who appear on adverts on daytime television. If you watch as much Dempsey and Makepeace and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as I do, and it's a frankly disgraceful amount, you see the same faces pop up in all the adverts. There seem to be "hot advert types". For a while it was the "black guy with a slightly lazy eye", then it was "Swedish dentures/cruises woman". There's "the grinning grandad from Trailfinders with his small boy hat trickery" and "barely doing anything Welsh guy from pay for your own funeral/buy a ready meal, Grandad" ads. For years the king was Derek from the Sunlife Over Fifties Insurance adverts, played by the redoubtable Roger Martin, constantly doing bits of business with pairs of binoculars or incredibly rudimentary cheese and tomato doorstops. 

But the reigning monarch of the thirty-second product slam today, is Denise Waterman. Or possibly Denise Gyngell. She seems to go by both. I did a deep dive into Denise - so to speak - and, wow! 

You'll know Denise. She's the twinkly-eyed, Aryan goddess milking fresh (slightly curdled) puns out of the words "all clear" in the AllClear Travel Insurance adverts, forever clinking a flute of prosecco on a dimly lit plane that looks like it's crafted from wicker. Or she's in a farmhouse kitchen, talking earnestly about how her seal-pierced microwave meal is, honestly, the best food she's ever eaten. She's done Nationwide, Royal Caribbean Cruises, and if she hasn't appeared in a fluffy white towel and full make up, stepping into a bath with a little door in it, I will be very surprised. 

She's a voice over artist, a jobbing actress, a podcaster, a life-style influencer and an experienced celebrant, and, most magnificently, she was a member of Tight Fit!

As soon as I found that out, I remembered. I remembered her from Tight Fit. If you recall the early eighties pop sensations Tight Fit, you'll remember there were three members: in the middle, like John Barrowman playing Rambo, was Steve Grant, greased up and falsettoing away, and flanked by two women in a modest state of undress: a blonde and a brunette. You, because you are not attuned to the universe in the practical and useful ways I am, anticipate the blonde is Denise. You are wrong. I immediately mapped Denise's high cheekbones and beaming smile onto to the brunette, who appeared to have been styled after Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. It was an exact match. 

Denise genuinely looks better now than when she was a twenty year old pop star. Sickening. 

Interestingly, none of the band sing on The Lion Sleeps Tonight, their breakaway pop hit. It was sung by a chap called Roy Ward, who'd been a drummer in a band called City Boy. I'm not aware of their work. The single was produced by Tim Friese-Green, the great grandson of William Friese-Green, who didn't invent cinema but had a proper go at it. Friese-Green is perhaps most famous for his work with Talk Talk and, latterly, Heligoland, but earlier in his career he worked with Blue Zoo and The Nolans and he invented Tight Fit. The Tight Fit group were assembled to front the single The Lion Sleeps Tonight after it "caught fire" and had to go on Top of the Pops, but were strong enough performers to do their own singing on the follow up Fantasy Island. Which is pretty good. 

Denise and Steve, as a duo, still do the eighties shows and Butlins as Tight Fit, when she can fit it into her enviably busy schedule. How's the diary looking Denise? Certainly not all clear. 

Oh, and she was married to steam enthusiast and the man who taught The Specials to dance, Pete Waterman. 

Patience of a saint.