Richard has commented, " although it would be such a huge transformation of my screen image, it was after all my twenty-fifth year in showbusiness, and I'd realised that I couldn't go on playing dolly birds forever . . . I knew right away I would be mad to turn down the part of Pauline ."
12.
Journalist Christopher Booker gave two reasons for this reaction : firstly, that " there was almost nowhere else to go . . . the mini-skirts could go no higher "; and secondly, in his view, " dressed up in mini-skirts and shiny macs, given such impersonal names as'dolly birds', girls had been transformed into throwaway plastic objects ".
