The notion that TV was just a medium for couch potatoes was rigorously turned on its head; Prudden also enjoyed a long and healthy media career until her death in 2011, aged 97 – and if video recording had existed around the launch of her career (and that of 1960s fitness stars such as Canada’s Ed and Barbie Allen), these workouts would have felt genuinely global.
Even George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) is weirdly prescient on the theme of TV fitness presenters. In one early scene, its protagonist Winston Smith undertakes the grim mandatory ‘Physical Jerks’ session, with the PE teacher rebuking him through the telescreen: “Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared. ‘Arms bending and stretching!’ she rapped out. ‘Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! …’”
The gym in your lounge
The real-life 1980s brought a jollier, transformative phase in TV fitness; this was partly because VCR tech brought the gym to your lounge at any convenient time, but in the UK, it was also because the advent of breakfast television spurred a new trend for ‘get up and go’ fitness routines. Britain’s first national breakfast programme, BBC Breakfast Time, launched in 1983, and also introduced the serene Green Goddess (aka leotard-clad Diana Moran); rival channel ITV’s TV-AM would present hyperactive pop workouts from ‘Mad’ Lizzie Webb – high-energy and high-camp. British Ghanaian dancer Tony Britts presented a slinky ‘Twice As Fit’ segment for BBC breakfast audiences – recently revived through the digital archives, and proving to be a quarantine home workout hit. The vogue for rhythmic aerobics exercise – brought to mainstream attention in Dr Kenneth H Cooper’s 1979 book The New Aerobics, and made fabulously glamorous by Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda’s smash hit fitness vids – had an influence on music and fashion, including Olivia Newton-John’s much-mimicked 1981 anthem Physical.