East End voice, West End life

Press, 14 May 1981, Page 15

East End voice, West End life

From

Mary Kaye,

Features International.

Her voice mav still have all the impact of what one critic described as sandpaper rubbed on the nerve-ends Even so, Lorraine Chase has come a very long way in Britain since she first put Luton Airport on the map four years .'ago, when she confessed that she wasn't “wafted here from Paradise,” in the now-legen-dary television commercials. After . non-stop appearances on panel games, stage shows and pantomime, she has now become a television star in her own right in the comedy series, “The Other ’Arf.”

It would be silly to say she hasn't changed a bit in the .process. For instance, after first hitting the headlines, she took her mother on holi-

day to an expensive hotel in Corfu and hated it. “Everybody was so posh and glamorous.” she says, "and I could see them all looking at me. and thinking: ‘Well, if that’s her, looking

like that, I could do better myself!’ It all made me so miserable, I came out in spots.” Now, however, she is busy planning a luxury trip to India — her first break for more than two years. “A lot of people have asked me why I don't have elocution lessons,” she went on. “But I reckon it would be daft if I tried to talk all lah-de-dah and proper. "I reckon I could if I

wanted to, but it wouldn't be me, would it? “I've never pretended to be an intellectual, but, at the ? same time. I'm not exactly thick, and I reckon I made it

the way I did because I was an oddity. “I think it's sad if you try to change yourself too much,” she said. “I go to all sorts of places and meet all sorts of people now — people and places I only dreamed about when I was a kid. "But I’m able to do it now because of a lot of hard work and quite a bit of luck. I've become a kind of celebrity. That's given me a lot more confidence in myself.”

i The daughter of a Cockney house-painter, 29-year-old Lorraine grew up in Lon- , don's East End. When she became Peckham Girls’ School carnival „ queen at the age of 14, and was asked to write down her ambition, she put “model.” “I thought it sounded flash,” she explained. But, three years later, her parents allowed her to go to modelling school. After that, there was photographic work, and'a few television commercials. Then, one day, because she happened to have a boyfriend who worked in the' same agency, a young advertising executive saw her, and — better still — heard her, and, realised her potential. “But if it hadn’t been that.

it would have been something else,” she says philosophically. “I always wanted to get out into life. But at the same time, even now, I think I can only go so far.” For six years Lorraine has been “getting along nicely” with her art director boyfriend, John Knight, with whom she shares a house in Lorraine's native east London.

"My Mum says it's time we settled down and got married and had a family.” she confessed. "And I sometimes reckon maybe she’s right.”