Paul Daniels (37 page)

While I was on my three-month sojourn with Debbie, Paul got drunk and stole my Ferrari. It may be odd to say that my own son stole my car, but I was down on the insurance as the sole driver. It also had the number plate MAG 1C and was the most recognisable car in town. Consequently, the moment he took it out, the police picked him up to find out who on earth was driving Paul Daniels’ car. When the officers stopped him and asked for his name, he said, ‘Paul Daniels’, because that’s who he is. They recognised that he was drunk, arrested him and put my car back in my garage for me. That was nice of them.

Unbelievably, a few nights later, he took it again. This time he was charged and was due to appear in court. It was all such odd behaviour that we had a psychiatrist examine him. The
report pointed out that Paul seemed to be suffering from a mild case of schizophrenia. From that moment on, Paul seemed to refuse to want to live in any type of normal, decent world. He certainly didn’t want to be in my world at all and this was, and is, extremely hurtful to me.

There was worse to come but I didn’t know it. You can’t help wishing your kids are going to do better than you have and not necessarily in your own business. Paul had become a real worry.

There was a telephone call from Mervyn that gave me another jolt the first day back from the trip.

‘You are doing a Royal show tomorrow night in honour of those who fought in the Falklands.’

Wherever we had gone in the world, according to all the news programmes and newspapers, we were losing the war with Argentina. We came home expecting to have to learn Spanish. The fact that we’d won came as a big surprise to me and Debbie. I found out where the show was and Mervyn had organised an illusion to be delivered to London from my stores in Milton Keynes.

‘It’s the Backstage Illusion,’ he said.

‘Really? Who’s going in it?’ (This trick involved two people.)

‘Roger Moore and Twiggy,’ came the reply.

‘You’ve got to be kidding. Roger Moore will never fit in it.’

I altered the illusion so that I would ‘present’ it to Roger on stage and he would get a surprise when one person changed into another, in this case Debbie to Twiggy.

The next morning saw me in the theatre and the usual mayhem of a Royal show was going on. Bernard Delfont came and said ‘Hello’ to me in the stalls and asked where I had been and what I was up to, the usual stuff. Robert Nesbitt was directing the action on stage. The Royal Box was being decorated with flowers. As the work was coming to a conclusion, I leaned across and tapped Bernie on the shoulder.

‘Excuse me, Bernie, it’s about the flowers on the Royal Box.’

The cigar twitched in the air. ‘Yes, very nice, very tasteful.’

‘Yes, they look lovely, but aren’t those the colours of the Argentinian flag?’

The cigar froze and then, ‘Robert, Robert …’

And off he went. It was too late to rebuild all the work so they stuck some other flowers in. Not quite as nice looking, but possibly more politically correct.

I rehearsed the trick with Debbie and Twiggy. Roger turned up later and I walked him around it without telling him the end. He went away and I never saw him again until about 15 minutes before we were due onstage. There was a knock at the dressing room door and, when I opened it, Roger stood there swaying slightly.

‘I owe you an apology. I’m pissed.’

Apparently, he had had too many friends in the show and he had spent all the evening enjoying their company.

My entrance came and I did a small opening trick. Roger entered to well-deserved applause and told a slightly risqué joke. In case he had any more up his sleeve, I rapidly went into the trick and pulled him around the stage, pushing his head down to look under the table, lifting him up and practically running through the staging of the illusion. At the end we got the raised eyebrow bemused look for which he was famous through so many ‘hero’ roles as Twiggy appeared and we were off.

What the audience thought of the little conjurer bullying Agent 007 all over the stage I’ll never know.

I had other problems of my own. I still didn’t want to go to work on stage despite Richard Mills asking me to do a season at the Opera House in Blackpool. It’s a great venue but I had no ‘drive’ in me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

The musical
Annie
was on in Bournemouth and I went to see it with a girlfriend. As the curtain came down on this very
uplifting musical, I said to her that the audience all seemed to be on a high.

‘That’s what happens in your show,’ she said.

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

‘No, surely you must know they all go out really happy?’

I had no idea. You go on stage and you do your thing. I knew I made them laugh but I had no sense of what happened when the curtain came down. WOW. If I could do that, then I
should
do that! That night I telephoned Richard and asked whether the Opera House was still ‘on’. When he said that it was, I sat up all night and wrote the show.

Next day it was in his office for consideration with all the guest acts, tricks and illusions suggested. Dick Hurran was called in and fought with the Delfont budgets to get the best costumes and scenery. He booked the Valabertinis, who I think came from Czechoslovakia and did an act on very high unicycles. He booked Jean Claude and his footballers and an act called the Koziaks from Hungary. This act had been on my television show and caused me to ponder on the British love of amateurism. The week the show was transmitted a young girl, also from behind the Iron Curtain, had competed in the Olympics. The media had gone crazy over the fact that she had done a backward somersault on the beam. All credit to her for that but the beam is about 4in wide and bolted down solidly at both ends.

The woman in the Koziaks’ act did a double backwards somersault, not on a wide beam, but on a round, flexible, pole vaulter’s pole that was being held at the ends by two men. As she did the somersaults she also managed to go through a hoop that she was holding. A little later she did a forward somersault on the same pole, a much harder thing to do as you can’t see the landing area coming. This woman never even wobbled on landing; it was if she was on the floor with all that space to land on. Nobody in the media noticed.

I got a telephone call from Dick.

‘You know in the scene from
Barnum
that closes the first half, well, who is going to sing the “Join the Circus” number? Everyone in the show is French or Hungarian or Czech.’

I asked him to let me think about it. The ending of the first half was very important in making the show spectacular and featured illusions built around the theme of the circus. The Ringmaster had to sing the song. I got a copy of the music, telephoned Mary Hammond, one of the best voice coaches and made an appointment. When I arrived I told her that I didn’t have any time for singing lessons but would she listen to me and tell me whether I could handle the number on stage.

‘If I can’t then tell me, because I don’t want to be an idiot up there.’ She asked me to sing a couple of notes that she played on the piano but I explained that the ‘plonk’ of a piano note bore no relationship to the sound of a voice so I couldn’t do that. She played the intro to the song and I couldn’t do it. I felt embarrassed and most peculiar standing there with no audience. I stopped her, took a breather, then closed my eyes and ‘saw’ the theatre. She played, I sang and I can remember at the end hitting a note that I had no idea my voice could reach. Mary had no doubts I could do it so I phoned Dick and told him I would do the number. It made my year! All that ‘rehearsing’ in the bath had finally paid off.

The show we did at the Opera House in Blackpool was the last of the really big Variety shows in that enormous theatre. It seated somewhere in the region of 3,300 people and had a huge stage. As well as the speciality acts, we had a full orchestra pit and 16 dancers. The heyday of summer seasons was coming to a close and in a large auditorium like that, even an audience of 1,500 would only half-fill the place. They loved the show, though, and that’s the important thing.

One night I was asked to come down to the stage door and
this was quite a hike at the Opera House. The fly floor was very high and the dressing rooms were above that. You have to come down in a lift and pray that it doesn’t break down during the show. The doorkeeper had said that there was a young girl who didn’t seem very well, so down I went to see what the trouble was about. I stepped out of the lift and walked down the side of the stage area. Sure enough, there was a girl in her late teens and the doorkeeper had got her a chair. A man who turned out to be her father was with her. As I approached she seemed to go into a fit and I was really worried about her.

‘Oh don’t worry, Mr Daniels,’ said her father, ‘she even has orgasms like that when she sees you on the telly.’ There’s not a lot you can say in those situations so I signed her autograph book and went back to my room very quickly. See, I told you I was a sex symbol.

Another group of women started following me around the functions and fetes I attended in the area. I didn’t mind them at all. They were a really funny gang and the ‘leader’, Karen, wrote very funny poems about their adventures following me around. Apparently, Karen’s daughter had developed a crush on me and, as I parked near the offices her mother worked in, asked her to keep an eye out for me. That’s how the Paul Daniels Spotters were born. They have all now left the office and got different jobs but from time to time they still turn up, hiring buses or whatever to travel the country, and I love them all.

The Opera House was the last of the summer seasons I was to do for a very long time. That side of our business was dwindling and I had been lucky enough to perform in the big ones. I talked to the Delfont organisation about the possibility of doing a production show in Majorca or somewhere similar. I had, for a while, gone out with a lovely girl who was a manager with Thomson’s holidays and she told me just how many people they sent out every week. I thought that perhaps
they would like a change from flamenco dancers, but the idea never went ahead.

In a way, I am glad that I didn’t get involved with foreign seasons because I was able to throw myself into the world of corporate entertainment and do even more television.

I
t's the Millennium that everybody talks about and very few can pronounce. The Nineties had seen Nelson Mandela released and apartheid ended; the information age had arrived with the home use of the Internet; and Michael Jackson married Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie. There was hope for us all.

Well, if I thought my life was busy when I was at the Prince of Wales, in the Eighties it went insane. Television, the great devourer of material, became my home. I did magic shows, game shows, guest appearances, specials and even a medical programme and
QED
. My mind was always whirring away trying to solve problems, usually related to magic, for future presentations. I exaggerate when I say ‘future', it was usually for a programme that was being recorded the following day. I'm a devil for leaving everything to the last minute and rarely think things out until absolutely necessary.

There is no way, in this book, that I can cover everything that happened to me in the maddest of the television years, but I'll
tell you some of the stories and maybe you'll get a flavour of my life. I hope so.

Take a week in the life of
The Paul Daniels Magic Show.
Months before recording, the team would have got together and discussed in general what was going to happen. A little later there would be another meeting and so on until we had all the tricks we would like to do with their titles on postcards.

Just before the series began, there would be meetings with designers and prop-makers, special effects men and technicians, and those postcards would be divided up into ‘shows' for the coming weeks. A certain illusion would be postponed because it would take longer to build, another kept as a ‘spare' in case anything went wrong.

If the show was to be recorded on, say, Saturday evening, on the Monday of that week we would all meet at the rehearsal rooms in Acton, sit around the table and discuss the items on the postcards. There would be the Producer, the Director, me, Debbie, Ali Bongo, Gil Leaney, Barry Murray, Graham Reed, the floor manager (that's the television equivalent of the stage manager in a theatre) and at least one assistant floor manager known as a ‘gopher'.

The floor of the rehearsal room would be covered in long strips of coloured tapes to outline where the set would be standing as well as any permanent fixtures. This was so we could get a feeling of how much room we had around illusions or in dance routines and the like.

We would talk about the various routines that we hoped to do and the gopher would start to make phone calls to the props buyers as we expanded the concepts and brought in more gags. Sometimes, even that simple operation would lead to some wondrous errors.

I walked in one morning to find a gross of drinking glasses and, when I asked what they were for, I was told that we had ordered
them. The week's programme was there in rough script form and I looked through it but could find no need of 144 drinking glasses. Slowly, an idea formed in my mind and I looked down the list again. There was a trick to which we had added a drinking glass. In case I dropped it, I had put in a request for two glasses, not to the gopher, but to a young person who was learning the job. They had gone to the gopher and, in case the fragile glasses were broken, had ordered four. The gopher couldn't get through on the phone to the buyers so asked the floor manager to do it and said that we needed eight. You're ahead of me now, aren't you? The floor manager ordered 16 but the buyer responsible for our show wasn't available so he left a message with his department. The message was passed along twice and became first 32 and then 64. The buyer, thinking that we needed 64 drinking glasses for some illusion or other knew that he would have difficulty ordering 128 and went for the round figure of one gross. We sent them back.

By the Tuesday of the recording week, you would have found us still sitting around the table tearing the routines to pieces and generally waiting for props to arrive. It was quite amazing the number of times they didn't arrive until the actual recording day so we used to ‘talk' the tricks through rather than physically do them.

Wednesday, and a couple of bits would have drifted in, if we were lucky, and we would also start talking about the following week and what we might do in that recording. During the afternoon, it was common for the guest acts to have flown in and we would watch them rehearse, suggesting moves that would enhance their television appearance. Television is different to theatre, circus and cabaret and needs to be ‘shot' for the small screen. That's why theatre shows, recorded for television showing, are never as good as the show specifically created for the television screen in a studio. I guess it is difficult to cross from one medium to another.

Thursday morning would see all the cameramen, lighting men, sound men, make-up and costume designers gathered round to see what we were going to do. If there was anything specifically needed for costume they would have been told well in advance wherever possible but sometimes we would pop a request in at the last minute. In those days, the BBC studios were much better served than they are now. The costume department, for example, could call on a vast range of clothing from within their own store; there were scenery and props departments, and even make-up could call on a stock of wigs and beards and even scars! When you are making creative light entertainment shows regularly you can often have a great idea at the last minute that will bring the whole programme to life. Sadly, nowadays, all those fabulous facilities have gone and I feel sorry for the programme makers.

This was the morning when the lighting man would ask about, or if he was very lucky, see the colours of the costumes and the illusions to complement them with his lights. The cameramen, working with the director, would work out the choreography of the cameras. Most cameras are mounted on huge, solid wheeled bases that can be slid across the concrete floor of the studios. One of the director's jobs, usually worked out in conjunction with the chief cameraman, is to make sure that when he is getting his shots and they are zooming around the floor, that they don't crash into each other, cross the shots in vision or even run over the cables. To see a camera's metal apron cut through a cable is quite spectacular. Sparks and cameramen shoot off in every direction.

You may have wondered at the number of people listed in the credits at the end of a programme or a film but, believe me, if they weren't important they wouldn't be there. They cost money, that's why.

On Friday we would go over it all again, and again, and
again, hopefully with props and, if the studio was not in use and our set was being built, we would go down and have a very slow walk through on the studio floor.

Saturday being the recording day, we would all be in the studios. Ali and Barry would sit by the director's chair, up in the director's box, watching all the shots to see whether I made a mistake or had the wrong angle. I would walk through the show very, very slowly in the morning so that everyone could make their notes and learn where they should be. After lunch we would do it again, a little faster, but inevitably there would be mistakes and we would all stop, go back and do that bit again. Just before tea we would do a fast run in the clothes we were using in the show, called a dress run.

During tea, I would go over any last-minute changes or notes with the Producer and then, at around 7.15pm, the warm-up man would go on to the floor, greet the audience, explain what was happening and generally whoop them up. Then he would introduce me and as I, too, greeted them and cracked a few gags, I would be eyeballing the individual members of the audience and pointing to suitable people for the participation tricks. Ali would have them fitted with microphones. I never met these people before the actual recording of the tricks because I thought it gave a more natural, ad-lib feel to the show. How did I pick them? Generally I would look for happy, cleanly dressed people aged between 25 and 35 if I could. It didn't always work out and, of course, there were exceptions but that was my general rule. In the clubs, I had learnt that under 25 they could be cocky and think that they were being funny when they weren't. Over 35 and they could develop pomposity. Not everyone fits those descriptions, thank goodness.

At 7.30pm the show would start to be recorded and it was all over by 10.00pm. You may be surprised that it takes that long
but there were always stops for costume changes or lighting changes, and sets to be cleared or placed, so it takes time.

Frequently, we were back in the rehearsal rooms on Sunday morning, especially when the panic started to set in the further into the series we got. Game, or quiz, shows were different. There would be a couple of meetings before the series started recording where the production team would sit around and go over the questions a few times trying to weed out those that were too hard, or unsuitable, or with doubtful answers.

Then we would go into the studios on the morning of the show and while I was doing a final question check and reading up on the contestants, the cameraman and the director would be shooting the prizes for insertion during the recording. The computers and the lighting would all be checked at the same time.

The contestants were brought in for lunch where I would sit and meet them, talk to them and try to become a ‘friend'. After lunch we would go into a small lounge where I would go over all the rules and the movements of the show and, most importantly, tell them ‘why'. I would try to ensure that they were as comfortable as they could be in this weird environment and then leave them to watch a previously recorded episode of the game so that they were brought ‘up to date' in their minds.

While they were watching that I would go and make notes on their fact sheets of details gathered over lunch. We would all meet up in the studios and both teams would get to play the game, but with different questions from the evening, of course. Then it was time for tea and at 7.30pm we would record the first show; I would get changed and then we would record the second show.

I started making game shows because the BBC wanted me to do more magic shows and I refused. The executives don't really think things through. To explain this, I have to take you back in time a long way, folks.

There were major stars of the Variety theatre, people like Max Miller, George Formby and Gracie Fields. If you haven't heard of them then don't worry, just accept the fact that they were major stars and as big as anything we have now. Even later, in the clubs, we had our own stars. Tom Jones was one example. Shirley Bassey was another. We got to see these people once a year and it was a big event in our entertainment calendar.

When television gets its hands on a great entertainer, the bosses don't really look at the long term, they saturate the screens with him or her. Russ Abbott is a fantastic live entertainer in many different fields but nobody can be fantastic 26 weeks in a row. The audience gets too used to the brilliance and it becomes too normal for them. Was there ever a better couple on the screens than the two Ronnies, yet even there, towards the end, I heard people saying they weren't as good as they used to be. I think the real problem was that they were exactly as good as they used to be and, sadly, were over-exposed.

I wouldn't do more than ten magic shows a year, with a Christmas Special sometimes as an extra. So they asked me to do a game show.
Odd One Out
was the first, later
Every Second
Counts
and finally
Wipeout
. So many of the other game show hosts told me that they thought
Every Second Counts
was the finest format of all the games that were on air. It certainly built up the tension and worked towards an exciting climax. Two stories from that show come to mind.

A Scots couple walked down towards me, stood on the marks as they had at rehearsal and, as was normal for the game, I asked the wife to tell me all about her husband. She started to speak and I interrupted, ‘You're not English, are you?' This was obvious from her very broad accent and I was playing the idiot.

‘Och, no, we're from Glasgow.'

Taking the mickey, I came back with, ‘Now that's a shame,
because I have heard that the people from Edinburgh speak the finest English in the British Isles.'

This was a red rag to a bull.

‘Edinburgh? EDINBURGH? I'll tell you about Edinburgh. His mither comes from Edinburgh and they're all
mean
.'

She was totally oblivious to the cameras and her husband trying to shut her up.

‘When you gae roond to his mither's hoose she always says, “You'll have had your dinner then?” just so she does'na have to give you any?'

The audience were howling and slowly it dawned on her that she was being recorded. Her face was, as they say, a picture.

Another couple came down and my information was that they came from Yorkshire. At lunch they had talked with broad Yorkshire accents and I'll change the names here to protect the innocent. He was a stocky, happy guy and his wife, slim and slightly taller, with a pretty face. I asked her to tell me all about him and before she could start, he came in with an American southern drawl, ‘let me introduce myself. I am Beauregarde Johnson and …'

I stopped him. ‘What?'

His wife explained, ‘He sings part time in a country and western band. He's very good.' She went on to explain what he really did and what he was really called. I asked him to tell me about his wife.

‘This is my beautiful wife Sheila. She works in a butcher's shop but really she wants to be a nurse.'

‘I don't,' said Sheila.

He never turned a hair. He smiled at me. ‘She does.'

‘I don't.'

‘She does, she's even got the uniform.'

‘I've got the hat and the suspenders and that's all he cares about.'