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After the magical glamour of Tutankhamun, the sensational bedroom pictures of Kim Kardashian and the rest of the Kardashian Krew, it’s hard to imagine that this same year can see the joyous travails of Barbara Windsor – all these flesh-flashing fans projecting their own insecurities on the woman on the receiving end.

The stars of 1972 were cast in the role of girl in distress, portrayed by the women of British television. That year also marked the highest-rated US and UK seasons of US soap “Dallas”. The show’s plot was essentially a showcase for the hormonal issues that flashed on to the screens of women of a certain age, particularly those who went topless: “Dallas” satuates its girls – the heirs to the oil-rich O.H.E dynasty, the matriarch and former church-going woman, J.R. Ewing – as either fantastic warm-hearted chewin’ heads of red or monstrous liars. (I couldn’t help but see some of my family members’ exact ages, a sharp contrast to the very different lives of the Ewings, Ms J.R. and Lulu, the family’s stripper housekeeper). So, a little iconography of that year – Dallas and its last season – pulled at my breast-shaped heart strings a bit.

I love a good wardrobe item from the mid-seventies, the jorts or schoolgirl sweater, a thing I found fascinating then and, now, in equal measure, has these days. I think back on the fifty years we’ve all lived through since that glorious, legendary era of daytime shows and fictional families comes to me, and I can’t help but be genuinely choked by nostalgia, similar to seeing a young “David” today with his hair all curl and donut and flares instead of wearing his trademark trilby (and never dressing up to play the part of Humphrey Bogart, either.)

The series “My Two Dads” (1976), which ran for 24 episodes on the first day of the rest of my life, had Barbara Windsor’s Miss Featherstone tell her distressed and recently widowed actor mother, Nancy Cotton, a hotel housekeeper, that her mother “will never find what she wants again: a bit part on television.”

Carol Vorderman’s Dagenham hero lost the daughter she’d had with her first husband, Denis Lawrence. Any other women would meet this in their mid-to-late 40s with limited prospects, grief and self-pity. jav But Vorderman flew off from her role as bright but neurotic lingerie designer Rosie to accompany her pop idol husband Peter Jones to Puerto Rico, where she has long-running celebrity status, (he’s one of the world’s best selling musicians!) in the hope of finding the love of her life. On her honeymoon, she buys a pair of trendy white sleeveless jumpsuits and hits the Las Vegas fashion scene, where her well-dressed friend, her lover Stuart Hall, discusses the joys of dressing this way. tuoi69 He even pitches in to help her pick a celebrity to interview, Ronald Reagan, who had left her one-time fancy dress company.

I was fascinated, and not in the good way, by Vorderman’s story and occasionally (or sometimes for good sport), I watched it, fascinated by the whiff of bitchiness that resonated after she’d returned to Britain and refused to call him her “husband”. And really, it was all divine. To have my heart in one place and my head in another, a place that was, then and now, somewhere in the middle, is, in itself, an insight into our female psyche. xvideo

In a world without Twitter or social media, or even the internet, I couldn’t possibly share my grief over another’s misfortune, or even best friend’s coming-out or success.