FAIRY’S GIRL WHO BEHAVED VERY BADLY

IT’S 1964 and a young child is staring up at her mother in wonder as she is washing up with ‘mild green’ Fairy Liquid.

Earlier in the ad, the child had cheekily been playing skittles with Fairy Liquid bottles, lining them up and knocking them down, before her mum asks for one of the bottles to do the dishes.

Actress Leslie Ash, now 57, was just four when she first appeared on TV in the Fairy Liquid ad — and it clearly suited her as she went on to star in six series of the BBC comedy Men Behaving Badly, as well as Mersey Beat and Holby City.

On the Fairy Liquid set, Leslie was chaperoned by her real mum and Leslie was allowed to keep the clothes she wore for the ad. ‘I enjoyed it because I think I had

the day off school and you got a new outfit,’ she recalls.

‘I enjoyed being the centre of attention and making people laugh on set, and the whole thing of having my hair done and being taken out to buy clothes.’

She remembers thinking the actress playing her screen mum was ‘quite stern, not like my mum was, but she had this really nice perfume on’. Leslie’s parents were friends with a producer, which is how she thinks she got the part. This early TV stardom set her on a path to the prestigious Italia Conti stage school in London, and she never looked back.

After working as a fashion model for teen magazines, Leslie’s acting career took off with the 1979 film Quadrophenia before she became a household name with Men Behaving Badly in the Nineties.