Kylie performs Live in the Park

If you were lucky, lucky, lucky enough to have been at Radio 2 in the Park in Leicester, then you will have seen Kylie Minogue in her first UK full concert performance for more than four years.

Not that the Australian star has been out of the limelight, far from it. She scored a hit with Padam Padam earlier this year, the latest in a string of musical bullseyes.

But what would we expect from a woman who has barely put a foot wrong in the 37 years since she burst onto screens as feisty Charlene Robinson in Aussie soap Neighbours.

Kylie quickly became a favourite among the show’s fans who were briefly devastated when she left the show two years later to launch her singing career.

Teaming up with Stock, Aitken and Waterman, she topped the charts with I Should Be So Lucky, and the joined forces with on-screen husband Jason Donovan for the slushy ballad Especially for You.

But Kylie wasn’t content with staying squeaky clean for long. Like her American counterpart Madonna, she took control of her image and career, reinventing the way she looked and sounded again and again.

Her romance with INXS frontman Michael Hutchence and collaboration with Nick Cave enabled her to go in different creative directions, experimenting with different sounds and genres.

At the same time that her music career was taking off and evolving, Kylie continued to act, making her big-screen debut in 1989 drama The Delinquents, which was a hit with her fans, and later opposite Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter, which wasn’t a hit with the critics.

It didn’t put her off from appearing in a 1999 performance of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Barbados, before she once again focused on her music career.

The new millennium brought more success with global dance floor hits I’m Spinning Around and Can’t Get You Out of My Head, while her eighth studio album, Fever, notched up over six million worldwide sales.

Workaholic Kylie was forced to rest in 2005, when a shock breast cancer diagnosis led to her cancelling her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour.

She picked up where she left off in November 2006 with the renamed Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour, which was wildly acclaimed, and released her 11th studio album, Aphrodite four years later.

There were still worlds for the diminutive Australian to conquer: in 2019 she made her Glastonbury debut and, in November 2020, with the release of Disco, Kylie became the only female artist to achieve a number one album in five different decades, from the 1980s to the 2020s.

This evening of programmes featuring the singer brings us right up to date, with her performance at Radio 2 In The Park, where she showcased tracks from her latest album Tension, as well as plenty of classics.

Then, there’s a whistle-stop journey through her CV in Kylie at the BBC (11.05pm), from her girl-next-door years with Stock, Aitken and Waterman to her sexy, boundary-pushing dance sounds of the 1990s, Noughties and beyond. Keep your eyes peeled for some of Kylie’s biggest collaborators too, including Robbie Williams, the aforementioned Nick Cave and – especially for us – Jason Donovan.