If you were a regular viewer of late-night British TV in the early 1990s, then you are probably familiar with Lynx. You may have forgotten about her but when I add the words ‘topless female magician’, the memories are sure to come flooding back.
Lynn Lowton from Bolton was a glamour model who decided to become a stage illusionist, a career that offered more media opportunities then than it does now even for less provocative performers. Rechristening herself Lynx, her act was a bit on the basic side – effectively, her show was the sort of thing that any amateur magician could pull off at parties and even at the time was perhaps becoming a bit old hat. But she managed to build quite a successful career for herself with appearances on the likes of The James Whale Radio Show (of which more anon) and Eurotrash. She was very popular with the post-midnight Friday night viewing audiences thanks to her unique performance twist that saw her disrobing. How much flesh was shown depended very much on circumstances – one appearance on Whale’s show (featured below after we found it on one of our VHS archive tapes) was clothed while another was topless – you never knew just how raunchy her performance might be.
When it came to her nightclub shows, Lynx would sometimes strip completely naked, while she also performed fully-clothed shows for family audiences. Her career began as part of a fire-eating trio that performed magic tricks on the side before she decided to combine magic and glamour modelling in one performance piece. At the same time as performing on stage, she was still appearing in men’s magazines and softcore videos.
“I just give my audience what they want”, she told the Bolton News. “Sometimes they want me to go topless and that option gives me an edge on all the other acts around.” It was something of a temporary edge, of course – once the novelty had worn off, there was nowhere for her career to go and as the laddish nature of late-night TV ended, so did her period of fame. She was no Paul Daniels and the outlets for her show were limited. A few years later, the burlesque revival was in full swing and other scantily-clad magic acts emerged, but for Lynx, it seemed to be too late for a career revival. Dropping the Lynx persona, she turned to acting in the mid-1990s with blink-and-you-miss-it appearances in Backbeat and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years before vanishing from the public gaze.
Like what we do? Support us and help us do more!
