The showgirl sisterhood: five former variety stars look back at their wild careers – in pictures

Jacquie Toye now and in the UK’s first production of Chicago Composite: courtesy of Jacquie Toye/David Pickens/Guardian Design

I hear the Golden Girls of Eastbourne before I see them – hooting laughter leaking out of a house in the East Sussex seaside town. Inside, I find five energetic women in their 80s and 90s, sitting in a knick-knack-filled living room and talking over one another like teenagers.

“None of us stripped, did we?”