Mention the name Jenny Agutter to an Englishman of a certain age and he’s likely to go a little soft at the knees and get a faraway look in his eyes, wistfully recalling the night he saw “Walkabout” on BBC2 and felt his adolescent hormones blow a gasket.

In the league table of British totty of the 1970s Jenny was the champion, Manchester United to everyone else’s Tranmere Rovers. She had the plummy voice and well-bred poise of the Head Girl of an expensive upper class girl’s school but while she sounded frightfully proper she also had a very free-spirited attitude toward the idea of clothes and got them off in almost every movie she was in — she even took her knickers off in “The Railway Children.” The fact that she did so while playing a schoolgirl in “Walkabout” and a nurse in “An American Werewolf in London” fulfilled several Englishman’s fantasies all at once: the posh bird in a uniform who is a bit saucy underneath the prim exterior. On the one hand you could picture her doing all sorts of nice, outdoorsy girl things like playing netball, riding horses and being terribly jolly hockey sticks, but also imagine her having an illicit fag behind the school gym, flirting with the rough boys from the local comprehensive, zooming off to London on the back of her long-haired boyfriend’s motorbike, and getting suave Uncle Roger all hot under the cravat when she stretched out her long legs in the passenger seat of his Jag.

I’m surprised some soppy indie boy hasn’t written a song about her but far as I know no one has so these will have to do. Two sides of the Jenny Agutter coin, at least in my head.

Download: Jennifer Juniper – Donovan (mp3)
Download: Mary Of The 4th Form – The Boomtown Rats (mp3)