I mainly remember Dana from one of the bottom corner seats of Blankety Blank. I vaguely remembered she won the Eurovision Song Contest, but didn't know she did it when she was doing her A-levels (All Kinds of Everything replaced Bridge Over Troubled Water at the top of the charts). I didn't know she played Snow White for fourteen years, on the West End amongst other places. I didn't know she was a leading songwriter and singer of Catholic music - her album The Rosary sold over a million.
She ran as an independent in Ireland's 1997 Presidential elections, and did much better than everyone expected. By the millennium, she'd become Connaught-Ulster's first female MEP (family issues; anti-abortion). She didn't succeed in becoming an MP in 2002 - her very small vote was perceived as a backlash against her anti-abortion and anti-morning-after-pill stance - and she was voted out as an MEP in 2004 (odd; I'm getting all this from Wikipedia, obviously, and it seems a bit rum that she could have stood for election as an MP when she was an MEP).
She returned to showbiz, probably mainly with the aim of playing the Futurist Theatre in Scarborough. She's a judge on the All Ireland Talent Show.
(Don Maclean, by the way, is not Don McLean. No American Pie, but lots of smooth presentational skills. Don Maclean doesn't like the way the BBC has gone secular, among other things.)
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The MP/MEP thing is a bit rum, but not as rum as Ian Paisley who was an MEP, MP and Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. I suppose he could shout to Strasbourg.
The LibDems very own Chris Huhne stood for Westminster while still an MEP. As did Nick Clegg, I think, or maybe he had a break. In any case, Clegg never did summer season at Scarborough, in spite of his long-running appearance on Last of the Summer Wine.
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