JACKIE was every girl’s best friend. Worried about exams? Jackie was there with sensible advice. Too shy to talk to the boy at the bus stop? Jackie came to the rescue, with confidence-boosting tips. Got the teen hormonal blues? Jackie would get you through it.

Like many girls in the 1970s and 80s, I was an avid reader of Jackie magazine. My copy landed on the doormat every Tuesday tea-time and I devoured it, from cover to cover.

It was 60 years ago when Jackie was launched. There hadn’t been anything like it before - a magazine aimed at teenage girls (and pre-teens like me, who started reading it when I was 11) packed full of advice on fashion, make-up, health, pop gossip and boys. Jackie still has a place in the hearts of those who grew up with it, and to celebrate its 60th anniversary a special ‘bookazine’ has been produced, full of nostalgic archive material.

With no TikTok gurus, YouTubers or influencers back then, Jackie was what guided us through the minefield of adolescence. As well as features on the dos and don’ts of kissing, applying the right shade of blue eye-liner and jazzing up a blouse with affordable accessories, there was the trusty Cathy and Claire problem page, which was like having two cool big sisters.

All I wanted to be, from the age of about seven, was a teenager, and Jackie was my ticket into that world of glamour. I loved the photo stories, usually involving girls rocking perms and pixie boots caught up in love triangles with lads working the waltzers in stone-washed denim. And I loved the pop star profiles, pull-out posters, quizzes and life advice.

Jackie hit the shelves in 1964 as an exciting new magazine “for go-ahead teens” and by the 1970s it was the best-selling teenage title. For 10 years it had a million readers a week. The Cathy and Claire column got sackfuls of mail each day.

A few years ago I interviewed Nina Myskow, who became the editor of Jackie when she was just 21, presiding over the magazine’s office in Dundee. She said the appeal of Jackie was that “it gave ordinary girls a link to a grown-up, glamorous world, and spoke to them in a way nothing else did”.

The aim, she said, was to provide a sense of community, to help young women through the challenges of adolescence. And, along with the make-up tips and photo-story dating dilemmas, it instilled a sense of feminism.

“With Jackie, I tried to let readers know there was a world out there,” said Nina. “My mother was a science teacher and I was brought up with a sense of independence and ambition. I felt strongly that girls should have that.”

Eventually, sales dwindled and in 1993 the final edition of Jackie rolled off the presses. There is no place for it in the digital world, says Nina: “Jackie was very much a magazine, something you waited all week for. I had the idea of the three-part pin-up, so you could collect the whole Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, whoever, over three weeks.”

In a world where everything appears instantly on demand, I can’t imagine today’s teenage girls waiting three weeks to piece together a poster of their pop hunk of choice.

Magazines like Jackie, and others I read, such as Blue Jeans and Just Seventeen, belong to a lost age when the only phone accessible to teenagers was the one on the little table in the hall, and streaming music involved taping the Top 40 on Sunday nights.

But Jackie had a lasting effect on me. It gave me a love of magazines - as a young woman I read the big glossies like Cosmopolitan, Elle and Marie Claire - and inspired me to become a journalist. Thanks Jackie. You gave us Girl Power before it was even a thing.