大象传媒

There is nothing like a Dame who drags herself from the docklands of Cardiff, to don diamond-studded wellington boots at Glastonbury seven decades later. Tonight's show marks Dame Shirley Bassey's 75th birthday [January 8], as the first in a two-part revised repeat of Paul Sexton's profile. It first broadcast in 2009, as she prepared to release her most recent studio album The Performance, which featured a starry cast of contributors.

This is Dame Shirley's story, built around a rare and extensive conversation which covers her entire career. For all her undying fabulousness, Shirley is still "The Girl From Tiger Bay", as she sang autobiographically on the album. The series celebrates one of Britain's most-loved and enduring entertainers, whose career as a chart artist now extends to an eye-popping 52 years.

In the two programmes, we also hear the memories of those who've worked alongside "La Bassey" from early times to the present day. Many of the artists who wrote new material for The Performance also contribute, including Gary Barlow, Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, Richard Hawley, Tom Baxter and Kaiser Chiefs' Nick Hodgson, as well as the album's producer and current James Bond score composer David Arnold.

Tonight in part one, Dame Shirley talks candidly about growing up in a mixed-race family in impoverished wartime Tiger Bay. She recalls how her mother said that, as a child, Shirley would often sing instead of crying ("weird kid, I was"), and how her siblings didn't appreciate her constant vocalising around the house ("until I made it, and then they said 'That's my sister'").

From humble early public performances in working men's clubs onwards, we hear about the determination that took her into the charts for the first time in early 1957, just a few weeks out of her teens. That drive was to bring her nine top ten singles and many hit albums within the first few years of her career, as she established a reputation as one of Britain's greatest live entertainers.

The show features Bassey's first UK No. 1 single As I Love You, from 1959, and her second chart-topping 45, the double-sided Reach For The Stars and Climb Ev'ry Mountain, plus many more of her best-known 60s recordings, such as What Now My Love, I (Who Have Nothing) and This Is My Life.

With such stirring performances, Bassey secured her reputation as an artist who really lived her songs. The triumphs and tragedies of her private life gave her the rare ability to make the lyrics she was singing entirely believable. "There's something about my life in every one of my songs," she says in tonight's programme. "Pain and suffering, love won and lost, and all that. Been there. So I can sing about it."

Dame Shirley also tells us why, when she performed at JFK's inauguration, the audience laughed at her opening song. She memorably describes meeting Kennedy as "shaking hands with lightning." Later, as a regular performer in Las Vegas, she would meet Elvis (with whom she shares a birthday), and she even divulges what they got up to when she went to visit him backstage.

We hear such signature Bassey songs as Big Spender, This Is My Life (much loved by Neil Tennant, as he describes) and, of course, Goldfinger. There are memories of that timeless 007 theme from its co-writer, John Barry, and that "Golden Girl" from the film itself, Shirley Eaton. Also contributing is her longtime friend Jimmy Tarbuck, who recalls playing "over the road" from Shirley in Las Vegas and how she once played Josephine in a TV sketch with Tarbuck, Dudley Moore, Kenneth McKellar and Harry Secombe.