Showbiz lights go on again for delightful Isla St Clair

Jul 7 2010 by Steve Burbridge, The Journal

WHATEVER became of Isla St Clair after The Generation Game? STEVE BURBRIDGE catches up with her on the theatre circuit.

AS co-host of The Generation Game, Isla St Clair was Queen of the Conveyor Belt alongside camp comedian Larry Grayson. Then, it seemed, she disappeared from our television screens.

Now she is back and touring theatres around the country with Eyes Front!, a production about music in wartime.

Isla is one of those people you can’t help but warm to. The gentle lilt of her Scottish accent radiates warmth and reassurance while her natural openness sets you immediately at ease. Small wonder she was chosen to take care of nervous contestants on the BBC’s hit game show.

It was a role she performed between 1978 and 1982 and one she reflects on with great fondness.

“We had so much fun, Larry and I,” she says. “He was an awfully nice guy who got on really well with the public, as was perfectly evident.”

Indeed, during the pair’s four year tenure, the show regularly attracted 18m viewers on a Saturday evening, something today’s programme makers would give their right arms for.

Typically modest, Isla is reluctant to take any of the credit.

“When I did it there were only three channels to choose from, so it was very much a captive audience, really. People also had the nice habit of staying in, as a family, and watching television programmes together.”

Isla laments the apparent passing of that habit.

“Now there is so much choice and people have so many more possibilities – not only in the home with television channels, DVDs or computers – but also with their social lives. Everything’s more accessible and people, generally, have a lot more money,” she says.

When her time on The Generation Game ended, Isla popped up on children’s TV and fulfilled a childhood ambition to play Maria Von Trapp in a stage production of The Sound of Music.

“It was great fun and very successful,” she remembers. “Edmund Hockridge played Captain Von Trapp and was very, very good. Had it not been for the fact that I decided to start my own family, I would have probably gone on tour with it round the country.”

While raising her two sons, Elliott and Calum, Isla retreated from “the celebrity world”. Instead she focused on motherhood and also returned to her roots as a singer.

“I began singing at my mum's Brownie concerts at the age of two,” she recalls.