My favourite film aged 12: Dirty Dancing

Growing up, there weren’t many films that I had watched so many times that I knew not just the lines but also the songs off by heart, but Dirty Dancing was one of them. I was way too young to see it at the cinema when it first came out in 1987, but caught it a few years later on TV, recording it on to a VHS tape so I could replay my favourite scenes. I was thrilled. I was a bookish kid who felt intensely shy and awkward. And there on my screen was a not-that-shy but definitely studious and awkward teenager being swept off her feet, literally, by Patrick Swayze.

That’s pretty much where any similarities with Frances “Baby” Houseman, played by Jennifer Grey, end. I wasn’t from a well-off family, didn’t go on fancy holidays and couldn’t dance to save my life. But living in a drab town in the deepest suburbs of Surrey, I did know what it was like to be bored with your perfectly fine but humdrum life and hanker for something more exciting, however briefly. Although I was only 12 so my options were limited. Dance was Baby’s escape, mine was the film. And the story of her holiday romance with dance instructor Johnny Castle (Swayze) transported me to a world of 1960s nostalgia and great music.

Rewatching it many years later, it didn’t take me long to remember why I had loved it so much. It’s the first time we – and Baby, who has just arrived with her family to Kellerman’s resort in the Catskill mountains – see Johnny in action. He’s not so much dancing with his super flexible partner Penny as melding into her as they show off their skills in a packed ballroom. The effect is electrifying. The dance sequences throughout the film are equally as thrilling; flitting between sweet and playful to flirty and sexy and then downright raunchy. I have always adored a good dance movie – I’m a sucker for a sassy shake of the hip and a well-choreographed musical number.

But the main reason that VHS tape was played over and over again when I was 12 was that Dirty Dancing was one of the most swooningly romantic films I’d seen in my young life. After Baby breaks the ice by sneaking into a secret staff party – “I carried a watermelon!” (see, awkward) – Johnny starts to teach her how to dance and slowly mambos his way into her heart. The chemistry between Grey and Swayze is magnetic. She is supremely likable as the naive and opinionated daddy’s girl while Swayze is effortlessly charismatic as the rock star of the holiday resort with his leather jacket and bad-boy attitude.

Related: How we made Dirty Dancing's (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life

I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded that the film wasn’t just teen fluff. Sure, it has its fair share of saccharine moments but there’s real substance, too. There are subplots involving more serious issues such as abortion and the class conflict that bristles between the hard-up dance crew and the snobbish young waiters from rich families. Baby’s sister Lisa starts dating one of the latter, Robbie, who turns out to be a creep.

Something else I’d forgotten is just how feminist it is. Baby is smart, has a strong moral compass and genuinely wants to help other people. She stands up to her disapproving dad, who is angry that she’s been seeing her working-class lover behind his back, with a moving speech about inequality. And Johnny may scoop her out of a corner but it’s Baby who ends up saving him, not the other way round, in a reversal of the well-worn romantic trope. She’s the one who sticks up for him after he’s falsely accused by a jealous ex of stealing someone’s wallet. While he reveals to her in a scene of aching vulnerability that he was the one who was taken advantage of by the rich older women clamouring to seduce him.

But, of course, it all comes back to the dancing. In the final climactic scene, Johnny returns after being fired to make sure he and Baby have their last chance to shine at the resort’s talent show. Cue goosebumps as the first bars of Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s iconic theme song come on, and Swayze and Grey take to the stage to dance up a storm, ending with that lift. It’s cheesy but undeniably fun.

Not that long ago, I watched the sequel, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, because Romola Garai, who plays the lead, is one of my favourite actors (so underrated!). And yes, it’s terrible. But nothing can tarnish my love for the original. Even after all these years, this feelgood classic still has the power to put a big stupid smile on my face. Did I have the time of my life once again? You bet.