Cathy McGowan on Ready Steady Go! (Rediffusion TV, c. 1965)

Cathy McGowan (born c. 1945) was a British broadcaster and journalist, best remembered as the presenter from 1964-6 of Rediffusion television’s groundbreaking rock music show Ready Steady Go! Image File history File links Cathy_McGowan_on_Ready_Steady_Go!.jpg‎ Extract from much larger photograph of Cathy McGowan and Cilla Black on Ready Steady Go! (c1965). ... Image File history File links Cathy_McGowan_on_Ready_Steady_Go!.jpg‎ Extract from much larger photograph of Cathy McGowan and Cilla Black on Ready Steady Go! (c1965). ... Ready Steady Go or simply RSG was one of the UKs first rock / pop music TV programmes. ... Associated-Rediffusion was the British Independent Television (commercial television) contractor for London, on weekdays between 1954 (transmissions started on September 22, 1955) and 1968. ... Ready Steady Go or simply RSG was one of the UKs first rock / pop music TV programmes. ...

Ready Steady Go!

Ready Steady Go! (RSG) was first broadcast in August 1963, its launch coinciding with the rise of the Beatles as the major force in popular music in the 1960s both in Britain and internationally ^[1]. As one historian of television reflected in the 1970s, "the revolution had the greatest possible effect on television ... and hindsight commentators were to see the year [1963] as a line of demarcation drawn between one kind of Britain and another" ^[2]. The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 as part of their first tour of the United States, promoting their first hit single there, I Want To Hold Your Hand. ...

With its slogan ,"the weekend starts here" ^[3], RSG was shown weekly on Friday evenings from 6-7pm ^[4]. Its original presenter Keith Fordyce, a stalwart of the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxemburg, was joined in 1964 by the young, trendsetting Cathy McGowan ^[5]. McGowan, who had initially been recruited as an advisor from among 600 applicants, had been working in the fashion department of the magazine Woman’s Own. She is said to have secured the role in a "run off" with journalist Anne Nightingale, later a disc jockey on Radio 1, by answering "fashion" without hesitation to a question from Elkan Allan (1922-2006), RSG's executive producer and Head of Entertainment at Rediffusion ^[6], as to whether sex, music or fashion were more important to teenagers ^[7]. Keith Fordyce was a disc jockey and presenter on British radio and television. ... The British Broadcasting Corporation, invariably known as the BBC (and also informally known as the Beeb or Auntie) is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world, employing 26,000 staff in the UK alone and with a budget of £4 billion. ... The Light Programme was a BBC radio station broadcasting mainstream light entertainment and music. ... Radio Luxembourg (1933-1992) was an important forerunner of pirate radio and modern commercial radio in Europe. ... Annie Nightingale MBE (born in London on April 1, 1942) is a radio broadcaster in the United Kingdom. ... For other meanings of DJ, see DJ (disambiguation). ... A separate article is about the punk band called The Adolescents. ...

"Queen of the Mods"

Make-up set endorsed by Cathy McGowan, mid 1960s (Madeleine Marsh (1999) Collecting the Sixties)

McGowan seemed totally in tune with the times - "the girl of the day", according to Eric Burdon of the Animals ^[8] - and, through the cutting edge of her fashion sense, soon acquired the eponym, “Queen of the Mods” ^[9]. (This term has been applied to others, such as Dusty Springfield and, in New Zealand, Dinah Lee ^[10], but most frequently to McGowan.) Much of her appeal lay in the fact that she was in the same age group as that to which RSG was primarily directed ^[11]: young women readily identified with her and regarded her as a role model, while men were attracted by her undeniably good looks. A similar empathy extended to the artists that McGowan introduced and interviewed. The singer Donovan, whose career was launched in 1965 by his regular appearances on RSG, recalled McGowan as the "young Mary Quant look hostess" (Quant being the leading British proponent of the mini-skirt, which McGowan helped to popularise), with whom he developed an "easy-going" style of on-screen conversation ^[12]. Young musicians felt neither patronised nor ingratiated by her and fashionable words, such as "fab", seemed to trip naturally off her tongue. Image File history File links Cathy's_Survival_Kit. ... Image File history File links Cathy's_Survival_Kit. ... Eric Victor Burdon (born May 11, 1941, Walker-on-Tyne, Northumberland) was the lead singer of The Animals and later of War. ... The US edition of The Animals self-titled debut album. ... Cutting edge is a term used to describe the creations of the small number of persons or groups who are at the frontier of progress in a field, especially science. ... Mod (or, to use its full name, Modernism or sometimes Modism) was a youth lifestyle based around fashion and music that developed in London, England in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the early to mid 1960s. ... Cover of Springfields 1969 album Dusty In Memphis. ... Donovan Philips Leitch (usually known simply as Donovan) (born May 10, 1946, in Maryhill, Glasgow) is a Scottish musician. ... Mary Quant OBE FCSD (born February 11, 1934) is a British fashion designer, one of the many designers who took credit for inventing the miniskirt and hot pants. ... The miniskirt is a skirt whose hemline is a ways above the knees (generally from ten to twenty centimetres above knee-level). ...

Impact on the "swinging" sixties

McGowan was an early patron of Biba ^[13], whose first store opened in September 1964, and had her own fashion range at British Home Stores ^[14]. Barbara Hulanicki, who founded Biba, recalled that "the girls aped Cathy's long hair and eye-covering fringe and soon their little faces were growing heavy with stage make-up" ^[15]. McGowan endorsed a portable make-up set known as "Cathy's Survival Kit". Biba was an iconic and popular fashion store in the 1960s and 1970s. ... British Home Stores (also known as BHS or, more recently Bhs) is a stalwart general retailer of the British High Street, selling clothes and household items (such as bedlinen, cutlery, crockery and lighting). ... Barbara Hulanicki (born 1936) was a Warsaw-born fashion designer, known as the founder of the iconic clothes store Biba. ...

After Fordyce’s departure in March 1965, McGowan continued to present RSG until it ended on 23 December 1966. In 1965 a decision that artists should perform live on the show ^[16] gave it the additional immediacy and edge that its substantially longer-running BBC rival, Top of the Pops (1964-2006), never really acquired; indeed, the latter retained the services of a Mancunian model Samantha Juste - in the context of television, McGowan's own rival of sorts - as its "disc girl" until 1967. Although RSG's momentum had begun to flag by the time of its demise and some, such as radio producer John Waters, have been dismissive of its (and McGowan's) credentials in relation to "mod" culture ^[17], it had become a "cult programme" ^[18]. Its impact on the music scene and, notably through McGowan, on the "swinging" sixties more generally, are widely held to have been considerable. The British Broadcasting Corporation, invariably known as the BBC (and also informally known as the Beeb or Auntie) is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world, employing 26,000 staff in the UK alone and with a budget of £4 billion. ... Top of the Pops was a long-running British music chart television programme, and indeed the longest-running music show in the world, shown each week on BBC and now licensed for national versions around the world. ... Manchester is a major city within Greater Manchester in North West England, historically notable for being the worlds first industrialised city, and its subsequent central role in the Industrial Revolution. ... Samantha Juste (left) with Pete Murray on Top of the Pops (BBC TV 1965) Samantha Juste, born Sandra Slater on 31 May 1944, was a fashion model who became widely known on British television in the mid 1960s as the “disc girl” on BBC’s Top of the Pops. ... This article does not discuss cult in its original sense of religious practice; for that usage see Cult (religious practice). ... Swinging London is a catchall term applied to a variety of dynamic cultural trends in the United Kingdom (centred in London, as the dominant city) in the 1960s. ...

McGowan, who was a 5 foot 4½ inch brunette, also did modelling work during this period and presented a show on Radio Luxemburg.

After RSG

After RSG, McGowan contined to work in journalism and broadcasting. She was a board member of London’s Capital Radio when it was launched in 1973. In the late 1980s she worked for the BBC's Newsroom South East, specialising in stories relating to entertainment ^[19]. This article is about the British radio station. ...

Family

In 1967 McGowan married the actor Hywel Bennett (b. 1944), with whom she had a daughter, Emma. She and Bennett were divorced in 1988 ^[20]. Since the early 1990s she has been the partner of singer Michael Ball, almost twenty years her junior ^[21]. Hywel Thomas Bennett (born 8 April 1944) is a Welsh actor, born in Garnant, Carmarthenshire, Wales. ... Michael Ball (born Michael Ashley Ball, on 27 June 1962 in Bromsgrove, England) is a British actor and singer, best known for musical theatre roles such as Marius in Les Misérables, Alex in Aspects of Love, and Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. ...

McGowan's brother John McGowan was a disc jockey in 1965 on King Radio, a "pirate" station broadcasting from a fort in the Thames Estuary ^[22]. In the mid 1990s the death from ovarian cancer of his wife Angela, a close friend of Cathy McGowan since their teens, led to his becoming the co-founder of a charity supporting research into the disease ^[23]. Radio 390 (1965 - 1967) was a pirate radio station which operated from the former British Army Maunsell towers located off southeastern England on the Red Sands sandbar. ... The term pirate radio lacks a specific universal interpretation. ... The Thames Estuary is a large estuary where the River Thames flows into the North Sea. ... Ovarian cancer is a malignant ovarian neoplasm (an abnormal growth located on the ovaries). ...

Notes