IT MAY SOUND STUPID, but it’s true – when we were young we thought Flo was the most glamorous person we’d ever seen. Growing up in the suburbs, we tended not to see many people who looked like she did, especially at a time when most chilldren’s TV presenters seemed to take fashion tips from our school teachers. Flo brought her own special brand of “black joy” to PLAY SCHOOL in the early 1980s, and proved to be a dab hand at dealing with Humpty and Jemima, and singing songs about wibbly wobbly worms. As we’re seeing, for a time every Play School presenter had to then front their own series, and in Flo’s case this was kids sketch show FAST FORWARD (“And now… Jo-kahs!”), alongside Andrew “Five Alive” Secombe, Joanna “gorgeous brunette” Munro, the great Nick “George Costanza” Wilton and later, Robert “Satellite Show” Harley. A recent viewing of an episode of this series proves that it wasn’t actually that bad, although it did have about a thousand writers and the end credits went on for hours. Later too Flo presented LAY ON FIVE, which we can’t remember much about other than the fact Stanley Unwin always seemed to be on it, and that theme tune. Adult TV followed – well, a couple of months on DAYTIME LIVE, at least – before defecting from the Beeb, opening up the TREEHOUSE on Channel Four and penning the ‘Go With Flo!’ column in the TV Times for a while. She’s now chairperson of the BAFTA jury, bizarrely, so she’s responsible for giving THE OFFICE a million undeserved awards each year. Grr. Most memorably, of course, she used to get her son Aston on whatever show she was doing, and we kind of feel we’ve grown up with him. Oh, and she wrote a book, “Floella’s Fabulous Bright Ideas”, which we’ve got a copy of (“For Aston”).

Tags: Floella Benjamin