Veteran entertainer JAN HUNT tells JOANNA DAVIS why her love of being on the stage will never fade and why she's so passionate about keeping the music hall tradition alive as she brings The Magnificent Music Hall to Weymouth.

IT’S not often I get the chance to interview a true showbiz legend. But there’s an 80-year-old professional who has been plying her trade for decades on end, producing and singing in music hall revival shows across the country.

Her name is Jan Hunt and she answers the phone on the first ring with the crisp, tidy, professional response: “Jan Hunt speaking.” As our 25 minute conversation plays out I realise I shouldn’t have expected anything less from someone who has track of every venue, date and location on a life full of touring.

Many remember Jan from The Good Old Days, the variety show which ran from 1953 to 1983, offering 30 years of entertainment from the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It was compered by the late Leonard Sachs. Fresh interest has been piqued in The Good Old Days following its recent repeats on BBC4.

You may also remember Jan from long-running children’s TV show Crackerjack (she presented for 10 years) and that introduction “It’s Friday, it’s five o’clock, it’s Crackerjack!”

Jan will be taking The Magnificent Music Hall to Weymouth Pavilion on Wednesday, May 23 - a show she describes as ‘something you can sing along to, with a huge variety within the show’. We want people to come along and go out on a high - we want to bring sunshine to their day.”

The show has featured some big names among its guest performers - Bernie Clifton (recently seen in ITV's Last Laugh in Vegas), Bobby Crush, Don Maclean, Steve Hewlett and Roy Hudd have all appeared on the bill.

Jan is passionate about keeping music hall entertainment on our screens and stages.

She said: “I’m determined not to let them forget about music halls. They’re part of our heritage and it’s good, old-fashioned entertainment. The songs written in those days are songs that stand the test of time. I want to keep the tradition alive so I do workshops with and audition young people to bring them into the world of the music halls.”

Jan plays the role of tragic entertainer Marie Lloyd in the show, who she describes as ‘the queen of the music hall.’

She said: “I try to portray Marie as she was. I’ve played her at different stages of her life, until she died aged 52. She started her life singing in temperance halls singing songs like Throw Down the Bottle.

“She had a tough life and three very difficult and greedy husbands. But she was loved by everybody. When she died all the beer pumps in every pub in London were covered.”

There are countless music hall songs Jan loves performing but she lists My Old Man, Oh Mr Parker as among her favourites.

“I enjoy performing most stuff and I go to the other end of the scale performing as a young child of 12 singing Daddy Would Not Buy Me a Bowwow,” she says.

In 1989 Jan set up the Paper Moon Theatre Company with the late Dudley Stevens, which is behind the shows she is producing today, including Magnificent Music Hall.

After working a lot with Dudley, she recalls sitting at the end of Bournemouth Pier with him.

“We said ‘why not form our own company? We decided there and then to do it. We were looking at the moon so decided to put that in the name.

“I’ve kept it going since then. It was the last promise I made to Dudley before he died that I would keep it going.”

I’m speaking to Jan the day before she flies out to Turkey for what sounds like a very much deserved holiday for an individual who sounds like she struggles to sit still.

She tells me: “I’m a one man band in the office and I do the driving, I produce the shows and sing in them, while I don’t do every venue, I’m also an assistant with the show - I’m a jack of all trades.”

Jan also tells me that she believes ‘age is nothing but a number’.

Recently she abseiled down the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth to raise money for the Royal Marsden Hospital, where her sister was cared for before she died. And on May 27, just four days after the Weymouth show, Jan will take to the skies for a wing walk in Gloucestershire to raise money in memory of Johnny Dennis,the chairman of Good Old Days and the voice of Lord's cricket ground, who died in 2016.

Jan said: “We’re raising £2,200 for a new pew in the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden in the name of Johnny. We used to do many shows in Bournemouth and he used to come to them.

“Johnny was an absolute gentleman, kind, thoughtful, caring, talented, generous. A superb actor, the best music hall chairman ever. He has been the most fantastic mentor, helping so many performers to achieve their goals.

She is flattered when I suggest that her fans may wish to sponsor her latest endeavour and has a greater recollection of her fundraising website than I do of my own email address (there's no fumbling around for information with Jan).

Hard working, modest and flying high quite literally as a wing-walking 80-year-old, Jan Hunt is one of a kind.

She can be sponsored at Justgiving.com/crowdfunding/jan-hunt

*Magnificent Music Hall, Weymouth Pavilion, Wednesday May 23, 2pm. Call the box office for tickets.