THE first time I ever went on a sunbed, I was 16. I was a spotty teenager with a school ball looming and my mum, in her naivete, thought it may help clear them up.

We hired one out of the local paper – as you did. It arrived and the man assembled it in my mum’s bedroom. He showed us how to set the timer and that was that.

I couldn’t wait to get on it. My mum warned me I was only to use it every few days (this was 15 years ago, we didn’t know then what we know now), but I got on it as often as I could, lying there with my little goggles on imagining how beautiful I was going to look at the ball.

In the event, it did little to make my spots vanish and I didn’t exactly end up with a “tan” but I was no longer milk bottle white.

For the best part of the next 10 years, I would use sunbeds on a regular basis. I wasn’t exactly a “tanorexic”, but I wouldn’t dream of going out on a Saturday night without a trip to the electric beach first.

My other half was exactly the same. And, when we went on holiday, coming home with a tan was an essential part of it.

Then, five or six years ago, my husband noticed a sore on his chest, doctors first put it down as eczema but eventually he was diagnosed as having basal cell carcinoma. That’s skin cancer, to you and me.

Luckily it was treatable, it was removed and he was cleared of it completely.

These days, neither of us would go near a sunbed. Even if you escape skin cancer, there’s the problem of premature ageing and I know I have irreparably damaged my own skin through sun abuse.

These days I still like to go to the beach but I never wear anything less than SPF 30 and spend a lot of time in the shade. I am a firm advocate of being safe in the sun.

But so many other people choose to ignore the sun warnings. Like smokers who refuse to acknowledge tobacco is linked to lung cancer, they think skin cancer won’t happen to them.

It doesn’t help that everywhere you look being tanned is linked with being beautiful.

So you have to applaud Girls Aloud star Nicola Roberts, left. The porcelain-skinned singer is fast becoming the celebrity spokesperson for the pale.

Tonight she appears in a documentary, The Truth About Tanning, in which she encourages young people to be themselves rather than feel they have to conform to some bronzed ideal.

She says: “There’s a reason why people are addicted to tanning and that reason is that they are unhappy with the way they naturally look. Buy why? It’s because they’ve been made to feel that way.

“That’s how I used to feel, but now I want to be an individual, to look different. I don’t want to look like everyone else and I don’t want to have a streaky orange tan because it’s tacky. If someone comments on a photo of me in a magazine and says I look too pale, I think, who the hell are you to tell me that?”

I can’t say I am as brave as Nicola, I still slope off for the occasional spray at the St Tropez counter. But I can say with absolute certainty that I am no longer dying for a tan.

NICOLA ROBERTS – The Truth About Tanning is on BBC Three tonight.