by Paul Daniels
A winter mixture of after-dinner cabarets, cabaret clubs, television shows and the usual one-night stands led once again to another Val Doonican season. 1977 and this was in Bournemouth. I consider myself very lucky to have caught the end of the era that had these wonderfully huge summer shows, with twice-nightly shows and lots of acts and girls. Any artist who worked in Bournemouth during those years will tell you that one of the strangest events in the season, and yet one of the most endearing, was an invitation to tea. This went to absolutely everyone appearing in Bournemouth and came from a Mrs York-Batley. There was tea, of course, with sandwiches, cakes and scones but the highlight was the game of croquet. This kind, elderly lady did this purely out of the kindness of her heart. She is long gone now, but remembered fondly by a whole generation of ‘turns’ and dancers.
During my summer season in Bournemouth, I suddenly realised that I had been living on the road, in digs and with various girls for more than ten years. Surely it must be time to settle down?
One newspaper had already published an article claiming that I was using a helicopter to travel and was living in Chelsea with six women. My sons, naturally, had fun poked at them at school and it was no good trying to point out that I wasn’t. Don’t journalists work out how many people they are going to hurt before they write their fiction? Among the family and close friends I told them that I wished I was living with six girls and a helicopter in Chelsea! OK, I wasn’t too bothered about the helicopter.
We drove up from Bournemouth one Sunday morning to view a large house in a village called Water Stratford, just south of Silverstone and just north of Tingewick. We were a bit early so we went to a huge Sunday market on an airfield nearby.
One of the stallholders was selling the popular ‘slinky’ toy, a magical toy that apparently walked across your fingers. In his salesman’s voice we heard, ‘Come on, Ladies and Gents, get yaw Slinkies ’ere. Ya friends’ll say “they like this, not a lot, but they like it”.’
‘No, they won’t,’ I said.
He looked up, stunned, and the Slinky dangled half-off his suddenly motionless hand.
‘My Gawd! What you doin ’ere?’
‘You mention my name,’ I said, ‘and as if by magic …’
I knew then that the catchphrase was really getting around.
When we got to the converted barn and cowshed, I knew it was exactly what I was looking for. Having been built originally in the early 1400s, it had been beautifully modernised, complete with enclosed courtyard and swimming pool. The house and the village were quite ‘Old England’. Its positioning in the south Midlands was of no great concern, as I was already aware that wherever an artiste buys a house, the bookings will immediately come in at the other end of the country. Walking around it, I worked out that I could have the main barn and Mam and Dad could have the ‘cowshed’ end. Negotiations were started and I returned to Bournemouth.
Three nights before the end of the season, I walked down the bank towards the theatre only to be met by Roy Murray and a couple of the management. Val was sick and would be off. They were bringing in a comic to top the bill and we revamped the show to fit. The next night I think it was Roger de Courcey with Nookie Bear who topped. They were really stuck for the last night and I said that I would do it. I wasn’t being big-time. It never occurred to them that I was topping the bills around the resorts every Sunday night. I went on and the show went fine and ever after Robert Luff, the producer of The Black and White Minstrel Show and who was involved in the Val Doonican production, claimed to have discovered me.
I bought Giffard’s Barn for £47,000, a small fortune in those days and, having started negotiations in the summer, I got the keys two weeks before Christmas 1977. It was the first house I had really owned. I went inside this lovely, warm, stone-built house by myself on the first day, lay on my back in the huge empty drawing room and laughed like hell.
It had cost me a lot of money, but I was making a lot of money. It’s an extraordinary fact that however much you earn, your costs will rise to match. I think that only the multi-millionaire Bill Gates is ahead of his expenses. When it comes to earning money, you really can’t win in the UK. If you spend it on big houses and flash cars you are a show-off. If you don’t, you are a cheapskate.
In my experience it is good for kids, particularly in deprived areas, to see someone ‘make it’. For them there is a dream. When I lived in South Bank we all wanted to be in the movies. We all had the Hollywood Dream. Now it’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It’s the lottery millions. Some people say it’s greed, but I don’t think they have known what it is like to be truly hard up.
Having picked myself up off the floor, I telephoned Mam and Dad. They were the ones I really wanted to share my new home with, more than anybody else.
‘Let’s go mad!’ I suggested.
By the following week, we had all moved in. By Christmas Eve, we had the tree up and the log fire roaring. That afternoon, a Harrods van came up the drive and delivered a case of champagne. It was a thank you gift from a charity event I had performed at Buckingham Palace the previous day. Nikki had given me some superb, cut-glass champagne flutes and they lent the final touches to a real, old-fashioned English Christmas.
On Christmas Day, Mam had performed the usual annual miracle of the Christmas Dinner and we sat sipping champagne from Buckingham Palace, out of crystal glasses, in front of a roaring fire and feeling simply glorious. My brother Trevor told us that he had been in Rome the week before and in a restaurant where the background music was all Vivaldi. I started to laugh uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop myself at all. The whole family looked at me in amazement.
Eventually, I got it out. ‘Just look at us,’ I said. ‘It’s a bloody long way from South Bank!’
Christmases were special at Giffard’s Barn, particularly as I had Mam and Dad to spoil. At last, I felt I could give them back a little of the love they had shown me over the years. With Dad now living ‘on site’ to make my props and illusions, I felt it only right that I purchase the gear to make his job as easy as possible. So, just before Christmas, I went to a large hardware shop and in the middle of the store was an incredible workbench, which looked perfect. It had a central motor, which drove every woodworking tool known to man and even had its own vacuum system for sucking the muck away. A company called ‘Kity’ made it and I didn’t bother to ask how much it was, I just wanted it for Dad.
It was delivered the next day and I got a shock. It arrived in a million different pieces and boxes ready to be built. I asked the deliveryman to put it in the downstairs toilet. The poor man gave me a very strange look, but obediently started to stack one box upon another. It filled the toilet up to the ceiling, at which point I got some Christmas wrapping paper and covered the door to seal the present inside. The deliveryman stood and stared in disbelief. It wasn’t until he left that I realised why he’d looked so puzzled – I should have told him we had other toilets.
Dad’s face was a picture that Christmas morning. As he opened the door, he gasped in surprise, for there sat the world’s biggest Meccano set and it was all his. That was when I learnt about his childhood and the cruelty shown to him during Christmases past. It took him a month to put it together.
The following Christmas, I gave them an envelope. ‘That’s a bit of a comedown after last year,’ said Mam.
Dad opened it. ‘I think you’d better sit down, Mam,’ he said when he had finished reading the contents.
It was a certificate of travel to take them to Hollywood. I was thinking of how they had been brought up in the boom years of the cinema and that maybe they would like to see where it all started. I was right; the tears that streamed down Mam’s face were priceless.
It was their first ever aeroplane flight and as we waved them off, I said to Trevor, ‘I bet Dad comes back in a stetson.’
I was wrong. It was Mam who came back in a stetson. They had a fabulous time and seemed very much at home. Whenever I go to Hollywood, I never mee
t anybody, but my parents came back with stories of having dinner with Liberace and Cary Grant. Meeting Joan Collins’ chauffeur on the plane, they took up an offer to be driven around by him and cancelled the limousine I had booked for them.
Giffard’s Barn has great memories. Sammy Davis Jnr had a line in his act something like, ‘Hey, look at me. I’m rich. Do you want to know how rich I am? I’ve got a swimming pool and I can’t even swim.’ When I was at Giffard’s, I altered the line. ‘Do you want to know how rich I am? I can’t swim and I’ve just had the pool moved.’ It was true and I know at the time there was a good reason, but I can’t remember it. Maybe it came about because the bull from the farm next door jumped over the wall and landed in it. We had to get a crane to get him out again. I didn’t even know bulls could jump.
I’m not someone who drives ‘on the bonnet’, I always drive at least two cars in front, looking way ahead of the car. I suppose its called defensive driving, then you are ready and alert for any eventuality, and it’s saved me from several accidents. I enjoy driving well and taught my son Martin to drive and he turned out to be a much better and safer driver than I was. I told him that as there was always a long waiting list for tests to say on the application form that he could take any cancellations. They phoned him to say his test was in one week’s time. I made him drive me one morning from Giffard’s to the heart of London, travelling through all the early morning rush hour traffic. When we arrived he was in a sweat but I told him that no matter what happened from now on, it could never be worse. He passed his test first time.
On Christmas Eve, as he was still new to driving, I suggested he followed me back from the Prince of Wales Theatre to Giffard’s Barn, where we were to spend another family Christmas. I warned him to keep his distance in case the roads were icy as the night sky was crystal clear and the stars sparkled in the heavens. Pulling into the driveway Martin got out and displayed the signs of being a great ad-libber:
‘This is going to be the greatest Christmas I’ve ever had.’ ‘Well it hasn’t started yet,’ was my reply.
‘I know, but I’ve just followed a star to a stable.’
CHAPTER 10
UP, UP AND AWAY
An illusion is defined as the creation of a magical effect that uses an animal, sometimes a human. There were an abundance of worldwide deceptions in the Eighties, where events were not always what they seemed. Diaries allegedly written by Adolf Hitler were discovered to be fakes and the inventor of modern jogging, James F Fix, died of a heart-attack whilst jogging. The wreck of the Titanic was discovered, Live Aid raised £8 million for the Ethiopian famine and Madonna burst on to the scene as the newest American star.
The 1970s had been very good to me. I was slowly learning more and more about television, thanks to appearances in shows like The Club Acts of the Year, Ace of Clubs, Opportunity Knocks, Wheeltappers, The David Nixon Show, For My Next Trick, Fall In The Stars, Be My Guest, Parkinson, The Marti Caine Show, Pebble Mill Showcase, Thank You and Goodnight, The Paul Daniels Show, The Magic Show, Jim’ll Fix It, Paul Daniels’ Blackpool Bonanza, two Royal Variety Shows, Disney Time, Blankety Blank, The Shirley Bassey Show and Larry Grayson’s Generation Game. I was well prepared, therefore, for the start of The Paul Daniels Magic Show, which ran on BBC TV from September 1979 to March 1994, for a total of 15 series.
I know that, to many people, the world of television itself is magical, so let’s pick a few stories out of the list.
Club Acts of the Year was another talent competition, but this time the viewers were comparing like with like. It is a bit silly to try to make singers, comedians, dancers and jugglers compete against each other because they all have different talents. Club Acts made magicians compete against magicians, comedians against comedians and so on. I didn’t win. All day I had been asking whether it was OK to go on screen with a box of Kleenex tissues and use it in a trick. I had brought some sticky plastic sheeting to cover the box but ‘they’ said to leave it as it was. A couple of minutes before I was due on stage, in fact the act prior to mine had already started, one of ‘them’ walked by and told me that I couldn’t go on with an advertisement like that. I didn’t stop to argue. I ran all the way up to my dressing room on the top floor and I stuck the plastic on as I ran back down the stairs. I got to the back of the stage, which was huge, as I heard my name being announced and I ran flat out to the wings, braked hard and walked on trying to act like Mr Smoothy. The trouble was that I had to speak and I sounded like a cross between an asthmatic and a heavy breather.
I did several shows of Jim’ll Fix It. The Producer, Roger Ordish, is now a good friend of mine and he told me that over the years he had more requests to assist Paul Daniels, be sawn up by Paul Daniels, be vanished by Paul Daniels and so on, than for any other requests. That’s nice, isn’t it?
Granada TV’s Blackpool Bonanza was a television show recorded in the Norbreck Castle hotel in Blackpool. The auditorium, in which they hold exhibitions, was huge. I was the host of the show, doing magic and introducing the guests. This summer spectacular was my first real series on prime-time and, again, was produced by Johnny Hamp. It was competing against the BBC’s Summertime Special, which toured the seaside resorts and for years I kept a small strip cartoon about the show. There were two characters and one says to the other, ‘Have you seen Blackpool Bonanza?’ ‘No, what’s that?’
‘It’s like Summertime Special, but one town takes all the blame.’
Lovely.
This show happened during the summer of 1978 when I was appearing on the North Pier with Marti Caine. I did the first half and she did the second. Great singer, very funny comedienne (that’s what they called them in those days, using English that told you instantly whether the comic was male or female. Nowadays you have to guess, sometimes even after you’ve watched them.)
The theatre on the pier was at the far end as usual. This was the way they were built, to avoid paying council rates because the building was beyond the average tide level or whatever. Located at the end of a half-mile walkway, the stage door is approached by what is more akin to a wind tunnel. On one side there was a café and on the other side was the theatre. When the wind was up, I would battle my way to the end, and towards the end of the season it could be hell getting down there. Once, carrying Starsky, my rabbit, in his hutch, I really couldn’t make any headway at all. I had to ‘tack’ like a yacht to reach the stage door. At one stage I looked to my right only to find the people in the warmth of the café rolling about with laughter at my antics, the Norman Wisdom look-a-like.
In a storm, the waves would crash up against and through the bottom boards of the orchestra pit to the extent that the musicians would put their feet up on the chair in front of them in rough weather to keep dry.
There is a story about Robb Wilton, one of the all-time great funny men, who was doing a season on the North Pier. He was a quiet comic, droll, with a biting sense of wit. One night the storms came and this one was a beauty. Robb tried to keep working although hailstones were banging on the metal roof and waves were banging up at the floor. At one stage in the act, a large pair of emergency exit doors were forced open by the wind and flapped noisily back and forth, the wind now howling into the theatre, ice cream tubs and programmes flying everywhere as the ushers ran and struggled to shut them again. As they won the fight there was a sudden lull in the storm, a moment of tranquillity. Robb, who had kept silent throughout the ructions going on in front of him, took a breath, folded his arms, did his trademark picking of his teeth in the corner of his mouth and slowly said, ‘I think they’re training me to be a police horse!’
Within showbusiness, the staff of the North Pier were legendary. The ushers and the stage door man did not come from showbusiness, but were hired for the season. They tended to be elderly. A stage door man, doing his job properly, protects the whole of the backstage area and the artists, from intruders. Not on the North Pier they don’t.
One night I had just come off stage and, without
a knock, the stage door man opened my dressing room door and pushed in an old man. He stood there without saying anything and we smiled at each other as I waited to see what he wanted. He just stood there smiling, so eventually, after what seemed an embarrassing amount of time, I asked if I could help him.
‘Finest thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said.
I though he was talking about my act. ‘Thank you,’ I smiled back.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not you. Twenty years ago, when I stood on the end of the pier and watched it burn down. Finest thing I ever saw.’ He was still saying it when I pushed him back out of the stage door.
On the other hand, it was raining one night when the same stage door keeper came and told me that there was someone waiting outside to see me, who said he knew me, but who, according to this guru of our business, ‘doesn’t look as though he is in showbusiness’.
‘What’s his name?’ I asked, and the doorkeeper looked vague.
‘It’s something to do with those cages you keep birds in.’ I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about and then the penny dropped. Aviary. My mind took a sideways leap and I immediately knew who he was talking about. I ran out into the rain and brought into the warmth John Avery. An idiot with dreams of setting fire to the pier could get in, but not John, the manager of the London Palladium.
Towards the end of the season, two serious-looking gentlemen asked to see me in my dressing room. In their wonderfully flat north-western tones, they explained that they were from Southport Borough Council Entertainments Department.