Paul Daniels (24 page)

‘If my money is inside this pack of Polos, I will kiss your arse!’

He snapped the pack in half and his note was inside.

‘Your place or mine?’ I asked and walked off, leaving Bernard speechless for the second time in a few minutes.

After the recording, Johnny came up to me and said that I was either a lucky bastard or dead clever. Apparently, throughout my spot I had forward- and back-referenced all the time so the piece could not be edited at all. Johnny took the decision to air the whole twelve minutes at a time when nobody got more than four. Twelve minutes on prime-time television was unheard of. Overnight I was a ‘name’. People knew who I was because, also, throughout the spot, I had kept repeating my name.

No one becomes a star on one television show. The day after the
Wheeltappers and Shunters
, the telephone was ringing non-stop at Mervyn’s office and I was recognised on the street, but I knew that it would be a one-show wonder and that I could easily disappear back into clubland. If I was to climb the ladder of fame, then I knew I had to be seen regularly.

On the following Monday, Mervyn and I started to get a sense of what was brewing. The phones were going crazy with bookers and people wanting interviews. By Tuesday the fan mail was pouring in. As we sat in the office opening the enormous influx of fan mail later that week, Mervyn gasped. One of the letters was a very sexually explicit letter from a woman in Bognor Regis and made
Forum
magazine read like Enid Blyton. Mervyn, bless him, was shocked and asked if he should telephone the police, but I suggested that he book me for a summer season in Bognor. That same day, Johnny Hamp telephoned and said that the reaction to my appearance had been so good, he wanted to book me for another programme. It was on this second show, where I did about 15 minutes, that
Johnny came up to me afterwards and said quietly in my ear, ‘You’re not lucky, are you?’ He had spotted my forward-and back-referencing technique again.

That didn’t stop him giving me a 20-minute
Wheeltappers
and eventually he gave me the whole show. Thanks, Johnny.

In the meantime, odd television appearances followed, including a guest appearance on the
David Nixon Show
the same year. David was a superb television magician and I saw how he was so at home in the studio. He made the viewer feel as if they had been invited into his front room. David also knew his specialised craft intimately and was acquainted with exactly where each camera was, which way to turn for the next
mid-shot
and what was long shot and close-up. I went home from that one and got some more books on television direction.

In those early days of watching myself on television, it was a strange experience. It didn’t feel like me on the screen. It was someone else and was a bit like when you listen to your own voice on a tape recorder, sounding different to what you expect. So, occasionally, when ‘that man’ on the screen did something that I knew was clever, I would talk to the screen out loud, go ‘Yeah’ and clap and encourage the magician I was watching. This mostly happened when a clever move, invisible to the audience, was made. I soon realised that others in the room, family, friends or other acts in digs, thought that I was being big-headed, but I wasn’t. It just wasn’t ‘me’. Sometimes, when the ‘man’ could have been faster, or better, or said something naff, I was also his biggest critic. I learnt to watch myself when I was alone.

Several TV special appearances followed over the next couple of months, including a series with the strange title of
The Lunar Debating Society.
This had temporarily replaced the late-night ITV epilogue slot and featured a different entertainer each week. I was booked for a week of close-up magic and followed
a week of Spike Milligan reading his poems. I haven’t got a copy of the
Lunar
show and I wish I had. I thought the format was great. A one-off television special for New Year’s Eve then followed for Granada, where I put the whole show together myself and the cost of mounting this was more than I got paid. It made me consider the fact that television artistes should get paid a lot of money, because they entertain a lot of people.

For this hour-long programme, I put together the whole show and had complete control over every aspect of it. This caused some to suggest I was conceited, but I just wanted it right. I’m sure my hard Northern accent didn’t help and my blunt way of working probably upset people, but I was always very short of time. I came from the streets and that’s the straight way in which I communicated to those around me. It saddened me when some felt they couldn’t work with me, because as any artiste in showbusiness will tell you, we all need to be liked.

I designed a special rotating doors illusion that swung round each time to reveal a girl standing in the quadrant. It could produce seven or eight girls all dressed in their flowery costumes and looked very effective. Having sent the design in to the television special effects workshops, I was amazed when I arrived at the studio to discover this illusion, which was at least three times the size. The builders had misread the instructions interpreting centimetres for inches and it was so big we could have produced a hundred girls or more out of it. We still used the effect as there wasn’t time to remake it, but I needed four crewmen to help me swing open the doors because they were so heavy.

An oddity in this show was an illusion called the Ghost Cabinet. This was a small, curtained cabinet and anything placed inside changed in some way. A man from the audience was invited up and he examined the box and then placed a piece of rope inside. The curtains were closed and opened and the rope
was knotted. A white glove was placed inside and the man sat in front of the curtains. The white glove came out and caressed him. Immediately the dancing girls on the show came on and stripped the box down to small pieces to show there was nobody there but, of course, the Invisible Ghost. What made this so odd was that the Director shot it on the wrong lens.

Have you ever noticed in athletics or during a horse race on television the runners look very bunched up but when you see the same group from the side they are all spread out? That’s because the first shot is taken from the front on a telephoto lens and that foreshortens the distances. The same thing happened with the trick. The cabinet, shot from the front on a telephoto lens looked as though it was right up against the back curtain and could have been worked from the back. The Director, when I pointed this out, said, ‘Yes, I see, but it isn’t worked like that, is it?’ He really didn’t understand that, in the studio, he was watching one thing but he was showing the audience something else.

The illusion was never shown and the girl inside, Nikki, (you didn’t really think it was a ghost, did you?) was paid never to be seen in an illusion that was never seen anyway. More than that, she received repeat fees every time the show was shown somewhere else in the world. She ended up getting more money than I did.

The success of the one-hour special meant the offer of an Easter show as a follow-up and I began to design this from start to finish as I was now accustomed to doing. In the middle of all this, a friend from Granada Television appeared and asked to talk to me in private. He explained that he had been present at a producer’s board meeting where my name had been discussed. Apparently, one of the directors had said that I was a bright new talent and worth hanging on to. Indeed, he had even proposed that I should be offered more money to equal
my value to the company. Another director had countered this suggestion by saying there was no need to offer more money as Paul Daniels had no idea of his worth.

I don’t often get angry. I find it doesn’t really help so I tend to laugh at stupid situations instead. I will occasionally act angry in order to get a point across as a last resort, but on this occasion I felt so betrayed I just shrugged my shoulders and smiled. Inside, with this new revelation of what the television bosses thought of me, I decided to leave. I felt somehow very let down. I had worked hard for them and I just thought that they would recognise that and reward it accordingly. Welcome to the real world of money, my son.

The next day, Mervyn started to let it be known that I was available to work for other TV companies. I was known by a lot of people at that time, but I wasn’t really a star name. The BBC expressed an interest.

They had used me in a series made in Manchester called
For My Next Trick.
The first series was taped in a deserted church in Dickenson Road and had already been written to include conjurors John Wade and Terry Seabrook with Faith Brown as the singer/stooge. I was brought in at the last moment to bring a different angle to the series, but I was horrified when I saw how the programmes had been compiled.

The idea of the series was based on
The Comedians
; another very successful Johnny Hamp show where the latest comics would tell gags which were intercut with each other. Unfortunately, not many producers or directors understand the theatre of magic, as it is a totally unique art form, and I knew before we had recorded the first programme that the idea just wouldn’t work.

Each magician would be recorded doing their complete routines, but in the editing room all the effects were intertwined with each other. For example, Terry Seabrook
borrowed five pounds and it was accidentally burnt; then it cut to John Wade doing a piece of origami; then a cut to Paul Daniels doing a line; followed by a cut to Faith Brown singing a song. The final cut would return to Terry Seabrook finding the fiver in his wallet. The disjointed format made no sense at all and jumping from the start of one trick, to the middle of another, to the end of another, just didn’t work with magic in the same way as comedy. I used a leaf out of my
Wheeltappers
notebook and quickly developed a way of presenting very short, 30-second tricks and jokes, which stayed intact and worked on their own. Terry Seabrook was a very funny magician and John Wade a very elegant one, but I was the only performer who really survived the series because I adapted to fit the format.

Even our friend Johnny Hart had a lucky escape. Johnny was obviously getting bored with his usual act and had declared an interest in doing comedy and illusions. He had refined his original routine so perfectly, but had stayed with it too long without learning too much about the rest of the business. He seemed to think that he could just buy a trick, pick it up and do it, which was a great mistake on the day he arrived at the
For My Next Trick
studio.

Having purchased a set of ‘multiplying candles’, Johnny walked on to the set with a beautifully coloured silk top hat. As we watched one of the highest-paid television magicians at that time, he proceeded to produce lit candles from thin air. Unfortunately, the candle flames shot about 2ft in the air and looked nothing like candles at all. In fact they were metal tubes filled with petrol and highly dangerous.

Apologising to audience and crew, Johnny disappeared into the backstage corridor to try to shorten the flames by flicking the candles up and down, which shot the excess petrol along the backstage corridor. This time the flame was only 5in long
and although it still didn’t seem like a real candle, it was passable, I suppose. A few moments later and he had produced two handfuls of candles all burning away and lighting up his smiling face very nicely.

With the climax of his opening piece over, Johnny blew the candles out and placed them in his silk top hat before going into a card routine. I continued to watch the escapade on a monitor as the camera cut to a close-up on Johnny. Suddenly, I noticed that the picture was getting hazy and as Johnny produced more cards he started to drop them into his hat, and as the camera widened to reveal his top hat, we saw that it was on fire. The smoke and flames coming out of the hat were so fierce that a hole had started to appear at the front.

Johnny Hart suddenly became aware that his top hat was out of control and, frantically grabbing it, ran to the backstage corridor where he had emptied the previous lot of petrol. In seconds, studio firemen and foam fire extinguishers surrounded him. I immediately bounced on to the stage and announced that there was nothing to worry about and that it was only Johnny giving one of his more extinguished performances.

Not to be outdone, Johnny turned up again two weeks later with a stock version of ‘The Zigzag Lady’. The only hitch was that every magician on the planet was presenting this famous illusion invented by the late, great genius, Robert Harbin. A new innovation in magical illusion, Zigzags were being overexposed in every cabaret, club, TV show and could be purchased virtually everywhere and everybody was presenting it in the same way.

Having had a chat with my dad, who was becoming increasingly interested in the technicalities of my props, I proposed a new way of doing the same illusion where the middle of the girl slides to one side. Once I saw that the adaptation would work, I suggested to the producer of the
programme that he wait until it was built and I would show it to him. ‘Johnny Hart is booked to do the Zigzag,’ he replied.

‘Oh, but I think you’ll be pleased with this because its different from all the rest,’ I pleaded.

‘Johnny Hart is booked to do the Zigzag,’ came the response. In truth, Johnny’s illusion was different, too. Instead of the girl’s head showing through a round hole at the front, it stuck out of the top. I noticed on the instructions enclosed with this version that it proudly stated it was a ‘design improvement so that every travelling magician can get one in the boot of his car’. I couldn’t imagine that a magician had designed this. The balance was all wrong. What had been forgotten was that it is the essential dimensions of the box and the psychology behind the trick that actually makes it work. Consequently, the whole illusion was laughable from the moment he started.

Johnny had decided not to rehearse with the girl assistant who screamed the moment he inserted the first blade. It made contact with her boobs. No rehearsal again, you see. She didn’t have a clue what she was supposed to do and found herself trapped inside a box with a mad magician terrifying her. With the girl looking terrified, Johnny carried on smiling while trying to tell the girl what to do and hoped he wouldn’t be heard above the background music. He eventually gave up, but was told that he could come back the following week and have another go.