Barbara Dickson came to acting from the folk clubs and the pop charts, and the parts that have suited her are working-class women keeping their heads up while things go wrong. Her Anita in Band of Gold is the quiet proof of it.
Fi1m perspective
Anita Braithwaite keeps her flat neat. That is most of the performance in Band of Gold (1995), and it is why it lasts. Kay Mellor's series about women selling sex on a Bradford street gives Geraldine James's Rose the weariness and Cathy Tyson's Carol the temper, and gives Barbara Dickson a woman who has pinned everything on George Ferguson (Tony Doyle), a married man who knows exactly what he is doing. Dickson never plays sad. She tidies, she waits, she keeps her voice level, and she is the saddest of the three. We were more upset by her than by anything in the murder plot, and it was the tidying that did it: a woman getting a home ready for someone who is not going to stay.
She came to acting sideways. Dickson started in Scottish folk clubs in the mid-1960s, met Willy Russell in Liverpool, and was the singer and pianist in his John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert (1974), which led to a recording contract and pop hits in the late 1970s. The acting proper began with Mrs Johnstone in Blood Brothers (1983), a part she created and has gone back to since. Television followed in the 1990s, Band of Gold chief among it, and the stage kept her: The Seven Ages of Woman (1997), a one-woman show built for her, and Viv Nicholson in Spend Spend Spend (1999). The singing and touring have run alongside all of it into the 2020s.
The parts have a shape. Mrs Johnstone, Viv Nicholson, Anita: working-class women, mostly Northern, holding on to something while it is taken from them. Dickson has said why the first of them mattered to her: "my mother was from Liverpool and I'm a working class person, and I felt very strongly about Mrs Johnstone". That is what we see in Bradford. She does not stand outside Anita and show us how pitiable she is. She is on Anita's side, and so Anita keeps her dignity while the series takes everything else.
What we cannot do is weigh the stage work, which is most of it and which the theatre has kept to itself. The screen record is thin: an appearance in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), then little on screen until the 1990s. There is a view of Dickson as a singer who acts, and on the evidence available to a viewer at home it is hard to argue with, because there is so little evidence. Start with the first six episodes of Band of Gold; the later series spread the writing thinner. Television found her once, got something quiet and exact out of her, and did not come back for more.
Biography
Barbara Dickson is a Scottish singer and actress. Born on 27 September 1947 in Dunfermline, Fife, she began her career singing in folk clubs in the 1960s before achieving commercial success with hit singles including "Answer Me" and "January February", and the duet "I Know Him So Well" with Elaine Paige.
As an actress, she originated the role of Mrs Johnstone in Willy Russell's musical Blood Brothers and played Viv Nicholson in Spend Spend Spend, winning two Olivier Awards for Best Actress in a Musical. On television she appeared as Anita Braithwaite in the series Band of Gold (1995–1996). She was appointed OBE in 2002 for services to music and drama.
