Riding the Waves by Jane McDonald

Author:Jane McDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753554357
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

11

Be Yourself

You’ve got to be yourself in life, haven’t you? As I later learned to my cost, there is absolutely no point in trying to be anybody else.

I didn’t feel I had anything to hide while Chris Terrill was filming me over those seven weeks of the Galaxy’s maiden voyage, so when The Cruise aired the following January, viewers saw the real me: a hardworking Northern club singer with three chins, wearing her heart on her sleeve. Having said that, for some reason I was talking very much like that and sounded like Lady Di half the time.

My mother said, ‘You’re a bit posh, aren’t you?’ when she watched the first episode.

‘I had to, Mum. It’s the BBC!’ I told her.

You’ve got to make yourself understood. It was a lesson I’d learned after seeing my grandmother tone down her Scottish accent at the Spiritualist church. Either that or face constant bewilderment, like my friends from Barnsley, where the accent is even thicker than it is in Wakefield. I was mindful of how my ex-boyfriend Ed, and other friends had been baffled by it – ‘What did they just say?’ they’d ask me, because it sounded totally foreign to them.

So, I took a leaf out of Gran’s book while working on the ships and living in America, where people would look mystified if I let my Yorkshire dialect loose. Having a Danish boyfriend was another factor, and even though I tried to speak slowly and clearly, sometimes Henrik saw me making people laugh and said, ‘I wish I could understand what you’ve just been saying because I bet it was really funny.’

To people watching The Cruise who weren’t from Yorkshire, I probably sounded like I had a thick accent, but to my friends and family, it was as if I’d turned into HM The Queen. In every other way, though, I was myself, from my terrible hair and awful stage frocks to my sheer terror in the run-up to my first show as a headliner.

And my goodness, that first show was terrifying! That was the night I realised how much your audience picks up on how you’re feeling. You must learn to leave your life and problems and whatever else is going on at the stage door. People want to be entertained and it’s your job to make sure they are, so make them smile. I tried to be too clever with my choice of songs when I should have known to stick to what people want to hear.

Chris Terrill was of the opinion that the documentary needed to show every aspect of what life was like on a cruise ship, but when he filmed the audience getting up and walking out of the show, people said he shouldn’t include it because it was too exposing. It really hurts when an audience doesn’t like you and there was a lot of pressure on, because getting bad ratings could easily have led to me being fired in front of the cameras – my career would have been over in a second.

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