Twink has finally broken her vow of silence over remarks made about her by Samantha Mumba in hotpress and elsewhere. The pair had clashed when Twink was producing a stage show in which the then unknown Mumba was to star.

When interviewed by hotpress last October Mumba alleged that Twink had fired her on the first night of the panto. “I was summoned to her dressing room at the end of the show and some of the words she used to describe me were words I never heard before,” the singer told interviewer Joe Jackson. “It was disgusting. We’d done three weeks’ worth of rehearsal, I went on stage-left and the girl who was supposed to give me my microphone went off stage-right and didn’t get across quick enough to me to give me the mic. But I only missed one line and she just exploded. She has a bit of a problem.

“If it all ended tomorrow and I was on the dole,” Mumba went on, “and she offered me ten grand to be in her panto I would never, never, never work with that woman again.” Mumba also denied that she had been discovered by Twink, remarking, “she couldn’t discover a fart in a paper bag.”

But now Twink has gone public with a very different version of events.

While speaking to DJ Alan Corcoran live on South East Radio last week, Twink initially told Corcoran that she didn’t want to “add fuel to the fire” of publicity by talking about the row at all and claimed that Mumba had wanted to make something out of their alleged clashes merely for publicity purposes.

But before Corcoran could shift the conversation to a fresh topic Twink went on to say: “Samantha was very young coming into the show, very undisciplined, a very opinionated girl. As any mother would say about her child, she had airs above her station and didn’t toe the line with the cast.

“She caused an enormous amount of problems for the choreographers and costume people and just about everybody really,” Twink alleged. She also alleged that it was “an untruth” that it was she who had fired Mumba from the show. On the contrary, she claimed that she had “begged” for her to be given her job back, “because she was so young,” and actually succeeded in having her reinstated.

“Really and truly at the end of the day it was nothing,” Twink continued. “It was a Louis concoction to get her noticed and to get her attention and it was a cheap publicity stunt at my expense.

“I was very offended because I have worked with children and young people for thirty years in shows and many of them are married now with their own kids. They come up to me and throw their arms around me and tell me ‘you taught me everything I know. We had a great time with you’ and so on.”

Twink then concluded with some advice for her adversary.

“Samantha was very out of line shooting her young mouth off. But my father taught me that you have to be very careful when you’re climbing up the ladder of success as to whose head you stand on because he might be the fella holding the ladder for you when you’re coming down.”

Alan Corcoran’s Lunch Time Show goes out on South East Radio weekdays 12 noon to 3 pm