Paul Daniels (32 page)

When it got to the stage where I hadn’t used the Ferrari for a couple of years, I decided to sell it. It’s only a car. The advert went out and someone bought it. They came and collected it on a trailer and, as it went down the drive and out of my life, I cried. I never thought that I would do that over a car, but I cried.

I
t seemed as if the rest of the world was toppling down. The Berlin wall was the first to go in 1989, uniting Germans once again, quickly followed by the dismantling of Lenin’s statue in Riga, USSR, which symbolised the end of the Cold War between the East and the West. Costing £6 million, the huge EuroDisney theme park opened near Paris and Paul prepared for some thrills and spills of his own.

Now that the BBC television series had started to roll, Richard Mills offered me the top-of-the-bill spot in Great Yarmouth. The show would be a full-blown Variety show featuring both large and small magic and lots of acts and dancers. There was a full orchestra and tons of scenery. I provided all the necessary tricks and illusions and Delfonts did the rest. So it was that on 23 May 1979, that I turned up at the rehearsal room in Shepherd’s Bush, London. I was carrying a few props and, as usual, I was early. The rehearsal room was underneath a church and I was not the first to get there. Sitting on the low wall that surrounded the building, waiting for the building to be unlocked, was a very pretty dark-haired girl. I made the usual
greetings and found out that she was going to be one of the dancers in the show. Waves of normality swept over me but, goodness me, I couldn’t get involved. I was the star of the show and had to be equally friendly with everyone.

Eventually the others turned up and we went through the usual getting-to-know-everyone routines. The dancers got into their leotards and leg warmers ready to rehearse. This is always a wonderful moment for any red-blooded man and I noticed that the girl from the wall was not only pretty but had a great figure. She reminded me of the little drawings of a girl that used to separate the paragraphs in the Penthouse magazine, which I only bought for the jokes, of course.

We had to place some of the dancers into the illusions and I picked her out. During our brief conversation, I had noticed that she had personality and a great laugh. She was petite, lithe and a fabulous dancer. Her name was Debbie McGee. So now you know why 23 May was mentioned. She won’t let me forget it!

Later, I was to find out that Debbie had been a soloist with the Iranian National Ballet and that she had been trapped in Iran when the Ayatollah returned to power. The English dancers had to hide and a friendly Iranian at the airport who fancied Debbie shoved her on a plane home. Although primarily ballet trained, Debbie had studied all forms of dance and needed a job as soon as she arrived back in England. Seeing a notice in
The Stage
newspaper, she auditioned and got the job in Yarmouth.

Thrilled at gaining work so quickly, Debbie telephoned a friend to break the good news.

‘But who is Paul Daniels?’ she asked her mate.

Having been out of the country for so long, she had not seen this new magician (and sex symbol!) appear on the scene.

Her friend said, ‘if you switch the telly on, he’s on now.’

Debbie, running to her TV, pushed the power button and
Blankety Blank
sprang into life. This game show, hosted by Terry Wogan, was at the height of its popularity.

I had ‘guested’ on several of them and asked the Producer if I could ‘send the show up’. He said ‘yes’. Often trying to go way over the top in being silly, on one occasion I ran out into the car park, snapped off my car aerial and ran back into the studio with it. Terry used a microphone on a long, thin stick so I produced mine and we ended up having a sword fight. Every show I did I would try to come up with visual gags.

On the day that Debbie tuned in,
Superman, the Movie
had just exploded on to our cinema screens and everybody was talking about it. Before the programme, I told Terry’s scriptwriter the gag about Superman being stupid because he wears his underpants on the outside.

I had taken a bit of a gamble, hoping that the scriptwriter would tell Terry the gag before the show. I had also concealed a Superman T-shirt with a big red ‘s’ under my velcro-attached shirt and tie. Sitting down at the
Blankety Blank
desk, I took a pair of red Y-fronts out of my pocket and pulled them up over my trousers while everyone was busy setting up the show.

Right at the start of the show, Terry picked on me. ‘Oh no, it’s not you again, Daniels!’

‘Don’t you start with me, Wogan,’ and I pulled my shirt open to reveal the ‘S’.

Bang on cue, Terry said, ‘Superman’s an idiot, he wears his underpants on the outside!’

I immediately stood on my chair, exposing my red Y-fronts and said, ‘What’s wrong with that?’

The huge explosion of laughter was so loud, that the sound engineer hadn’t time to turn his buttons down and the sound went into distortion. Meanwhile, this was Debbie McGee’s first view of Paul Daniels! Debbie’s eyes widened at the thought of
spending a whole season with this idiot and phoned her friend again to say so.

‘No, don’t worry,’ said the friend, ‘he’s normally a very good magician.’

‘Oh no,’ said Deb, ‘I can’t stand magicians.’

What a great start to a romance.

The season started and Debbie and I just sort of got along. I was still with Nikki but Debbie and I started seeing more of each other away from the theatre and both of us wanted it to go further. Eventually we ‘snuck’ away for a day and I rented a boat on the river. Being the flash, splash-the-money-about kind of guy that I am, this was a small day boat with a tiny cabin. It’s a good job that we are both small in stature or our love life may never have taken off. From the moment that I lassoed a small bush on the riverbank and tied her up (the boat, not Debbie), passion took over and tidal waves were announced on the local weather stations as we rocked and rolled the boat about.

From then on it was love at every stolen opportunity but it was me, however, that kept pushing her away. Yes, there was the well-hidden fear of what had happened in my last marriage but also I was 40 years old and Debbie was 20. Nikki meant a lot to me and I didn’t want to hurt her. Talk about being in a turmoil. Over and over for the next few years, Debbie and I would have flings that sometimes lasted quite a while but it would be me that would keep interrupting the affair.

‘You’ve got to understand, love. The press will have a field day if they find out about you. They’ll murder us on the age difference and look how your parents, sister and brother will feel when they go to work, or school or whatever. Go and find another fellow.’ So that’s how we met, and parted, and met and parted, for years.

Debbie was a great assistant – one of the best, if not the best, in the world when it comes to helping in the theatre of
magic. Those who have written about the ‘Blonde Bimbo’ who got the job on TV because of her affair with the magician have no idea what they are talking about. The Blonde Bimbo has a degree (I haven’t) and an amazing knowledge of all forms of dance. Debbie got the job on the television series when I wasn’t there. I had refused to go to the auditions because I didn’t want the press to do to me what they had done to Bruce Forsyth when his girlfriend was a hostess on the show.

Martin, my son, was 16 while we were in Great Yarmouth. Paul, his older brother, had started to work for me in Blackpool but didn’t seem to be very disciplined in his work habits. When we were doing television shows they would both help me whenever necessary and both helped out backstage with the props and the scenery. Paul became a particularly good flies man. That’s the guy who hauls the scenery up into the air and lowers it to the stage when it is needed. A good fly man never bangs the scenery on to the stage but brings it to its ‘dead’ perfectly. Paul could land it like a feather.

In fact, every job Paul took on, he did very well. Assisting in the show, on stage, he seemed uncomfortable and had probably inherited my shyness, but again he did the job very well. He would help out solving problems with fitting up the show with a lovely sense of logic. When we put out demonstrators selling a range of magic he outsold every other demonstrator. He became a financial adviser and did well. Paul gave that up for tiling and, having seen his work, it’s good. All of which made what happened to him later very sad.

Probably because, when I left school, I had taken on a job in which I had no interest, I told all three of my sons that they should do what they really wanted to do.

‘I don’t care if it is picking rice in the paddy fields of China; if it is in your heart then you should go for it. If you fail, that’s
OK, but it would be terrible to be older and still thinking, “if only I’d …” If you have a dream, then do it.’

My career now took on a life of its own. I would do a summer season, a television season, a run of corporate cabarets, nightclubs, radio and so on. Holidays were grabbed between all of this and I would take the lads whenever I could. Gary was a bit too young to go on the trip we made early in 1980 when we went to Los Angeles and it rained. Oh boy, did it rain. Houses were being washed away. Landslides were blocking roads. We went to Disneyland and got well soaked. I took the decision to change the holiday, rented a car and set off for Las Vegas. After numerous diversions we managed to find a way to cross the Mojave Desert. It was pale green with plants and flowers popping up all over the place. The locals kept saying, ‘You are so lucky to see it like this.’ But we had that stuff back home and we wanted to see a desert! We were all ill with colds and flu.

One day, shopping in Vegas, the whole of the shop shook. An earthquake. I grabbed the lads and Nikki and got them out of the shop fast. Nobody else took any notice. That night on the television they announced, in passing, that there had been an earth tremor in Las Vegas but the
big news
was that it was still raining in LA. We thought they’d got their priorities wrong.

We went back to LA over snow-covered roads. This was turning into the holiday from hell so I organised flights to Florida where at last we could enjoy the orange groves and the theme parks and we finished up having a great time.

That was the year the full summer show moved to Bournemouth. Once again, I was in the Pavilion Theatre where I had spent a happy summer season in
The Val Doonican Show.
Now I was back as top-of-the-bill and the show was called
Summer Magic.
Bournemouth has a jungle drum system of communication. It must have. How else can you account for the
arrival of dozens, possibly hundreds of requests for charity appearances around the area before you even know you are going there yourself? I said ‘yes’ to them all. I hope I am a charitable man, but that wasn’t the real reason I took them all on this time.

An act called Little and Large were ‘hot’ at the time and the Civic Authority let it be known to my management that they fully expected Little and Large to do the major business and that our show might break even. A summer season show extends for a few weeks before and after the main body of holidaymakers arrive in the town and that is normally a quiet time, as very few locals bother going to see shows that they believe, incorrectly, are ‘just for the grockles’. That’s a south coast word for tourists.

By doing all the local charity jobs, I believed that the locals would support the show and they did. There was another ‘benefit’ that we hadn’t anticipated. They told all their friends, visitors and holidaymakers to come to the show as well and we did great business.

In the early part of the summer, I agreed to do a pantomime for Dick Condon, the manager of the Theatre Royal in Norwich. Now there was a real manager of a theatre. The whole building buzzed with excitement all day long. He had snack bars and restaurant service, photographic and art exhibitions and he sold everything he could to do with the productions that were on at any given time. He seemed to be everywhere with his lovely Irish accent, greeting people, usually by name. You would find Dick wandering around the town saying, ‘Hello there,’ to passers-by, ‘we haven’t seen you in the theatre for a while.’ Way to go, Dick, way to go.

Not many civic theatre managers have that drive or initiative. As an ex-internal auditor, some of them drive me crazy, but then they are not generally appointed from showbusiness but
come from other administrative jobs. Civic theatres can, and should, make a profit and not be a burden on the taxpayers. It can be done. Dick Condon proved it.

Ask any performer from any branch of the theatrical arts and they will have their own horror stories of having to work in modern theatres, designed by architects that the local council have appointed but who have no experience in theatre at all. Mind you, I have heard the same moans from hospital nurses, television workers and many others that their buildings, too, don’t fit the purpose for which they are supposed to be designed.

I have been to ‘theatres’ that are designed as ‘multi-purpose’ buildings. This means that they don’t correctly fit any of the ‘multi-purposes’. Gymnasiums, for example, in which the seats pull out are acoustic nightmares for bouncing sound and kill the shows that the managers try to put on. We have had to walk through the corridor, where the audience is coming in, to get to the stage. That destroys the ‘magic’ of theatre. It also prevents you carrying and setting up props.

Let me tell you about one theatre that embodies all the errors in one design.

The local council used their own in-house architect. On the day of the grand opening, the first artist knocked on the stage door and asked to be shown to her dressing room. ‘Dressing room?’ asked the stage door keeper. The architect had forgotten to build any. So they quickly brought caravans down for the acts to change in. This blocked the car park completely. For the first few months, performers had to run outside in the cold to temporary caravans in order to get changed. Eventually, they stuck an ugly block of dressing rooms on to the rear of the building.

The orchestra leader turned up next and asked to see the orchestra pit, normally a long ‘slot’ across the front of the stage.
He was directed to two egg-shaped holes in the front apron that protruded forward of the proscenium arch.