by Paul Daniels
We were assigned an Australian girl who was in charge of, and controlled, our entire budget for the series. In her early twenties she had never worked in any kind of broadcasting before. Madness ruled.
One of the new accountants asked a producer why he needed the studio all day, which of course was expensive, when the programme was only half-an-hour long. The accountant knew nothing of rehearsals or camera choreography or lighting requirements or even the amount of time it takes to build a set.
All around us money was being spent on stuff that had nothing to do with putting a better product on the screen. I was unhappy and I was far from being the only one. The corridors that once buzzed, now moaned. The ‘freedom’ that built a great broadcasting company was the thing that was now bringing it down. It was not answerable to the people who were paying for it. It was not answerable to anyone.
One day, a couple of us were talking about how hard it was to make programmes. The whole building was talking about redundancies being grabbed by all the good creative people who knew they could get jobs anywhere. A man joined us and took part in the conversation. It turned out he was a journalist and he published everything I said. The bosses didn’t like the publicity. The crews who worked in the building all said I was right.
So I had to go. The method was obvious, if you are in the industry. It has been done many times. Both the magic series and the game shows were suddenly very difficult to follow if you were a viewer. Their time slots were altered, not only on the same day, but also the days were changed. If viewers can’t find their favourite programmes regularly, then the audience breaks down. Then the Controller can say that nobody is watching and close the programme down. It is difficult for them to do that if you are always in the ratings, so they ‘plan’ you out of the ratings. Even I couldn’t find out when I was on.
Some months after the last series was recorded, I was at a dinner function and Isabell Kristensen, the designer of fabulous dresses, was sitting opposite me. She said to Debbie, ‘When I saw you on television recently, I said to myself, “I have to dress that woman.” You looked so good, your figure is great. So I telephoned my agent and she telephoned the BBC. We were so sorry to hear that you are not making any more television shows.’
And that is how I found out that my time at the BBC was over.
The next day, I got Mervyn to telephone the BBC and it was confirmed.
I have just re-read what I have written and it may seem to you that I am bitter about what happened. The opposite is the truth. Without knowing it, they did me the most enormous favour. Over the years I had been there, I had often wondered how I would feel if I was told I wasn’t wanted any more. Every artist I have talked to about this has the same fears – ‘Will they want me back again?’ The moment I got the call from Mervyn, however, all I felt was a great sense of relief. It’s a cliché I know, but I really did feel as though a great weight lifted off me and I was free. Brilliant. Maybe I was under a greater strain than I was aware of making the last couple of series, but all I know is that I felt great. I couldn’t have left the BBC at a better time and, as a working entertainer, I have had the most wonderful time ever since.
I was in Television Centre recently and it was dead – hardly anyone around during what used to be the busiest time, the evenings when the programmes were recorded. Perhaps it comes to life during the day when the accountants roam the corridors. I hope that one day someone realises it is supposed to create its own productions and brings it back to life again.
Now that I was free to accept contracts a long time in advance (in the past I lost a lot of work waiting for the BBC to determine its recording schedules) Debbie and I worked all over the world in theatre and cabaret, on both public and corporate work. It was not only the range of different countries, it was the wide range of work that made life interesting and a challenge. We took on a couple of cruises a year.
If you go on a cruise then the big tip is to join in with absolutely everything that is happening on the ship, even the things you don’t think you’ll like. If you are worried about being seasick, take a tip from Dr Daniels: with your doctor’s approval, get some seasickness tablets. That’s a funny name really because they should be anti-seasickness tablets. Three or four days before you sail, take one in the morning and one in the evening every day until you embark. If you wait until you get on board to start taking them, it will be too late.
I do hope this next story will not put you off cruising, which is a fabulous way to have a holiday.
Debbie and I sailed off on the QEII on a return trip bound for New York. We had heard that there were a couple of hurricanes around but thought that, if we were sailing, there had to be a way around them. After a couple of days of peaceful, but cloudy, cruising, I did a cabaret show on the ship and life was good.
The next day, the captain warned that we would be in the centre of a storm that night at around midnight. ‘Storm’ was an understatement. We had an early dinner and, by 9.00pm, the ship was starting to pitch up and down. Thankfully, for me, she wasn’t rolling from side to side. I can’t stand that.
We decided to go to bed early and the waves were really starting to roll in by then. All passengers were warned not to go out on deck – they would have been crazy to do so. The wind was howling fiercely and eventually got up to speeds of 130mph before the anemometer literally blew away. Considering how well they are fixed down, it must have been some wind. The big storm over England a few years back had wind speeds of 100mph.
I went to sleep while the ship battled through 40ft waves and occasionally half-awoke when a door or drawer in the cabin flew open and banged shut.
At 0205 there was a huge explosion and I was wide awake immediately. There was a feeling of a major accident, that we might be going down, that we had hit something. Debbie was very frightened so, to appease her, I, Sleepy Daniels, got out of bed and looked out of the window. Waves were going by at an impressive height and I was being thrown up and down. Doing my best impression of a naked string puppet, my legs bending when I least expected it, I went to the door and walked out into the corridor. There was nobody there and so I went back to bed mumbling, ‘No alarms so we must be all right,’ and I went back to sleep.
I think Debbie felt that I should have done more to protect her, but she’s the one who can swim, not me.
The next morning was still rough but it had all calmed down by lunchtime. The ship had been hit by a 93ft wave. That would have gone over the top of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. It certainly went over the top of the QEII and you have to stand alongside her to realise how big it must have been. The water had gone over the top of the bridge and some had even gone down the funnel.
None of the crew had ever seen anything so big at sea and the damage must have cost many thousands of pounds. We had lost life rafts, the front mast, winches, foghorns and the supporting beams under the foredeck had been bent at right angles despite being extremely thick metal. The foredeck itself was wok-shaped.
Amazingly, no one was hurt. In a rolling sea I have known people to break limbs, but in this head-on collision no one was even bruised. That was even more amazing when you realise that Hurricane Luis was the worst recorded storm in the twentieth century. It was a tribute to the great shipbuilders of the Clyde that the Queen sailed through it. The British press headlines read that she ‘limped’ into New York, but that wasn’t true. This great ship went in at normal speed and did us proud.
Because of the delays during the repairs, I couldn’t stay on board for the return trip. I had four TV shows to record on the Monday so I disembarked in New York and flew back. Some trip. Debbie stayed on board with our friends for the return trip and gave me one of the best laughs I have ever had. The fax read, ‘Darling, do you remember all those waiters we thought were gay? Well, it’s amazing how many of them aren’t.’
* * *
Every year we have managed to fit in a tour of the UK and, whenever possible, Ireland. This large illusion show is mostly based a
round comedy and both Debbie, who is now even doing illusions, and Martin joined in the fun. Touring is damned hard to set up and damned hard to sell, but it is great fun to do. Mervyn thinks we are all mad because there are much easier ways to make money in this business. What does he know, we ask.
When he is not touring with us, which is most of the time, Martin is off doing the comedy clubs, the corporate work, summer seasons and all the jobs that make our business tick over. You don’t have to be on television to make a career in showbusiness. In truth, most of the business is done away from broadcasting anyway. He and his wife, Jo, are very happy and even more so now that they have Lewis to look after and to play with. Lewis is walking. That happened when he was one year and one day old, on Boxing Day. Martin had a video camera pointed at him as he played near the settee. Lewis looked up, saw the camera, and walked. Show-off! I wonder where he gets that from.
My youngest son, Gary, left ICI and went to work in computers for NHS hospitals in the Middlesbrough area. From being a podgy lump (we always use terms of endearment in our family) he suddenly got into aerobics and is now a streamlined hulk, he tells us. He is living near Middlesbrough with a lovely, funny, happy girl called Lisa, whose father runs a pub. If only the pub had been on a golf course it would have been perfect.
Paul, the eldest, is still my biggest worry in life. Hey, it can’t all be good, can it? For years he drifted in and out of our lives, sometimes for months and wouldn’t bother getting in touch to tell us how he was getting on. He meandered from job to job and seemed mostly to be out of work. In his personal habits he wasn’t too clean and preferred the scruffy look of the streets. Still does, as far as I know. He just did not want to be part of the family, and yet kept coming back as if he did. It is all very disconcerting.
For years, I blamed myself – the going away, the divorce and all that messy stuff in my early life. Psychiatrists would go down that route maybe, but there comes a time in your life when you are old enough to look around and realise that not all relationships are perfect. If the early life disturbed Paul, surely by now he has the experience of his own failed relationships to build on? Me? I was always the cock-eyed optimist, always hoping that he would pull through and start contributing to society in some positive way.
I did all I could for many, many years. I hung on to any shred of hope that was visible, but there was none. He was an excellent magician, although he told the newspapers that he didn’t like the art at all. I suspect that he was frightened of the comparison with me and I can understand that. He was constantly uncontrollable and I never knew what he was up to. When Paul turned 30 I had to realise that he was now a man. This was the time when I decided that I had put up with enough; I could no longer ‘bail him out’.
I worried, cared and thought about him constantly. For years, he was the last thing I thought about at night and the first concern that hit me every morning. He still is.
The worst moment came one day when I was having a meal with friends and I got a phone call.
‘Paul is in prison,’ the voice at the other end said.
‘For what?’ I needed to know but feared the worst.
‘Some kind of fraud.’
Paul, being a biker, had realised it was very difficult to get insurance cover and had formed his own insurance company. Whether it was deliberate or not I will never know, but he got it wrong, didn’t set the system up correctly, and a government office closed him down. The press made a meal of him standing in court alone as he was sentenced. He went to court alone because he had never told any of the rest of the family he was going. We’d have all been there for him.
Legally, he had committed fraud. It was a serious offence and he got 12 months. According to Paul, he had been told that, as a first offender, there was no chance of him getting a jail sentence and that is why he never bothered calling us. Who will ever know?
It’s not easy to get into prison to visit someone. There were days of telephoning to find out how to get permission to visit. Eventually, I drove to Pentonville and went through the procedures of forms and what you could and couldn’t take in, door after door locking behind me. It’s a good job that I had been to have my claustrophobia cured the year before or I would probably never have made it inside. There are times when you don’t want to be recognised and this was all of them. There is a strange embarrassment in the other people who are visiting and even in the warders. I didn’t care, I just wanted to see my son.
There should be school tours of the worst side of prisons; they are bloody awful. Hopefully, it would scare them to bits and they might think twice about committing their crime.
Paul was sitting in a long room of tables, the aisles of prisoners separated from the aisles of visitors by low partitions. He was noticeably frightened and obviously unhappy. The sentence had hit him hard and he had woken up with a jolt from his ‘it’ll never happen to me’ attitude. He told us that he was in the ‘mildest’ part of the prison, but he still hated it. I honestly believe that if they had put him into the worst part for two weeks, with him expecting to be there for a year, and then told him to go home with a warning that if he ever came back they’d put him in for three, it would have made a difference. As it is, anyone going inside does what every human being does in any situation, they just get used to it. I could do nothing. I left Pentonville gutted.
As often as I was allowed to, I visited him. It never got better. His girlfriend Sam visited him and even Debbie made the trip ‘inside’. Martin and Gary came down. All of us hated seeing him trapped.
A few weeks later, he was transferred to Ford Open Prison where he boasted that he had played in the same football team that George Best had been part of. As I sat and listened to him while on a visit, he said how much he admired some of the things the other lads had done and told me how easy it was to fiddle money out of a telephone box. What schooling.
During this period, we decided to refuse any interviews for the gaggle of press constantly sneaking around us. Publicity was the last thing he needed at this time while he was doing his best to get himself back on his feet. The tabloids were only interested in him because of me and I was keen to protect him.
In the meantime, I wrote almost every day. I wrote my diary, told him what the family was up to and generally let him know that we all cared and were still rooting for him. If I was working abroad, I sent postcards. He answered a couple of times and I was thrilled to receive his letters in reply. Together, we started to formulate a plan to help him when he came out. After being in prison for fraud, he stood no chance of getting a decent type of office job, so I suggested he became a local, self-employed handyman. He was a very skilled tiler and could turn his hand to anything. We considered general gardening, plumbing, decoration, electrical work and even small building work. He had the talents; we had to find a way to exploit them.
Together, and please note that I say ‘together’, we came up with a total plan that would swing into action on his release. Nobody knows when they are starting out in life for the first time, or in Paul’s case, the second, exactly what is going to be best for them. We put together a package of occupations that Paul could do all at the same time until he found which was the best for him. We listed what we knew he could do and he agreed to each one in turn.
First, the name had to go. If he used his own name then he would always be associated with me. He carries the family name of Newton, so we called him Paul Newton. It is very difficult nowadays to work, especially in the areas we were discussing, without transport, so I said that I would buy him a van and a mobile phone to get him started. Every function that you go to nowadays has some table-hopping magicians and, as that was his forte, I knew that he could easily get work doing that with the big advantage for him of not being associated with me. During the day he would do tiling and light deliveries and any other job that came up needing a light van. This was all agreed and we mapped out everything in great detail. He asked for some magic props and everything was fixed.
Paul was finally released on New Year’s Eve. Who decides this stuff? A group of men, Paul among them, were all released from an alcohol-free zone into the biggest night of the year for getting drunk. Certainly in Paul’s case, it wrecked his chances of making a clean break before he even got started. Although I don’t even think that he realises it, I have noticed that it only takes a couple of drinks to change his personality. Alcohol seems to kick in fast with him. Predictably, he went straight home to his girlfriend in London and got smashed out of his brains. A couple of nights later, she kicked him out. I don’t blame her; he deals a tough hand. Strangely, later, he blamed me for having been kicked out, and I realised that he blames everybody for his misfortune except himself. He telephoned Sam threatening suicide.