Paul Daniels (22 page)

As he stood to attention centre stage, barely able to keep the trumpet pressed to his mouth, the notes slowly poured forth. It
was the slowest version of the National Anthem of all time. The audience, half-cut themselves, struggled to their feet and swayed in the gentle breeze. The moaning sound continued and, perhaps because everybody was in a similar state of intoxication, the fact that the tune was hardly recognisable didn’t really matter.

As the final notes of the first verse struggled out of the tortured instrument and died away, the audience collapsed into their seats, only to hear the tune continue into the next verse. The indignity of a sozzled audience trying to pull themselves back on to their feet once more was all too much for us and we collapsed into hysterics each and every night we witnessed this absurd farce.

The following year, I was invited back to Jersey again, this time at the Hotel De France and without Monica on the bill. She was working somewhere else on the island and I started to chat up a dancer called Melody from our show. I’ll give you a tip: if ever you are going out with two people at the same time, make sure they don’t have the same initial. In my case, my mouth would get to the ‘M’ and then keep it going until I could work out which one I was talking about – ‘Mmmmmmonica’ or ‘Mmmmmmmelody’.

The venue had its own purpose-built cabaret room, but the owner had decided that he would do a lot of the internal design himself. The theatre seats he designed had to be fastened to the floor in case of a fire, but the base of the seat wouldn’t go all the way down. For the first week the audience sat with their heads cricked round to the side and their knees up in the air.

The ‘projection room’ that housed the follow-spots had been built too high on the outside of the cabaret room, so the holes the lamps came through were at floor level and the spot operators had to sit on the floor alongside the spotlights. Perhaps the manager had delusions of grandeur for instead of
the normal follow-spots used for cabaret-type venues, the manager had purchased ‘super-troupers’ which are extremely powerful spots used at rock venues like Wembley. The high temperature from these burnt through the heat-resistant red film placed in front of the light each night. This gel, known as ‘surprise pink’ in the trade, prevents an artiste from looking pasty and ill in the white light, giving them the appearance of being tanned and healthy. With a little bit of make-up and one of these gels, its amazing how many wrinkles and years you can lose!

The most important thing is never to look directly into the stage lights, as the effect is like staring at 20 car headlights and can be very disorientating.

Having warned a visiting singer, Stuart Gillies, about the power of the spots, Gillies insisted he wanted it white. If you put in about six layers of red, you’d still only get a pale pink because it was so strong, I tried to clarify. No, he insisted on open white. Rather him than me, I thought, and waited to see what would happen.

As his opening music started, the stage lights swung into action and the backstage introduction announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome the star of our show … Stuart Gillies!’

He walked on and they hit him with these two white super-troupers. For a moment, he was stunned with the impact and, looking like a bleached ghost, started to get dizzy. He stumbled through his first number and did a great performance without being able to see anything other than the tip of his nose for the rest of the evening.

The resident show consisted of myself, a dance troupe called The Trendsetters, the Ivy Benson Band, and the top-of-the-bill was Michael Bentine. Although something of an oddity, I really liked Michael a lot, though I never considered him a good
summer show act. He would probably have been the greatest after-dinner speaker of all time, but his style was not really suited to summer season. It was nicely funny, but it wasn’t the belly laugh stuff that summer holidaymakers seek, so it was a bit of a waste of his talents.

I met a lot of great acts who admitted that they couldn’t work different types of venues, particularly the clubs. The London nightclub scene is a million miles apart from the working men’s; the culture difference is so great. I noticed that every venue needed its own technique to make a performance work. I don’t think the London acts learnt the rules of the society that they were moving in, having tried to stick with the culture conventions they had come from. I realised early on that the social order of the clubs was incredibly amateur; the lads were not posh, though not stupid either. Hence l arrived early to set my own lights and then gave them a good, driving, funny, but technically and visibly skilful show. When I moved into the nightclub scene, the audience was full of travelling salesmen, businessmen and couples having a smart night out, mixed in with the local townies. I changed my style and my pace accordingly, with my language and gags becoming a little more ornate. On a short cruise before my summer season, I noted how the audiences there preferred the more subtle jokes.

In theatres, there was this huge chasm between me and the audience called an orchestra pit! Most club acts, me included, were held back by the distance to the front row after being used to having audiences come right up to your feet. I was really aware of this problem of bridging the gap between the crowd and me until I went to see Cliff Richard perform. As I sat in the stalls, I sat thinking, ‘Wow! From down here there’s no pit.’ From the audience point of view, Cliff created intimacy and made his audience think he was singing just for them. From then on, the orchestra pit disappeared for me.

When I got to television, the technique changed again. So many of my guests would be nervous because they were going to entertain about 15 million people. That’s a big audience so I told them that they were wrong to think like that. On television, I had noticed that I was entertaining one to six people sitting about 12ft away from the screen in their living room. For the life of me, nowadays, I cannot understand presenters who shout at the camera as if they are in the Albert Hall!

Before the Hotel de France season started, I had already been warned that Michael Bentine was a really difficult person to get on with and this was a rumour I noticed percolated down from almost every star who existed. ‘Val Doonican is a shit,’ I was told. ‘Don’t work with Max Bygraves, he’s unbearable,’ another time. ‘Sacha Distel is horrendous,’ Everyone at the top, apparently, was nasty. I began to think that if I really wanted to make it in the business, then I had to be a ‘shit’ as well. Then I met Michael Bentine and he was a really nice man, so I had to re-think my understanding of this type of gossip.

As the years went on and I worked with Val and Max and Sacha, I realised that they weren’t ‘shits’, they just wanted it right. The whole performance rests on the shoulders of these stars and if the show isn’t right, they are the ones who get blamed. The audience doesn’t go home saying, ‘Well, that sound man made a mess of that show!’ They go home saying, `Wasn’t Val’s show awful!’

Consequently, the top-of-the-bill always has to push people who are treating the business as a bit of an ordinary day-to-day job, into the realisation that the audience has done us the greatest of honours and bought a ticket. They have paid a lot of money to be entertained so we should work to the best of our abilities.

During the season, Michael Bentine did me several favours, one in particular without knowing it. Before the season started,
he came to see me work. By this time I had introduced an addition to my act that was a big winner with the audience. I was stunned at having seen a brilliant and powerful mind-reader called Maurice Fogel. This guy was a master of his art and, even if you knew how he did it, he would still make you believe he was reading minds. A great dramatic actor, one of the many great highlights of his act was catching the bullet in the teeth. It’s a trick. Don’t try it. Maurice, however, didn’t need this style of trick other than for publicity. He could make your hair stand on end just with a blackboard and a piece of chalk.

Despite my admiration of the Great Fogel, another of his effects was a spot where volunteers from the audience would be jumping up and down, on and off chairs, as if driven by some invisible force. To me, and to Billy Hygate who was with me, this was so badly done that it was glaringly obvious what was happening and indeed how Fogel was doing it. I had read of others doing similar routines and always skipped past it in the magic books as being unworkable. Maybe it was only the night I saw it when it was so awful, but as I watched a light bulb flashed on in my head. In that split-second, a routine developed in my mind that was to become the major feature of my live shows from that moment on and I don’t think I have changed a word of the presentation from the first night.

The performance was to become known as The Electric Chairs. They were not electric, though I do know of a frustrated magician who had some made! By the time Michael Bentine came to see me perform pre-season, this 20-minute piece was the great climax of my spot, sending the audience into fits of laughter. Michael had the wisdom to ban me from using this routine for his forthcoming season on Jersey. Top-of-the-bills have the right to say to another act on their show, ‘don’t sing that song, don’t tell that joke.’

It wasn’t so much the ability to ‘top’ what I had done with
something funnier, it was the fact that when I left the stage, the whole audience was talking about the chair routine. This was an almost impossible situation for any act to walk into.

I thought I was in trouble. I had grown to rely on that routine as a guaranteed closer. Talk about a panic. What to do? What I hadn’t realised, and please forgive the conceit, was that it wasn’t the routine that was funny. It was me. My reactions, my expressions, my surprise and my body language all created a comic viewpoint on the magic I presented. I had learnt, almost unconsciously, to be funny with any piece of business. This realisation dawned on me after a few shows without the chairs and I had a great season.

Years later, I read a book by the great close-up magician Al Goshman. As a ‘table-hopper’, he wrote how he thought his routine with silver dollars appearing under salt cellars was necessary for him to be an entertainer. One night, when few diners were there, he didn’t do his usual routine, but found they still laughed and were baffled. He, too, discovered the secret. It is never the trick, it’s never the illusion, it is never the song. It is always the performer. Ordinary singers can take a great song and it will be ordinary. Sinatra could take the same song and make it something special.

So it was that Bentine had done me a good turn without realising it. I now knew that I was a funny person and this gave me the confidence I was to need in the years that lay ahead. Oddly for such a nice man, Michael would vanish immediately he came off stage and not be available for the signing of autographs. I told the fans he was in the shower and that I would take the autograph books and pictures in to be signed. I signed them.

He had a cleverly built comedy flea circus that I carried on stage for him each night. It had no real fleas, but relied on concealed ropes, pulleys, switches and motors to make it look
as if fleas were performing on tightropes and jumping across sand dunes. Years later, after the television production team had presented our own flea circus on television, Michael wrote to me accusing me of stealing his idea. It made me very sad, because we were such good friends and I never intended to upset him. I knew the idea was not original to Michael. If you are in the magic business you are virtually brought up with fake flea circuses, but I still hired a researcher to look into it. We then traced a flea circus back to the mid 1800s. You can’t really put a copyright on that.

Half-way through the Jersey season, the cast was told that a legend was in the audience. It was Tommy Cooper. The hairs on the back of my head stood to attention at the sound of his name and I couldn’t wait to meet him. Before the show, this 6ft 6in giant strode into my dressing room and gave me a huge grin.

‘’Allo!’ rumbled my hero on the way through into Michael’s room.

He then went and sat in the audience and I think I did the show more like an audition than a performance. That was silly because Tommy Cooper needed a funny magician like he needed another fez. After the show, a young man came backstage.

‘Mr Cooper would like to see you. I’m his son.’

Following him to where his comedy genius father was sitting up on the side balcony, Tommy motioned for me to join him and offered me a drink. ‘No thank you, sir, I don’t drink.’

‘OK then. Just give me the frog.’

The cardboard, origami-type frog was one of the items I had replaced the electric chairs with and went down very well with the audience. I used this little puppet-like creature as a comic and unusual way of finding a spectator’s playing card. The green frog had a character all of its own and raised a lot of laughs along the way and I was very hesitant to part with it – even to a master like Tommy.

‘I can’t give you the frog, Mr Cooper, because I can’t do my usual routine and this frog is the only one I have and I can’t get another one.’

‘I’ll show you a card trick,’ replied Tommy in his wonderful bumbling voice. At which point he proceeded to show me a card routine, which I not only knew but also knew how it was done. ‘Give me the frog.’

‘I can’t, sir. I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll show you another trick.’

The myth that Tommy was a brilliant magician was untrue. He was competent and had a great knowledge of magic, but if that were all he had ever chosen to do, he would never have made it into the big-time. He was a brilliant clown and I was later to discover that when I purchased his old scripts, they were covered with hand-written notes. These comments showed how well thought out his routines were, even to the point of the notes describing when he should look – left, pause; look right, pause; look at audience, pause; shrug, pause. It was all in the scripts.

‘Give me the frog.’

Seeing me repeatedly hesitate, he walked down on to the stage and said, ‘tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a whole routine.’