Carol Vorderman discusses her podcast and the first record she bought
Carol joined Ken Bruce
The wonderful Carol Vorderman joined Ken Bruce on Greatest Hits Radio for Golden Years, where she shared some fun memories from her teenage years, as well as telling Ken about her podcast, Perfect 10.
Choosing 1974 as her Golden Year, which is when she was aged 13-years-old, Carol chose songs from ABBA, The Rubettes and Labelle. TV presenter Carol is also the host of the Perfect 10 podcast, which features 10 quiz questions that are designed to test your brain. After launching the podcast back in January, Carol has also now released a Perfect 10 quiz book, which includes plenty of questions to test your knowledge.
Talking about the podcast, Carol said: "The Perfect 10 podcast started in January and it took us a year to get the format right. We had about three different goes until we ended up with the perfect 10 questions.
"The Perfect 10 - 10 questions, 10 points available, all done in 10 minutes. And it tests all different parts of your brain. So it’s got riddles, we’ve got a little bit of an anagram, one where it gives you a word and you take two letters out and put two in to form a new word.
"We have a memory round where you read a couple of paragraphs and you have to turn over the page for the questions so you can’t see it again. We give you images of things and you have to say what that well known phrase or saying is. So it’s testing different parts of your brain all the time."
Carol chose 1974 as her Golden Year, a year which she described as a 'coming of age' for her. It was also the year that ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with 'Waterloo', something Carol remembers well. She explained: "I was 13. I suppose it’s all sort of like coming of age really and the discovery that you can dress up. Every Friday, it was youth club in Denbigh and I'd take two hours to choose whether I was wearing the brown outfit or the black outfit. And that’s all I had - it was one or the other! But it would take me hours to do that.
"So 1974 was a very special year, it was very alive. There was a lot of happy music, I’m a very happy person so there was a lot of happy music around. Eurovision was huge. Eurovision came on and it was the first year we saw ABBA, and it was just a happy time. And when they came on, they just looked happy. That’s something that’s sort of stuck with me and I just loved them for that."
1974 was also the moment that Carol bought her first single - a pivotal moment in any music lover's life. For Carol, this special single was 'Sugar Baby Love' by The Rubettes. She said: "It was in the days where you saved up your pocket money, well I actually had a job at the time in a newsagent over the weekend. So you’d save it up and you’d go to Woolies and buy your record, and it was a big deal because you’d chat with your mates and you’d wait for the charts to come out.
She continued: "I used to put it on my gramophone, and you had to keep it in the cover so it wouldn’t get scratched. But sometimes it was that little scratch that made it special, you loved the imperfections because they were real for you."
Carol's third song was Labelle's 'Lady Marmalade' - a track which brings back some funny memories of French lessons at school. Carol said: "So you’ve got to picture 13-year-old Carol Vorderman. In those days, people were talking about the common market and how French was going to be the international language of the world. That’s what we were told, so this was of course the first time we’d ever heard French on a record.
"Of course in school you’re learning things like 'have you got a blue exercise book?' This was wild: 'Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?' And we’d all go in and sing it to the French teacher pretending. And he’d scowl at us and we’d go, 'what does it mean, sir?'
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