Paul Daniels (21 page)

It was the drunks in the audience that were always the real problem. Jack Sharp, a Northern agent, who had settled in Essex, booked me in London to perform in an East End pub. Arriving early as usual, I got out of the car and was suddenly enveloped by an avalanche of noise. It was coming from the pub where I was due to perform. Gritting my teeth for what I would find, I grabbed my magic box and suit bag and entered the lion’s den. Trying to make myself heard above the cacophony of noise, one of the bouncers pointed upstairs.

The upper room went down into a kind of ‘well’ in front of the stage, with a balcony around the edge. Even though it was quite early, there was no sign of sobriety anywhere; every member of the audience was seriously sloshed. As I looked down, the floor was awash with spilt beer and fag ash, with punters sluicing their way through it as they created a constant stream to the toilets.

Moving backstage, the compere grabbed me in a panic and asked how quickly I could get on. I soon found out what the party was in aid of. West Ham and Fulham had both qualified for the FA Cup that afternoon and these men were celebrating this success as fully as possible. Was he seriously thinking I would work out there? Yes, apparently he was and, not being in the mood to lose a night’s cash, I prepared myself for the onslaught.

‘What’s the panic?’ I asked.

‘I’ve already had two acts arrive who refused to go on,’ he explained.

‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes,’ I smiled, trying not to turn green.

‘Great. I’ll give you a build-up, but don’t forget you’re on for half an hour. If you don’t do half an hour, you won’t get a penny!’

Glancing back out into the swirling mass of bodies, I knew I’d be lucky to last half a minute. The trio playing on-stage could not be heard above the din of shouting, cursing and screaming.

The compere battled his way on stage and desperately tried to get the attention of the audience in order to start the cabaret, but it seemed impossible. Way off in the distance, I heard a kind of murmuring sound and I realised that this was my introduction. The band played me on, but I still couldn’t hear them. It was a nightmare.

I walked straight up to the microphone and tried to start the act, while watching the room like a hawk. A few moments in and the first beer mat came whistling across the room toward me. Rocking my head to one side, I dodged it just as an ashtray arrived from somewhere else.

I’d had a small clock inserted in the top of my box so that I could keep an exact eye on my timing. I kept this for years and gradually gained a reputation for having perfect time-keeping skills on stage. Company managers on future shows were to think that I was a genius, because when they asked me to do twelve minutes or nine, I would do exactly that. It wasn’t until later that they discovered my secret.

Now, looking at my box, I could see that I still had 25 minutes left to get through before payday. Then I had a burst of inspiration. Taking the mike off the stand, I risked life and limb by going down into the alcohol-sodden audience and made straight for one particular table. Here, one man was just about capable of staying upright on his chair and I sang very quietly and purposefully to this one guy.

‘I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air …’

Out of his drunken stupor, his eyes refocused and he began to join in. His slurred tones were almost recognisable, so I encouraged him to sing louder. He glanced at his mates struggling to stay alive either side of him and they joined him until three or four were singing along. Another verse and another table joined in, then another and then another. I had picked the right football team and the right anthem. Now the whole room was singing their anthem as loud and as seriously as they could. I sang the bubble song with them over and over again for a solid 25 minutes and then made my exit with a standing, stomping ovation.

The compère immediately threw on the next act, who happened to be a stripper. She was greeted with loud boos and cries of ‘Bring the singer back on!’ (Suddenly I’m a singer!)

The poor girl was jeered and shouted at even though by now she was topless. Suddenly, and I swear this is true, she grabbed the mike and started to sing, ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles …’

Suddenly the whole audience stopped in its tracks and joined in with the singing once more. Twenty minutes later she, too, made her exit to a standing ovation. Don’cha just love showbusiness?

The event that really changed my life, possibly more than anything else, happened on a rare night off when I agreed to drive another comic to a gig in Essex. His car had broken down and I was happy to oblige. It was a hen party, full of women, most of whom were far filthier than men will ever be. They had booked a male stripper, and how the feminist movement can blame men for looking at nude women I shall never know. One of my jobs at Dad’s cinema was repainting the toilets and we had to repaint the Ladies five times as frequently as the Men’s. When I asked my dad why we had to paint the Ladies toilets so often, he said it was because the women had both hands free to write with!

I was the only man at the hen party, standing at the bar with my usual Coca-Cola, when a Viking suddenly roared on to the stage. The women started shouting at the guy dressed in furry costume, furry boots and with horns on his head. After about ten minutes, all he had left on were his boots and horns. As he waved his chopper around, the women were screaming at such a high pitch I thought all the glasses in the bar would shatter. As I watched this man, I saw the light. Just as some people say they become born-again Christians, in a flash of light it suddenly dawned on me that no matter how tall, short, fat, thin, or bald I became, I would never look as stupid as that guy on the stage at that moment. It occurred to me that there would always be someone dafter than me in the world and this revelation did wonders for my self-confidence. I became a born-again extrovert.

Speaking of strippers, whenever I was working in the North East, my base for this period in my life was the Roker View Guest House in Sunderland. It was from there that I would travel out each day to the various clubs that, by this time, were starting to change once more. Later, when the onset of the glamorous and more popular nightclubs meant that the working men’s venues descended into a spiral of seediness, the digs became home to the strippers. These girls became the normal form of entertainment, with an act or two thrown in between. I noticed that over a period of months, any new girls who moved into stripping changed from bubbly, happy personalities, to being a bit odd. Each one lost their spark and became introverted within a cocoon, which made them seem less intelligent as the jading process overtook them. I don’t know why, it is just something that I noticed.

Bob Butler, who was handling my work under the Artists Management banner telephoned me one day to say that an offer of Jersey was on the table and was I interested? The timing
was perfect and as long as I didn’t have to spend the whole time on roller-skates I would be happy, I explained. Bob seemed like a nice guy and I got to know him well over the weeks of negotiations that followed. It was his wife who surprised me.

An act going around the clubs called ‘Zareda’ had a boyfriend called Johnny St Claire. Johnny would sing in the first half and help set up Zareda’s spot for the second. He was a clairvoyant who did a clever mindreading act and mental manipulation and could very effectively reveal private details about members of his audience.

Unaware of how seriously some people take this stuff, I was horrified when I heard that Bob’s wife asked for ‘guidance’ each week. I had to explain gently to Bob that Zareda, the great seer, was actually a guy named Ozzy Ray, an ex-pantomime dame. Having walked into Mac’s Magic Shop in Seaton Carew, Ozzy had purchased a fake blindfold and a book on ‘cold-reading’. According to Mac, whom I knew very well, he paid ten shillings for the lot. What an investment that proved to be. The book taught him the ability to be able to tell things about a person that supposedly you could not have possibly known. Clues that the cold-reader assimilates about a person include what they wear, the quality of their clothing and, in particular, their shoes; as well as their cleanliness, body language and style. Age gives a million clues as well, even being able to select names that they are likely to know because each generation has its own popular names. Having studied this book, Ozzy found he could decipher a lot of information about a person and the more he did it, the better he got, soon becoming an expert in the field. Maybe when these people have done it that long, they start to believe it themselves.

Bob’s wife had difficulty accepting it, but I thought that if ever I didn’t make it with my conjuring tricks, I should go in for this. If one woman was prepared to pay good money to a
stranger, how many other hundreds of women were doing it too? It does make me sad, in this enlightened age, that people still believe in this over and above the fun of being entertained. I seriously think that our schools must be failing our children if they teach them advanced mathematics but don’t warn them about being conned. If you are into that so-called psychic stuff, do yourself a favour – treat it as being for entertainment purposes only and get some books on how to do it yourself. It may well peel layers of belief away from your eyes.

Arriving at the Sunshine Hotel in Jersey, the air was clear and the sky was blue; what a lovely start to our season. Happily for me, the first act on the bill was Monica Robbins. The second act on the bill was Paul Daniels and the third was Bal Moane, a tough Irish comedian. The evening’s entertainment was rounded off with Dougie Brown, probably the greatest ad-libber I have ever met.

On opening night, Dougie did not go down too well with the audience. The reason for this was that the audience had been laughing at me for 45 minutes, then at Bal for another 45 minutes, so that by the time they got to Dougie they were ‘laughed-out’. I suggested to the owner of the hotel, who was also the entertainments manager, that I went on first followed by Bal, then Monica and finishing with Dougie. This would give the audience a break in the laughter before the star comic. The manager disagreed and simply swapped the two comics over, with the result that Dougie went very well and Bal died. This was the way it happened all summer, with the two of them alternating and each one dreading the night they were on last.

Dougie and Bal decided that I should play golf. I couldn’t afford to buy a set of clubs as I was still sending money back home and there was never much left over. I therefore bought one club a week, so the first week I went and played with my 5-iron. The second week was much better because I had a 5-iron
and a putter, and so on. I was never any good at golf and I still play that way.

Dougie and I went out one day to play, not on our normal public course, but on one of the posh ones. Maybe you don’t know, but when you arrive on the first tee it is standard practice to drop your ball into a tube with all the other people in the queue. When your ball gets to the end of the tube, it is your team’s turn to play. We dropped the ball in the tube. We waited. Just as our ball dropped into position, a very posh team of four golfers, in plus-fours no less, moved ahead of us on to the tee. We pointed out the error of their ways and they pointed out that they were members of the club. We pointed out that that made no difference as their club had accepted our green fees and we were next. They gave in, with much ill grace.

Dougie teed up and hit the ball well down the middle. It just so happened that I had bought some new balls as well as adding another club to my set. To the members’ horror, they stood and watched as I unwrapped a ball then removed a wrapped club from the bag and carefully removed the cellophane. In a moment of inspiration, I remembered that in the large pocket of the golf bag I had a new book by John Jacobs on how to play golf. I unwrapped that, cracked the spine so that it would lay open and put it on to the ground in front of the ball. Pretending to read it, I gripped the club, looked at the book, swung the club back, stopped, bent over and turned the page, then stood up with the club still raised and swung at the ball. It went down the middle. Thinking about my game nowadays, maybe I should go back to that technique. I picked up my tee, doffed my cap, said, ‘Good morning, gentlemen’ and went on my way, thinking, ‘thank God I hit it.’

Another winter of touring the working men’s clubs and I was back on Jersey. This season was spent doing the first half of the show at the very popular Tam’s Hotel, and then everyone
on the first half of the bill would shoot off around the island touring a different small hotel every evening and leaving, in my view, the greatest cabaret act England ever produced – Ronnie Dukes and Rickie Lee – to do the second half. Rickie was a superb singer, while Ronnie, a little, bald-headed, rotund man, drove along a superb one-hour comedy show with his battleaxe mother-in-law sitting at the piano acting as stooge.

Doing a different hotel every night, I designed portable scenery out of boxes with pipes that extended holding up glittery curtains providing a colourful backdrop. ‘Tam’s a-Poppin’’ was the name of our ‘resident’ show and I could never figure out why it allowed its first half to tour the island because, if you had seen that for free in your hotel, I don’t think that you would have paid to see it again at Tam’s, even if you did get to see Ronnie and Rickie.

After finishing our own touring gig, we would return each night for our own entertainment in the form of the resident bandleader. This guy would provide the dance music after the cabaret, but would inevitably get slowly plastered as the night wore on. We would all watch him from the balcony, as no sooner had he got the tune going, than he would disappear into the kitchens behind the stage curtain. This was where he must have kept his supply of liquid refreshment for each time he returned he was a little worse for wear.

Each return to the stage would be in time to start the band on the next sequence or play a bit of keyboard and even trumpet. By 2.00am, his final duty would be to play the National Anthem. I wish shows still did this, as it would give us back some sense of national pride that I believe we have lost even though this guy turned it into a wonderful piece of entertainment.