MUSICALS
Ben Elton explains what inspired him to write a musical about Lesley Hornby from Neasden – better known as Twiggy, the face of the Swinging Sixties
I’VE KNOWN TWIGGY SINCE THE NINETIES – we met through Richard Curtis, with whom I co-wrote Blackadder – and we’ve been friends ever since. There was one occasion when we went out for dinner and she started talking about her life, saying perhaps one day her tale should be told, because it was something of a Cinderella story. I said it was a long way from that because, frankly, she’d gone straight to the ball at 17! For me, the interest lay elsewhere – in her experiences of being a young woman in a horrendously sexist industry, and in what it says about social mobility that a working-class girl from Neasden could end up performing for the Queen.
I wanted to write a musical that combines fun and glamour with aspects of Twiggy’s life that people might not
