If Michael Aspel, the sugary-haired host of This is Your Life, walked into the kitchen at work brandishing his big red book and a crocodile’s smile, how would you react? Would adrenaline and excitement course through your every fibre as you mentally prepare to relive a left well spent? Or would you stiffen slightly digging fingers into your cheese and pickle sandwich in anticipation of being confronted with every failure, mistake, and wrong turning?
I’d be firmly in the lunch-crushing latter camp. Poor old Michael wouldn’t have much to report on, and most of the programme would be taken up by the various barmen of the same five pubs I’ve frequented for a decade dimly trying to remember who I was. He was, they’d be pressed to say by a panicking producer, quite polite when he ordered pints. That’d be my legacy: polite pint purchaser. It’d all be so different if I was someone else. It’d be so different if I was Dennis Posa.
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Posa, who passed away in 1985 at the age of 38, lived the kind of life that’d have most of us going green with envy over: pornstar, disco diva, soap opera actor. Michael Aspel, you feel, would have had a lot to go over had he snuck onto the set of an American drama one fine afternoon. He’d put most of us to shame, anyway.
Dennis Posa was known to most people as another alias. To some he was Wade Nichols, well-endowed star of X-rated films like Jawbreakers, Teenage Pyjama Party, and Boynapped. To others he was, Police Chief Derek Mallory from long-running soap opera The Edge of Night. Yet to me, and lots of other people with a real soft spot for the OTT melodrama of late-70s disco, Posa will live on forever as the one and only Dennis Parker.
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