If as a teenager I had received any correspondence containing the words ‘Donny Osmond’ followed by ‘Live in Concert’ I’d have jumped around screaming with excitement.

Forty years on, I have received such a message. But it’s come a little too late for giddy histrionics. The missive arrived by email, publicising a concert to celebrate the singer’s 50 years in showbusiness.

Yet I wasn’t even tempted to book a ticket.

In my early teens I LOVED Donny Osmond. My room was plastered with posters of him, some larger than life-size. He was the first person I saw when I woke up and the last person I saw before I went to bed.

I would listen endlessly to the song ‘Puppy Love’, which I played over and over again on my record player.

I loved him so much that I was convinced his songs were directed at me and that one day we would be married. I was jealous when he sang with his sister Marie. Looking back, I was lucky to avoid the psychiatrist’s chair.

Looking back, I can’t understand what I saw in him. With that massive mop of hair in that weird style and that sickly, toothy grin, he looks like a public school choirboy. And he wore those awful velvet caps that made him look like a girl.

York Press:

Donny Osmond

But to me he was everything. I also now know that I was one of thousands of teenage girls who loved Donny. When the singer Susan Boyle, who is the same age as me, met him a few years ago she confessed to having fantasised about him since she was young.

I didn’t like The Osmonds, the band made up of Donny and his brothers, who toured the UK in the seventies, so I didn’t make an effort to see him, and even if I had, I don’t think they played anywhere near where I lived.

So I made do with my posters.

As far as I know, my own daughters don’t have any pin-up idols. They have never expressed a love of any particular male pop star, have never put up posters, and I have no idea whose music they listen to as they channel it directly into their ears. Today’s teenagers follow their heroes on Twitter and ‘chat’ to them on Facebook.

Donny has aged well and is looking better than he ever did as in his heartthrob days.

If I was to meet him face to face I don’t think I’d be in any way overwhelmed, but you never know. If he suddenly threw back his head and launched into “And they call it…”, my heart might skip a beat and I could quickly revert back to being a lovestruck teen.