"BLAIZE: "MY MOTHER LOOKED LIKE WONDER WOMAN".

"Immodesty Blaize: Sex, scandal

and naked ambition".

Britain’s most celebrated burlesque performer is bidding to become the next Jackie Collins. She talks to John Walsh about her first novel, ‘Tease’, a lightly veiled account of her own difficult childhood

"Dan Burn-Forti".

"Blaize: 'My mother looked like Wonder Woman. She had big hair and boobs like mine, very vixen-like and feminine".

"It's a shocking thing for an interviewer to be distracted from what his interviewee is saying, but the safety pin was bothering me. I was taking tea with Immodesty Blaize in London's Mandeville Hotel".

"The foremost burlesque performer in the UK, cheerleader for the billowing new wave of arty striptease and now a dbut novelist touted as the new Jackie Collins, Ms Blaize is a striking presence. She's five feet nine in her stockings; add the five-inch heels, and she's so tall that her vast cat-like eyes, with their hint of Eurasian-harem decadence, look down into mine".

"From a complex hair-do arranged in huge, coal-black spheres, a wide strand of platinum blonde escapes across her perfect forehead. Her face possesses a beauty made to sneer at the puniness of men: the Russian cheekbones could take your eye out, the blood-red lips hint at a feral streak. Ms Blaize, you feel, could eat you alive, and not in a good way".

"Then she speaks and normality is restored. Her voice bears traces of her native Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, and her conversation is naturally animated, even jolly. From coming on like Mata Hari one moment, she can morph into a public-school head girl with a flair for maquillage. She's dressed today in a royal-blue cashmere garment, like a cardigan but longer".

"It's pulled tight over her bosom, wraps itself round her 26in waist and clings like a drowning man to her hips. As she wiggles and gesticulates on the hotel banquette, her blue garment travels up and down leg and thigh, apparently at random".

"Then I notice that a safety-pin in the hip region is holding together all the material and I can't take my eyes off it. Is the stretchy wool frock clamped to her voluptuous frame by a single pin? If it were to spring apart under the strain, would I suddenly find unscheduled bits of flesh exploding all over the De Ville restaurant?".