Tube strike

Some believe wholesome role models are all it takes to correct errant teenagers of the lower orders. Suitable paragons, the theory goes, should be drawn from the professions to kick down limited horizons.

But even as they propose it, this theory’s supporters must know the idea is doomed, because young adults choose their own heroes and heroines, usually selecting figures of dubious morality.

As an insecure teen living in North Wales in the early 1980s, my heroine, and that of all my friends, was Paula Yates. Paula presented the breathtakingly hip Channel 4 television music show, The Tube, a riot of colour and excitement at the end of a bleak, steely week. Thrillingly, she came from our home town. She had even, some 15 years before me, slogged through the teeth-grinding boredom of life at our comprehensive school, but that wasn’t why we admired her so much.

Paula was fabulously stylish, articulate and funny, but what blew us away - and what made her a first on British television - was her unabashed confidence with men. Irresistibly, the pop star-men she interviewed each week were not repulsed by this confident woman, as I had been led to believe they would be, but the opposite – they loved her brio.

This was something my 14-year-old self – and thousands of girls like me - had never seen any woman do before. Even more impressively, Paula pulled this off without the usual advantages of beauty, or even straightforward prettiness. Her looks, like mine, were just okay - but it didn’t matter. Paula had confidence.

But as she aged, my heroine let me down. I fancied becoming an anarcho feminist. Paula, meanwhile, seemed fixated on a disturbing, 1950s-style domesticity. She started writing books urging mothers of school-aged children to stay at home rather than go out to work. How could she advocate such guff, I wondered, when she could do whatever she wanted? I hated her contradictions, and found it hard to like her. Now, knowing of her awful lonely upbringing in that rainy town in Wales and, later, her miserable death, I can forgive her.

Julie Burchill once wrote that Paula, because she was blonde and fluffy, expected to be given an easy ride through life. An informed book by Paula’s former friend, Gerry Agar, would suggest Burchill was right. Perhaps if Paula had been less dependent on those men she was so confident around, or even to be the feminist I so badly wanted her to be, she would still be around. Who knows? I will always be grateful to her, despite her faults.