‘I WAS A FAME MONSTER – until I lost it all!'

Nineties TV star Tania Lacy had the world at her feet before one stupid mistake cost her everything

- Phillip Koch

It’s 1987 and everybody is doing the Locomotion with Kylie Minogue. Teenage girls all wanted her big blonde perm, and in a few short years, quite a few of them would also idolise Tania Lacy – the fresh-faced girl dancing in the background of that famous music clip.

But even then Tania was far more than a back-up dancer – the 23-year-old also choreographed Kylie’s Locomotion music video. “It’s still not something I know if I should be proud of,” she quips in her new live-streamed comedy show Catch A Falling Star.

Now 56, Tania’s brilliant return comes after many years out of the limelight, and she pulls no punches in a searing performance that details her rapid rise to fame and terrible descent into heroin addiction and poverty just three years later.

“People say you choose fame – I would say fame definitely chose me,” she says. “Back in the ’80s and ’90s, I had this really awesome job as a famous person. I used to be on the front pages of the newspapers. I had followers, but they were real people. I’m talking real fame.”

FACE IN THE CROWD

To understand how it went so horribly wrong, you have to rewind to the beginning. Just a few months after Locomotion, Molly Meldrum hand-picked Tania out of a crowd of dancers on his legendary ABC music show Countdown and asked her to open the show. She then went on to become a roving reporter on a new Saturday morning show called The Factory.

Tania soon became the standout star for crazy stunts like crashing a Sylvester Stallone press conference, or breaking into Simply Red star Mick Hucknall’s dressing room, or getting Motley Crue to autograph her underwear live on air.