Paul Daniels (19 page)

The next number was heavy rock ‘n’ roll and the drummer laid into it. Suddenly, his head started twitching to his right as he looked into the wings and he also kept gesturing with his head to his bass drum. Nobody was listening to or watching Vince. We were totally hooked on the pantomime going on behind him, particularly when, with fag dangling from the corner of his mouth, the organist appeared on his hands and knees, crawled behind the organ, crossed behind the speaker and knelt sideways in front of the drumkit, holding the drum with his hands to stop it ‘crawling’ forward. As Vince rocked he stayed there, nodding and smiling at the audience who were failing about. Vince’s face was a picture when he saw him. I don’t know what was said but the kneeling drum holder left in an even bigger huff than before.

Vince had a manager who took me under his wing from his
office inYork. He went to Rowntree’s and got them to sponsor the printing of a brochure for me. They said they would as I featured Polo mints in my act every night. Someone in the audience would lend me some money in exchange for a packet of Polo mints and, having checked the number of his note, would find it later in the hole in the middle of the mints. I also did a routine where the mints linked together, chain like, so the brochure was made very cleverly with the mints separate on my hand and when you unfolded the paper they had joined together. You will probably find this hard to believe but I am a collector’s item. There are people in the world who collect anything to do with me and they search diligently for these brochures. The reason they are so eminently collectable is that not many of them were sent out.

Something else had happened that shocked me into the full realisation of what I was up to with women. In the midst of travelling the clubs, and the haze and fog surrounding the break-up of my marriage, a blinding awareness had come in the middle of making love to a girl in the back of a car. I had realised that I wasn’t actually enjoying it; I was just doing it for the sake of it. I remember I actually apologised to the girl and drove her home. A few years later, on a long train journey, I started to doodle the names of the girls I had made love to in my ‘mad’ years. I got past 300 and gave up. Nowadays, that would have been a suicide mission.

From that moment on, I was very choosy about my relationships. Yet there were still a couple of times when I was on the road and intensely lonely when I tried paying for a prostitute but found I couldn’t follow it through. It was all so sordid and dirty and twice I just walked away from it without ‘getting my money’s worth’. I’d never do that again. Many years later, I was accosted by a pro near King’s Cross station in London. Debbie had only just that minute left me to walk
across to her car when a very young cockney girl in a full-length coat asked whether I was looking for a good time.

I laughed because nothing was further from my mind and pointed out that my wife might object and pointed to her. The penny dropped and the young girl said, ‘’Ere. You’re ’im off the telly, aincha?’

I agreed that I was ‘im.

‘Give us your autograph, dahlin’, for me mum.’

‘Sure,’ says I. ‘Have you got a pen?’

‘You gotta be kiddin’,’ she said, opening her coat. ‘Where would I keep a pen?’

She was starkers. I didn’t say the obvious!

Early on in the never-ending cycle of gigs, I met one of the greatest stage hypnotists I had ever seen, Peter Casson, who became my manager. I never had any problems with Peter, although he had the strange hobby of suing everyone and was always in court representing himself in some case or other. We met because I got a week at the Club Ba-Ba at Barnsley and the Club Ki-Ki at Kirk Sandall and he owned them. I learnt a really big lesson on my first night at the Ba-Ba. I didn’t think that I had gone down very well at all and I fully understood the large sign that Peter had put up backstage: ‘Will all Artistes please refrain from asking the audience whether they are having a good time or enjoying themselves as the lack of response is invariably embarrassing to both parties.’

As soon as I came off stage, the compere said that I was one of the funniest men ever to appear in the club. I said I didn’t think so and he said that the only thing I ought to do is slow up. Around Barnsley, the rhythm of speech is much slower than in the north-east and I ought to give them more time to get used to the sound of my voice before getting faster towards the end of the act. Great advice. Fabulous advice. From then on I did that, and I also learnt to clip my words in Scotland and take
my voice up a little at the end of the sentences in Wales. It’s not making fun of anyone, it’s enabling them to be able to ‘hear’ me better. Where this tip really came in handy was years later when I appeared in Las Vegas.

That experience was still a long way away. I still had a lot more to learn.

T
he international space-race began in earnest when American President Kennedy challenged the USSR to be the first nation to place a man on the moon. Managing to launch the first cosmonaut in 1961, the smiles on the faces of the jubilant Russians soon faded when the USA followed eight years later with the first human landing on the moon. The Apollo command module touched down on 21 July 1969 with Neil Armstrong making his ‘giant leap for mankind’.

So turning 30 was a significant time for me, not for all the commonly depressing ‘Oh my God, my youth is over’ reasons, but because I was at last a full-time professional entertainer. Well, I hoped I entertained ‘em. Looking back, I suppose it was an inevitable journey given that all I did in my spare time was magic, magic, magic. Plus my kind of entertaining with magic was different, thanks to Bruce Forsyth, although he didn’t know it. I treated the audience as though they were at a party. I would be cheeky to them, they could be cheeky to me and together we had fun. There was a particular market for this, as no one
else in the country presented magic in the way that I did and I enjoyed the audience’s enjoyment.

Although the applause felt good, it was not the reason I did the job, I just enjoyed being on stage. Years later, the best description of this came from Voronin, who was the artistic director of a theatre in Kiev. In his clipped English and struggling to find the right words, he said, ‘Paul, I lorv to vatch you in the stage. It is liking vatching the fish in the water.’ He was right, I am very much at home when the stage lights go on. And any performer savours the nice things people say, it protects you from the critics’ cruelty. Lord Delfont once said that I had the ability to turn the Opera House in Blackpool, which seats over 3,000, into a living room. Isn’t that nice? Thank you, Bernie.

The reason I had decided to turn full-time professional was because I had an offer of a summer season show at the Cosy Nook Theatre in Newquay, Cornwall. I had more than enough club dates in the diary and I thought the summer season would carry me through until the autumn and by then I would have picked up more dates.

With all the showbusiness work that was coming in, it was increasingly difficult to get home. In fact, home didn’t feel like it belonged to me any more, merely a place where my three sons, Paul, Martin and Gary, stayed with their mum. I visited them as often as I could and they were well loved by Jackie and myself, but our marriage had now drifted so far apart that we had to face the truth that it really was over between us. Now we prepared to cut the final cords that tied us.

On the last day that I said goodbye to Jackie and the family, I had more than a lump in my throat. Admitting it was over was the hardest thing of all. Of course, I would see them all again and again, particularly the boys on a regular basis, but even though Jackie and I were not happy together, somewhere deep inside I still wished it wasn’t happening.

It took the most enormous effort for me to leave the house and the kids behind and I tried to hang on to myself and not show the lads how upset I was. As I got into the car, I couldn’t hold back any longer and I drove around the corner only to stop a few hundred yards later as the tears flowed. Sitting alone in the car, I cried my eyes out and it took some while before I composed myself enough to drive away safely. That happened every time I visited in the years to come. I really missed those lads.

It would have been miserable for the boys if we had stayed together, as they would have been subjected to us rowing all the time. I also had a belief that I could earn more money ‘on the road’, although for the first couple of years I frequently slept in the back of my car to save on digs money so that I could send more home. It was several years before I stopped living out of a suitcase and found a permanent home I could really call my own.

So it was the failure of the marriage that drove me into showbusiness and not, as in many other cases, showbusiness that ruined the marriage. It was at exactly the same time that I closed the door on my marriage, the door opened with the summer that now lay before me.

The billing for the theatre, neatly built on the side of the promenade, included the singer Monica Robbins, two comedians, Don Mundy and Alan Mills, a high-speed roller-skating act called The Skating Valentines and me. Casson was a great believer in old-style variety and insisted that we did four different shows a week, with a complete change the following week as well. He thought that holidaymakers would come to the theatre more than once during their two-week break. They didn’t, but the show was very successful.

I also had to present ‘Uncle Paul’s Children’s Showtime’ on several afternoons as well as the evening performances. It depended whether it rained or not.

I got a shock when I joined the production. In the world of
the amateur you rehearse all year and do a week. The ‘pros’ rehearse a week and do a year! Well, a season. The difference is that everybody arrives knowing their acts and their requirements so well that the only thing you have to learn are the links. In this show I was also in the comedy sketches, behind Monica with the other guys singing the backing and working as a stooge for The Skating Valentines.

‘You just walk across at this moment in the act and, as you are walking, we’ll both pick you up under your arms and whiz you round,’ they nonchalantly explained. ‘As you are going around you climb to the top of us looking as though you are trying to get off. Just make sure you don’t look down, or out, but that you just keep your focus on one of us. Then you won’t get dizzy. But when you do get off, act dizzy as it will get us all a big laugh.’

I didn’t have to act. I spent the whole summer nauseous. I knew I could go up and down on roller-coasters, but I found I couldn’t go round and round and I got very sick. Unfortunately, there was no one else in the show that could do the job for them, so I was stuck with it and lived in constant fear of throwing up on stage all season.

My own spot hadn’t changed over many years of using simple, everyday household items, which I knew the audience could relate to. My act involved using a box of tissues, odd bits of rope, a couple of eggs, lemons and some walnuts. The cleaners threw my act out three times during the season thinking it was a load of old rubbish. Who am I to argue? I then had to go round Woolworth’s to buy my props again.

The other surprise was Monica. I wasn’t looking for a relationship but we hit it off straight away. Well, perhaps not straight away. I had taken to wearing all black at this time of my life. Black shoes, black socks, black trousers, black roll-neck and even (what a prat) black leather gloves all day long. To those
who had been in the business for some time I must have looked a right wally. I thought I looked mysterious! Monica decided to take me down a peg or two and, in doing so, we became more than the best of friends. She also found me digs and generally looked after this showbusiness virgin.

By now, the shop had been sold but there had been a mistake in the transaction and somewhere along the line the stock had not been sold at the value it should have been. The stock was included in the sale price of the shop and I owed a lot of people a lot of money. The show at Newquay only paid me £35 a week and I was in a deep depression. It was Monica who telephoned everyone I owed and worked out repayment deals and, although it took a couple of years, she really sorted me out and put me back on my feet.

The show had comedy sketches. These were great. They were really mini plays with gags all the way through and were the theatrical equivalent of television’s sitcoms. I was in all of them but then I was written out of most and finished up in only one. More depression. I was obviously no good. Monica came to the rescue again.

‘You don’t know much about showbusiness, do you? You’re out because you’re funny. You can’t be funnier than the comedian.’

When, in my final sketch, my lines were dropped so that I had nothing to say, I turned my ‘silent’ policeman role into the campest, most effeminate copper of all time and still got laughs. Don’t you just love showbiz?

Newquay itself was a real culture shock. I had spent all of my life in the North and did not expect to find the weather so mild and the coastline so beautiful. Even the flowers in Newquay opened at least a month earlier than they did up North. I loved to go on long, early-morning walks to watch the seals as they dipped and dived through the waves. I actually
felt a tinge of resentment towards my parents. Why did we live in the North when there was so much natural splendour in the South? Then, of course, I felt guilty about the resentment. On the other hand, are you like me? I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone wants to live in the Arctic Circle or in the shadow of a volcano or on an earthquake fracture line.

It was just after I started working in Newquay that I got a letter inviting me to come to an
Opportunity Knocks
audition. That was the major talent show on TV at the time and I had no idea how they had heard about me. All the letter said was that they had heard I was ‘different’.

The famous Hughie Green, who had enabled a lot of artistes to become television stars, presented this ITV networked show. The Skating Valentines had lent me a stretch lurex suit to wear so that I would look ‘professional’ but I never got into the gear. The whole affair was so badly organised that I just wore my jeans and sweatshirt. Note I had dropped the all-black gear.

The room was full of other hopefuls and one wall was stacked high with guitar amplifiers. A row of magicians in tailcoats had coo-coo-ing noises emanating from under their clothes. Having previously explained that I had only a few moments as I had to get back to the theatre to work, I went to the front of the queue with the letter that the production company had sent me. It seems that they needed some professional acts to fill out the programmes between the amateurs (or was it the other way around?) to get a cheaper show.

The receptionist, hassled about the utter confusion of several hundred acts, all desperate to be picked, wouldn’t listen to me, gave me a number and told me to return to the queue. Then I spotted the long table with Hughie Green sitting in the middle, with his assistants Doris and Len on either side. A very young girl was standing with her hands clasped in front of her, singing
in an incredibly beautiful soprano voice. Having finished, Hughie called her over to the desk and, congratulating her on her superb voice, handed over his business card.

‘In the next 12 months,’ he instructed, ‘I want you to go out and sing for people, for up to now I think you have only sung at school?’

She nodded.

‘Well, my love, you are still a bit stiff and proper. When you have more experience of audiences, you will have learnt to relax. Then come back and see me.’

Next up was a guy who couldn’t sing to save his life, but he was beautifully dressed. It was awful, out of tune, out of tempo and the worst thing of all was that the singer thought he was wonderful. Hughie couldn’t stand more than two verses and stopped him in his tracks.

‘Excuse me, do you sing in the clubs?’

‘Yes, Mr Green, I do.’

‘Well, do showbusiness a favour and get out of it.’

Harsh words and the room was more than a bit stunned. Hughie was a hard, but fair man and he was right. This man should not have been taking other people’s money when he was so bad.

It was almost as if no one dared to go on next so I took the opportunity to walk to the middle of the floor and started my act. Hughie stopped me.

‘Who on earth are you?’

‘I have this letter, sir, and I’m short for time as I’m on stage tonight. Just let me show you what I do and I’ll be out of your way.’

As the panel watched my short collection of tricks, they laughed and clapped along the way. Four minutes later and I was preparing to leave when one of the panel said they liked what I did and I would be getting an invitation to be on the show.

True to their word, I received their letter a few days later, stating the date that I would be on the show and that I would come in second place. Fees and expenses were to be paid, and as it was one of Hughie’s special programmes for the forces, it was to be done on an aircraft carrier. Of course, with my army experiences on the aircraft carriers in Hong Kong, this was the perfect location for me.

What an eye-opener that show was for me. I got changed underneath an aeroplane. The make-up was done from a suitcase. I learned that television is not all that well organised.
Opportunity Knocks
was famous for the contraption at the end of each show that recorded the audience’s level of clapping and thus produced a studio winner. The ‘clapometer’, which occurred to me probably meant something completely different to the boys in the Navy but I didn’t do the gag, would go up and down on a sliding scale. I had always assumed it was some sort of electronic device. It turned out to be a long cardboard box with a slot in the side. The needle was attached at one end to a rubber bungee and at the other to a piece of string. The ‘engineer’ pulled the string and made the needle go to the numbers on the list supplied by the production company. As per my previous information, I came second.

The whole affair added nothing to my career other than experience, although for years afterwards, Hughie Green and
Opportunity Knocks
constantly claimed to have ‘discovered’ me, whereas I was paid to come second! The power of the media was also underlined when a lady in a sweet shop recognised me the following day. She was the only one who did. For a long time after that, I used to ask the audiences, ‘Put your hands up if you ever voted for anyone on
Opportunity Knocks
.’ For years nobody put their hands up and then, one night, a man did. I continued, ‘For somebody that you didn’t know …’ and his hand went down again. Was it all a fiddle? I don’t know. What it did
provide was a vehicle for new talent to be seen so I suppose that made it all worthwhile.