Still a Wild Child in Third Age
A Third Age Entertainment feature
by Graham Smith

Can it really be over 30 years since Pan’s People gyrated off our screens and into pop history? Amazingly it is, but Dee Dee Wilde is still top of the pops down at her local village hall where she is teaching disco dancing to the over 50’s!

“I’ve only ever wanted to dance,” enthuses a very youthful 62-year-old Dee Dee, “From being a little girl it was my dream. I’ve kept fit and well and if I can help those in third age to do the same it is worthwhile.”

Pan’s People did the dance routines to hits when performers couldn’t make the show. They became almost a national institution and, in their day, some of their routines were regarded as rather raunchy.

The last time they appeared on Top of the Pops was in April 1976 dancing to Silver Star by the Four Seasons. Grown men wept at their departure, and since then we have evolved into the video and CD world of music. Not quite the real thing is it?

It was the gloom and doom of recession which made Dee (real name Patricia) decide to put a spring back into other people’s steps and open twice weekly dance classes at a church hall near her home in West Ashton, Wiltshire.

“I wanted to do something before I was too old,” she said, “Keeping fit can be very dull sometimes but this is fun. We do warm ups and disco routines to music chosen by my partner Henry Marsh, a musician who played with the band Sailor. It is great to be helping people to keep active in their fifties and beyond.

“I have one old lady at 80, with bad arthritis, who thanked me recently for changing her life with the classes. It’s great when that happens.”

Dee and Henry run their own production company and are soon to release a DVD based on fitness dancing. Topically, some of the proceeds will go to The Welsh Guards Afghanistan Appeal Fund.

Post Pan’s People Dee Dee danced in opera and founded The Dance Attic which became famous for attracting major stars to train and rehearse. Hardly surprising for a lady who worked with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder (her favourite) and Jimi Hendrix, who once kissed her hand after she danced to his music.

“My son serves with them so we thought in these troubled times it was appropriate,” says Dee.

Dee’s pupils really throw themselves into the classes and one remarked: “It’s like being back in the sixties and seventies. I never thought I’d have one of Pan’s People as my dance teacher.”

Dee keeps in touch occasionally with the other girls, Flick, Ruthie, Babs and Louise but says: “I am the only one who has kept up with the dancing and it has served me well.”

Aside from the classes Dee has another passion, cushions. Her business “Wilde About Cushions” produces bespoke cushions for special occasions.

But I rather think it will be some years yet before this wild child, her own description, is ready to sink back into them and hang up her dancing shoes.

To learn more about Dee Dee and her Wilde About Cushions, visit www.wildeideas.co.uk.