Pan's People were a 1970s British TV dance troupe associated with the BBC TV music chart show Top of the Pops. In an era before pop videos, they danced each week to songs whose original artist was not available to perform them live.

The group of five attractive girls who made up Pan's People became household names, and were responsible for the sexual imprinting of a whole generation of British teenage boys. Their skin-tight dance outfits were probably responsible for a generation of male lycra fetishists.

The troupe were: Babs Lord, Ruth Pearson, Dee Dee Wilde, Louise Clarke and Andi Rutherford. Later Cherry Gillespie and Sue Menhenick replaced Andi and Louise. The best known of the dancers is Babs Lord, as a result of her marriage to the actor Robert Powell and her subsequent career as an amateur yachtswoman, and world explorer, having made several trips to The Himalayas, The Sahara, both Poles and the Jungle in Guyana. She holds the remarkable record of being the oldest housewife to visit both the North and South Poles.

Flick Colby, the group's choreographer, also performed as one of the dancers, and has gone on to a successful career as a choreographer.

Subsequent attempts to recreate the Pan's People formula with the groups Ruby Flipper and Legs & Co. were not as successful. A similar dance troupe, Hot Gossip, were a much more risqué and sexually explicit version of Pan's People which featured on the Kenny Everett Video Show on the commercial TV station ITV.

External links

• The Unofficial Pan's People homepage
• BBC Pan's People page
• The Pan's People Online Fan Club
• Pan's People discussion thread