Sara Pascoe’s first brush with fame was marked by tears and the kindness of strangers. When she was 14, she auditioned to be on My Kind Of People, the mid-1990s ITV talent show fronted by Michael Barrymore and partly filmed in shopping centres across the country.
‘I really had visualised that it was going to take me straight to superstardom,’ recalls the comedian, author and presenter of The Great British Sewing Bee, who’s just about to do the biggest tour of her life with her new live show, Success Story.
‘I thought it would change my life because I was very unhappy at school and the idea was that if people saw me on television they would see the true me, which I considered to be very special.
‘Everyone on TV seemed so happy, magical and beautiful. I thought that if you were on TV, when you walked into rooms people would turn around and notice it’s you, their faces would change and they would smile.
‘People would maybe come towards you, hold out a hand to touch you or give you a snack. And I realised I confused fame with being a dog; a lovely, cute dog in a cafe.’