Poet Pam Ayres is returning to the city where opportunity first knocked for her, writes Roz Laws.

Poet Pam Ayres is recalling two trips to Birmingham with very different outcomes.

One pivotal date started her career, when she successfully auditioned for Opportunity Knocks. But the other, more recent one, left her fuming.

Pam came to the NEC to see Bob Dylan, but it wasn’t a success.

“I spent the whole evening watching the wrong bloke!” she cries.

“He was up the back in the shadows, wearing a trilby. He was an unrecognisable geezer, mumbling away. I didn’t think that could possibly be him, so I was watching someone at the front of the stage.

“It cost a bomb, too, and I was outraged at the price of programmes. My husband bought the tickets as a birthday treat but I wasn’t enamoured with the evening. It had the feel of a rip-off.

“I adored Dylan when I was 17, but I don’t love him any more.”

It is to be hoped that audiences enjoy Pam’s show more when she plays Birmingham herself. She’s bringing her humorous poetry to the Town Hall on Sunday.

It’s a return to the city where it all started in 1975, when she auditioned for Opportunity Knocks, the show which would change her life.

“As a country girl, I was very alarmed at having to go to Birmingham,” remembers the 64-year-old, who lives on a smallholding in the Cotswolds with her husband and manager Dudley, 10 cows, nine sheep, chickens and dogs.

“I can’t remember the name of the hotel, but the audition took place downstairs in a dingy old ballroom that smelled of damp and fear. I wore a highly fashionable red tartan smock and recited I Wish I’d Looked After My Teeth.

“We had three minutes to perform to three judges. I didn’t expect them to laugh, so I was really pleased when they did. The lady with the stopwatch was enjoying it so much she forgot to turn it on.

“They said ‘You’re certainly on the show. You are somebody doing something different’.

‘‘It was the moment on which my life turned.”

Pam went on to win the TV talent contest, despite her father telling her she didn’t have a “snowball’s chance in hell”.

It launched a career which has lasted 36 years, despite criticism from the establishment which looked down upon her work.

“There’s always a feeling that what I do isn’t proper poetry, but I have never said it was,” says Pam, who has just released her autobiography and a new DVD, called Word Perfect.