EVERY Thursday across the nation a million schoolgirls huddled in groups, giggling excitedly, desperate for the experience that would illuminate their week.

What were they doing? Reading Jackie, of course, the publication that was so much more than a teen magazine.

Jackie was an insight into a pop world and the stars, who until now had been so secreted away.

It was a chance to share and absorb the readers’ problem pages, because their problems were your problems, to learn what to wear with a cheesecloth blouse, how to apply eye-shadow and not look like a tearful panda.

Jackie Magazine was born in 1964 but really came to life in the seventies, when it was considered the teen girls’ bible.

Now, it’s a piece of musical theatre.

Jackie The Musical, says producers, “Is about the spirit of the magazine rather than the actual product. It’s about the people who read it rather than the people who worked on the magazine.”

That makes sense because female audiences (the men who go to see the show are fewer than those who read the mag) wouldn’t wish to see a play about the dynamics of magazine production.

What the audience will see is a fairly simple plot. Jackie (Janet Dibley) is 54 and going through a divorce. Her husband has left her for a younger model.

But she can’t cope. In her desperation she says ‘If only I had Cathy and Claire to help me (Jackie agony aunts.) And as she packs her belongings she finds boxes of her old Jackie magazines from the seventies.

Somehow, (don’t ask) Jackie conjures up a version of her younger self. Together the two Jackies wonder where life went wrong. But do the answers lie in the pages of the DC Thomson publication?

If that perhaps sounds as thin as a pair of Woolworth’s tights, it doesn’t matter because the show has much more, packed full of the classic pop songs of the era, from the likes of The Osmonds, David Cassidy and David Essex.

Hits such as 10 cc’s The Things We Do For Love and Mud’s Tiger Feet are guaranteed to rouse the audience.

And what Jackie The Musical is really selling is nostalgia.

“It’s all about loving looking back,” says Janet Dibley, who has recently starred in Doctors and Eastenders, but came to national prominence in the eighties with Nicholas Lyndhurst in sitcom The Two Of Us.

“Everyone I knew of my age was a Jackie fan. It was about being a part of something that wasn’t connected to your parents.

“And (as a teenager) there was the continual pressure of boys; we wanted to talk about boys the whole time; when will I get a boyfriend? What will I do when I get a boyfriend?”

Jackie dealt with these crucial questions, running features such as How To Make Yourself Kissable.

Articles, written by young females in the Dundee office, helped girls’ through the fog of confusion, such as Twenty One Ways to Make Him Notice You. “If all else fails,” said the problem page, “walk into him. Or offer him a chip.”

Where today’s teen mags such as Bliss will carry features on oral sex and condoms, sex in Dundee in the sixties and seventies, had yet to be invented.

But Jackie editors knew that young girls craved relationship advice. (The problem page attracted 500 letters a week.)

One of the ways Jackie spoke to its readers was via speech bubbles in their photo stories, in which hopeful young actors posed for the cameras, looking suitably bewildered, while the bubble above their head read ‘I wonder if he/she really does fancy me?’ Some of the bewildered-looking included Alan Cumming, Hugh Grant and Leslie Ash.

However writer Nina Myskov, who edited the Jackie Magazine from 1974, recalls her staff sometimes made mistakes.

“I remember once receiving a sad letter from a girl that said: “I wrote to you about my flat chest, and you sent me a knitting pattern for a little woolly hat. What should I do?”

Another girl, a 12-year-old wrote in, enclosing a photo. It read: “I love the pin-ups, but my dad is better-looking than Mick Jagger. He does the Magic Roundabout on TV.” The girl was Emma Thompson. Jackie did move on (slightly) with the times however. In 1974 the Dear Doctor column covered what were termed “below the waist issues.”

Jackie couldn’t last of course (the last issue was in 1993 ). Schoolgirls changed. They were no longer excited to learn about what it costs to stay in a youth hostel, how to get a passport, which perfume to wear, and how soon should you kiss a boy.

They no longer wanted to read about the ‘glamour’ life of an air hostess or take in the Presbyterian thriftiness implicit in features on stitching jeans patches or tie-dying t-shirts.

But Jackie The Musical reminds its audience how nice it was to be that innocent, taking them back to a time before the internet and AIDS and Isis.

It will bring flashbacks of the time when, like Janet Dibley, they bought yellow platform boots and wore them home in case their mother insisted they take them back.

And even if life wasn’t that colourful back then, the women who will go to see this show, who loved the two Davids and Donny and Marc really want to remember that it was.

* Jackie The Musical, the King’s Theatre, July 26-30.