Paul Daniels (40 page)

‘I don't care what they did, nobody is parking in here.'

I was left with no option but I did manage to find a different way to put it.

‘Er, do you know what I do for a living?'

‘I don't care what you do, I am not letting you into this car park.'

I gave up. ‘OK, I'll go home. Would you phone the studio for me and just tell them that I was here, and I've gone home?'

I drove home.

While appearing at the Prince of Wales, Giffard's Barn had proved too far to get to on a regular basis. I lived in the Kensington Hilton for about nine months and then bought another house in Royal Crescent, a beautiful row of Georgian buildings opposite. Somehow, I had managed to buy one of the few houses in the crescent that had not been converted into flats. New bathrooms and a kitchen were installed and all the lights and curtains were voice activated. I was ahead of my time and, remember, he who dies with the most toys, wins. The
house had one other big advantage – it was just around the corner from the studios.

In no time at all I was sitting having a coffee, feet up and watching the television. On came the programme and Mike said the usual greetings and then, ‘Paul Daniels is supposed to be with us but he must have disappeared. Never mind, I'm sure he will be here soon.'

‘Oh no I won't,' I said to the set, but he didn't answer me.

After about ten minutes the phone rang and it was the ever-efficient Joyce.

‘What are you doing there? Have you forgotten you are supposed to be in the studios?'

I explained what had happened. Joyce had worked at the BBC for years and I had stolen her to work for me. She couldn't believe it.

‘I'll ring you back,' she said.

Sure enough, she did. ‘They are going to send a car for you,' she said.

I told her to ring them back and cancel it. I had a car and it was packed with the props. It was ridiculous to use licence-payers' money on a car when I was prepared to drive myself there and park in an empty car park.

‘I'll ring you back,' said Joyce.

Yet again, she did. ‘Can you be there in exactly 15 minutes' time, don't go beforehand. They are going to send him on a tea break to prevent any embarrassment.'

I went and did the show. On the following Tuesday evening, I was coming out of the Television Centre when I spotted a camera crew shooting a very strange-looking machine. It. turned out to be the Sinclair C5, an attempt at a one-person electric vehicle. A little lamp came on in my head. I watched as the very low-slung ‘car' went round and round the inner courtyard and found the man in charge of it.

‘How much is that?' I asked and he told me that, fully fitted with the bright orange tonneau covers and the rear flash that made it much more visible to other traffic, it was £450.

‘Here's a cheque,' I said. ‘I'll take it.'

He argued back, ‘Oh you can't have that one. That's the first one and it's our demonstration machine.'

‘Get on the phone to Sinclair's and tell them that you are selling it to me and that tomorrow I will drive it right through London for them.'

They delivered it round the corner and the next day I had it charged up and ready to go. True to my word, I drove the C5 through London and the press loved it. I, and Sinclair, received full-page publicity and they never cashed my cheque.

A few days later, having made some phone calls to find out when he was on duty, I drove the C5 up Wood Lane and turned into the entrance to the BBC Television Centre. Out ‘he' came to find out what my business was and I lay back and drove the machine under the barrier and into the car park. It was hysterical. He chased me round the car park and I drove it back under the barrier, raised my fingers in a ‘formal' salute, and went home. Worth every penny, even if they'd cashed the cheque.

I've never used it since, other than to show nephews and the like. For a while, Dad and I considered hanging it on divots on the back of the Ferrari but we never got round to it.

I suppose the most famous trick I ever did at the BBC was the Iron Maiden escape. John Fisher had either approached the bosses or they had asked him to make a Hallowe'en magic special. John called the team together and we went over various ‘spooky' concepts. Eventually, he asked me whether I could come up with something that would really ‘spook' the nation, ‘like Orson Welles did in America when he announced an invasion of Martians'.

Various ideas were mooted until I came up with the idea of
a trick going wrong. We worked on this show for longer than most and eventually the following went out as a live show on 31 October 1987. We shot the whole thing in a rather gothic setting and style.

As I remember, there was a version of a levitation done using Debbie and then, inside an old mansion, I performed a version of Fogel's Houdini Séance routine, with magic tricks to illustrate what happened at the last real séance held to try to contact the great escape artist. Eugene Burger, a strange-looking, bearded, dramatic magician created a couple of intimate magical moments, personifying ghost-storytelling with a twinkle in his eye. As I have always tried to be up to the minute with technology, the electronics company Panasonic provided a blank tape, still in its cellophane from the production line, and we put it into a free-standing, battery-operated video recorder, which was only attached to a battery-driven video camera. We recorded a shot of the house clock coming up to midnight, but little happened, only an ornament fell over. When we played the tape back, however, a ghostly shape could be seen to walk across the room.

Finally, I asked the invited audience to go next door, back into the hallway of the house. Standing on a large table base was an evil-looking illusion. This was a kind of iron Maiden cabinet, the interior of both the cabinet and the door having large metal spikes. There was obviously no spare space for anyone inside. A paper door covered the interior also and, when I was chained into this, a hopper of metal balls was opened, allowing the balls to drop through to another container that, in turn, was connected to the door release.

When this second container reached a certain weight it pulled the pin out of the release and the enormous door swung shut, metal spikes tearing through the paper and into me, if I didn't get out in time. This was all demonstrated, checked and
in I went. What the viewers didn't know was that all week I had been escaping from this beast, bursting out of the paper door just before the spikes came swinging round. They also didn't know that until the afternoon of the recording, only the close members of the production team knew that I wasn't coming out. I had designed two illusions in one. We told the cameramen on the afternoon so that they would not over-react that night.

On the night of the live show I went in, the invited audience sat around, the illusion started and, as my foot started to come out through the paper door, the metal spiked door slammed shut. There was a stunned silence and then the director cut the screen to black. Instead of the happy music that always ended our shows, there was total silence except for the voice of the floor manager being cut off in mid sentence, ‘Would you all please go to the next …' The credits for the show rolled up stark white against the black screen and, at the BBC, the phones went mad.

In the house, which was well out in the country and cut off from civilisation, the audience went, uncomfortably, back into the lounge. The stage hands pulled the door open and tore away the paper. I was still standing, chained, in the same position I had occupied before the trick started.

‘I can't get out,' I said and a stage hand said, ‘Oh bugger, he's still alive so we'll have to come to work on Monday morning.'

Once released, I went in to the next room to reassure the audience and to remind them that this was Hallowe'en and we had just said ‘BOO' to the nation. Anne Robinson, the journalist who now presents television shows, looked at me in amazement, total amazement.

‘Get me a phone,' she demanded, knowing she was on top of one of the best stories of the year. We wouldn't let her get to a phone because we didn't want a leak to the papers before they went out for the next day. She has never given me a good
write-up since, saying in no uncertain terms that she doesn't like me as a person. Amazing that she has this perception seeing as how, apart from passing her once in a corridor, that was the only time that she has ever met me. I can't tell you how that breaks my heart.

Meanwhile, the switchboard at the BBC was blocked. The telephonists couldn't give an answer for quite a while because they didn't know what the answer was. John Fisher was dancing around the house in delight that we had pulled it off and we all had quite a party after the show. The phone lines were blocked for three days and we had created an ‘event' like Orson Welles and his
War of the Worlds.

The BBC being what it was, and the schedules being so tight, despite the live Hallowe'en show being created on the Saturday night, we all had to be in the studios for a Sunday recording of one of the series.

I sailed in bright and breezy, still on a high and went into my allocated dressing room. The team were already in and waiting for me. John's face showed one of his tight upper lips.

‘Well, I'm glad you're happy,' he said, ‘because you might have cost us our jobs.'

I couldn't believe it. The whole event had been approved by John, I had come up with the concept, it was all built and recorded under his supervision and the night before he had been dancing on air. Now, in one sentence, it was all down to me. We had done what we set out to do, we had made a good programme. He should have stood his ground. Apparently, the BBC were not happy about the fuss and the publicity. The Head of Light Entertainment made one of his rare trips to visit us at work and started to give me a ticking off based on the fact that the
Sun
newspaper had said that our viewers had phoned in their thousands to complain. I called the BBC operators to find out what was happening and their comment was, ‘Well, you've
given us a lot of work with everyone phoning to ask if you are all right. When we tell them that it was a trick, mostly they just laugh and say, “Oh no, he's fooled us again.” '

They may have had a few complaints but the problem with the BBC is that it gives enormous credibility to the
few
complaints it gets out of the millions of viewers who don't.

‘Be that as it may be,' said the Head. ‘The Board are not very happy.' ‘Then let me go and talk to them,' I said. ‘Let me tell them about the operators and the people's reactions. Let me tell them that the viewers must be sick to the back teeth of plastic television and knowing what is going to happen next. What this place needs is more Hitchcocks and Spielbergs and Cecil B De Milles. And if it keeps everybody happy I'll tear this bloody thing up.'

In my briefcase, I had my contract with the Beeb.

‘There's no need to go that far,' he said and the whole matter was never mentioned again.

I went to work in Naples, to entertain United Nations staff I think. An agent, and now a friend, Kenneth Earle, had fixed it all up and he had put together a mini-show. We had a guitar player who would also be our musical director, eight dancers, a comedian who worked under the stage name Geronimo Tate and me. The order would be dancers, Geronimo, dancers, me, finale with everyone. We went by train. I know that sounds like a horrendous journey, and it was.

There's something you should know about Geronimo's act. There is a very famous recording of Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan singing ‘Passing Strangers'. They alternate the lines, Billy's rich, deep voice contrasting against Sarah's higher, sweeter sound. These people were big stars and were known as ‘singers' singers'. Geronimo had turned this into a comedy ending to his act. He had two hats and he would wear the man's hat and do Billy's voice switching hats very quickly to do
Sarah's. It was a good bit of business and would always get him off to good applause.

We arrived in Naples quite a few days early which surprised our UN organisers. They asked Kenny if we would mind doing a show up the coast a little for some troops stationed there. The UN organised transport and offered extra money for the extra show so we loaded up and off we went.

I don't know who built that place but somebody had obviously been to Sunderland and had a look at the designs of north-east clubs. It was a duplicate of a working men's club and Geronimo and I felt at home. The stage was in the corner of the room and we were to get changed in a curtained-off corridor. We had a lot of backstage visitors because the girls were getting changed in there as well.

The American equivalent of the Concert Chairman came around to inform us how delighted he was to have the Ing-glish show and that he was going to put another act on first to warm the audience up for us. Off he went and we heard an unbelievable introduction, worse than any clubland chairman back home, and this was to a mixed audience. In the UK, it is quite common to see the Chairman knocking on the microphone to see if it is on. He usually hears his knocks coming out of the speakers and then comes out with, ‘Give order, I said give order. Pulleeeze. Right around the room. ATHankYEW'

The American went through a similar routine. He, too, knocked the microphone, but then he announced, ‘Anow HEAR this. ANOW Hear this. Tonight ERLADIES AND GENTLEMEN,' every consonant was punched into the microphone, ‘we have for you, the Ing-glish Show.' Loud cheering. ‘These people have come all the way from Ingerland to entertain yew. I do not want to hear any bad language of any type. Do you understand me here? I do not want anybody
shouting out f***, c***, b*******,' and he went through the list. ‘We are going to get the evening started by bringing on another entertainer to get yew all in the mood. Give a big hand to Billy Eckstine.' Our jaws all hit the ground. Out walked one of the all-time great recording artists and he sang. Geronimo was saying, ‘What do I do? What do I do?' and I told him to do what he always did and it went well when it was his turn.