Paul Daniels (45 page)

‘Edward, get Andrew.'

He ran away and while he was gone she asked whether I had
anyone to take my car back to London. The job fell to Debbie, who has never really forgiven me for that. Prince Andrew ran back.

‘Have you still got the Queen's Flight helicopter?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then take Mr Daniels to Windsor, he's late for an appointment. I'll telephone ahead for a car to take him to the Savoy.'

Quick thanks and goodbyes were said and he ran for the helicopter while I ran to get my clothes and my act box out of my car.

We loaded the helicopter (the biggest, reddest helicopter I had ever seen) and, as Prince Andrew climbed the ladder into the cockpit, I climbed into the luxuriously upholstered lounge area with a couple of bodyguards and the Duchess of York. The bodyguards, in case you were wondering, were for her, of course. We flew to Windsor and landed in the grounds. On the way, I showed the Duchess and ‘the boys' some card tricks.

As we landed, corgis ran out yapping and there was a very clean black limousine waiting for me. More quick thanks and I was whisked along the M4 to London, changing in the back of a Royal car. As the doorkeepers saw the car approaching the river entrance they went into a right panic. They were not expecting a Royal and it caused a major fuss. I wish I'd had a camera to snap their faces when they opened the door and the conjurer got out!

I was due on stage at 9.30pm and I was spot on. My opening line was, ‘Now you're not going to believe this …' and they probably didn't.

I also went to St James's Palace for a cocktail party to honour charity workers. It's a really nice palace with lots to see inside. Standing there, drink in hand, a young boy came up to me. Everyone else was an adult. Very confidently he held out his hand, which I shook as he said, ‘Gosh, Mr Daniels, are you
going to do some magic?'

I explained that I was only there as a guest and not as a performer and his face fell.

‘Look,' I said, ‘I'll get shot if someone finds out but come over here.' We went to a slightly screened-off area of the room and I took out a pack of cards. He saw some tricks for about ten minutes and then said, ‘I wish I could do magic.' I asked him if he had ever had a magic set or book, and he said that he hadn't.

This boy had been so polite and so excited by it all that I said that I would send him one of my marketed sets of magic.

‘I'll have to ask Mummy,' he said and shot away through the crowd. He wasn't long.

‘Mummy said it's OK.'

I took out a pen and pad. ‘What's your name?'

‘Frederick.'

‘And your surname?'

He looked at me as if I was bonkers. ‘Windsor.'

I tried to act as if I had known, ‘Oh, of course, silly me. Where do you live?'

I was not doing well.

‘Here,' he said.

So that's where I sent it.

S
o many people write to me, email me, fax me and stop me on the streets, all with the same question: ‘Why aren’t you on the telly?’ It came about like this. The BBC started to change. New ‘gods’ took over and tried to turn the huge broadcasting company into a commercial concern. It was to become much more ‘news’-orientated and where once the corridors churned with programme-makers, more and more accountants moved in. It all seemed very strange.

During breaks in the shows we made there, I would ask the audience who was unhappy with the licence fee. Most would raise their hands and I would offer up an alternative point of view.

‘Consider the price of a ticket for a night out at the theatre, or even the cinema. If I was to tell you that the seats would only cost you 50p to come and see my show, would you think that was an amazingly good offer?’

All the audience would agree.

‘So I would get 50p off all of you. Of course, you would have to get dressed up to come and either drive in or take transport.
There may be parking fees involved and, at the very least, a snack or drinks. The price goes up and up, but 50p is not bad at all. Our last show got 15,000,000 viewers and, at 50p per person, I should have been paid £7,500,000 for performing.’

This comparison always surprised the audience. I went on to point out just how much they were getting for their licence fee in terms of hours of broadcasting both on television and radio and I know a lot of them changed their minds about the cost of the licence. Nowadays people are paying three times that amount to watch a wider range of channels showing exactly the same range of stuff they got from the BBC.

Once you have covered sport, films, comedy, cartoons and the like, there isn’t anything else. The terrestrial channels already covered our range of available interests.

The concept of the BBC was brilliant. All the viewers would pay a little towards the service and the volume of income would pay for a totally independent service, free of having to kowtow to commercial interests and free of politics. It was never supposed to be commercial, it was supposed to serve us, the viewers who were paying for it.

Over the years, the money bought great studios, great wardrobe and props facilities, easily the best rehearsal rooms in London, and so on. The place buzzed as day after day, night after night, producers and directors, lighting and sound, wardrobe and make-up, writers and artists, painters and builders would all be rushing about involved in artistic endeavour, and all trying to outdo each other in the quality of an amazingly wide range of programmes for all ages. It was exciting to be there.

Suddenly, a couple of things happened at the same time. You have to understand that in America the advertisers control the broadcasting to such an extent that they practically control what the viewers are given to watch. Advertising agencies in America decided that they couldn’t change the buying habits of
older viewers so they started to plough their money into programmes specifically aimed at the young audiences. To me, this is a declaration that they couldn’t do their job properly. They should have been able to create adverts to suit and to sway the older audience, but no, they gave in. This is even more surprising when you realise that the older audience is growing very rapidly and I don’t know about you, but when I was young I didn’t want to stay in watching television.

As is usual in this country, we followed suit. I could understand, possibly, the commercial stations following the advertising trend, but so did the BBC, abandoning traditional shows and transmitting ‘young’ comedy with ‘naughty’ words that drove away their older audience.

Then they started to sell off the facilities and lose their professional production staff and crews. The new system required having nothing in stock and ‘buying’ in anything that was needed, including production crews. It is true that the old way did need a major pruning and streamlining, but the new regime missed the point. They pruned the wrong end, keeping the already top-heavy management and losing the people who actually made programmes.

There was an end result that perhaps they had never considered – all the terrestrial channels started to look the same. Whereas the BBC used to have its own style, its own ‘look’ and its own quality, by using the same lighting, sound and set designers who were being used by all the other channels we, the viewers, lost choice and the other channels had nothing to try to live up to.

Also, more than ever before, the terrestrial channels started to show the same type of programmes opposite each other. If the BBC had a game show, then ITV had a game show, police drama opposite police drama, and football opposite football,
ad infinitum
. Such a move was bound to reduce the
number of viewers for each type of programme and we were being offered less and less choice. I began to wonder if the people who planned the schedules had shares in satellite television companies.

There was a lot more. There was the moment when one of the ‘bought in’ make-up girls, approaching my face with Polyfilla in hand (I need a lot of make-up!), said, ‘Ooh, I’ve never made a man up before.’ I asked where she had learnt about make-up and all her experience had been gained on a Selfridges counter. She knew nothing about wigs, beards, moustaches or prosthetics that are used to change the appearance of a performer. She knew nothing about the different types of studio lights and the effect on make-up.

We were assigned an Australian girl who was in charge of, and controlled, our entire budget for the series. In her early twenties she had never worked in any kind of broadcasting before. Madness ruled.

One of the new accountants asked a producer why he needed the studio all day, which of course was expensive, when the programme was only half-an-hour long. The accountant knew nothing of rehearsals or camera choreography or lighting requirements or even the amount of time it takes to build a set.

All around us money was being spent on stuff that had nothing to do with putting a better product on the screen. I was unhappy and I was far from being the only one. The corridors that once buzzed, now moaned. The ‘freedom’ that built a great broadcasting company was the thing that was now bringing it down. It was not answerable to the people who were paying for it. It was not answerable to anyone.

One day, a couple of us were talking about how hard it was to make programmes. The whole building was talking about redundancies being grabbed by all the good creative people who knew they could get jobs anywhere. A man joined us
and took part in the conversation. It turned out he was a journalist and he published everything I said. The bosses didn’t like the publicity. The crews who worked in the building all said I was right.

So I had to go. The method was obvious, if you are in the industry. It has been done many times. Both the magic series and the game shows were suddenly very difficult to follow if you were a viewer. Their time slots were altered, not only on the same day, but also the days were changed. If viewers can’t find their favourite programmes regularly, then the audience breaks down. Then the Controller can say that nobody is watching and close the programme down. It is difficult for them to do that if you are always in the ratings, so they ‘plan’ you out of the ratings. Even I couldn’t find out when I was on.

Some months after the last series was recorded, I was at a dinner function and Isabell Kristensen, the designer of fabulous dresses, was sitting opposite me. She said to Debbie, ‘When I saw you on television recently, I said to myself, “I
have
to dress that woman.” You looked so good, your figure is great. So I telephoned my agent and she telephoned the BBC. We were so sorry to hear that you are not making any more television shows.’

And that is how I found out that my time at the BBC was over.

The next day, I got Mervyn to telephone the BBC and it was confirmed.

I have just re-read what I have written and it may seem to you that I am bitter about what happened. The opposite is the truth. Without knowing it, they did me the most enormous favour. Over the years I had been there, I had often wondered how I would feel if I was told I wasn’t wanted any more. Every artist I have talked to about this has the same fears – ‘Will they want me back again?’ The moment I got the call from Mervyn,
however, all I felt was a great sense of relief. It’s a cliché I know, but I really did feel as though a great weight lifted off me and I was free. Brilliant. Maybe I was under a greater strain than I was aware of making the last couple of series, but all I know is that I felt great. I couldn’t have left the BBC at a better time and, as a working entertainer, I have had the most wonderful time ever since.

I was in Television Centre recently and it was dead – hardly anyone around during what used to be the busiest time, the evenings when the programmes were recorded. Perhaps it comes to life during the day when the accountants roam the corridors. I hope that one day someone realises it is supposed to create its own productions and brings it back to life again.

Now that I was free to accept contracts a long time in advance (in the past I lost a lot of work waiting for the BBC to determine its recording schedules) Debbie and I worked all over the world in theatre and cabaret, on both public and corporate work. It was not only the range of different countries, it was the wide range of work that made life interesting and a challenge. We took on a couple of cruises a year.

If you go on a cruise then the big tip is to join in with absolutely everything that is happening on the ship, even the things you don’t think you’ll like. If you are worried about being seasick, take a tip from Dr Daniels: with your doctor’s approval, get some seasickness tablets. That’s a funny name really because they should be anti-seasickness tablets. Three or four days
before
you sail, take one in the morning and one in the evening every day until you embark. If you wait until you get on board to start taking them, it will be too late.

I do hope this next story will not put you off cruising, which is a fabulous way to have a holiday.

Debbie and I sailed off on the
QEII
on a return trip bound for New York. We had heard that there were a couple of
hurricanes around but thought that, if we were sailing, there had to be a way around them. After a couple of days of peaceful, but cloudy, cruising, I did a cabaret show on the ship and life was good.

The next day, the captain warned that we would be in the centre of a storm that night at around midnight. ‘Storm’ was an understatement. We had an early dinner and, by 9.00pm, the ship was starting to pitch up and down. Thankfully, for me, she wasn’t rolling from side to side. I can’t stand that.

We decided to go to bed early and the waves were really starting to roll in by then. All passengers were warned not to go out on deck – they would have been crazy to do so. The wind was howling fiercely and eventually got up to speeds of 130mph before the anemometer literally blew away. Considering how well they are fixed down, it must have been some wind. The big storm over England a few years back had wind speeds of 100mph.

I went to sleep while the ship battled through 40ft waves and occasionally half-awoke when a door or drawer in the cabin flew open and banged shut.

At 0205 there was a huge explosion and I was wide awake immediately. There was a feeling of a major accident, that we might be going down, that we had hit something. Debbie was very frightened so, to appease her, I, Sleepy Daniels, got out of bed and looked out of the window. Waves were going by at an impressive height and I was being thrown up and down. Doing my best impression of a naked string puppet, my legs bending when I least expected it, I went to the door and walked out into the corridor. There was nobody there and so I went back to bed mumbling, ‘No alarms so we must be all right,’ and I went back to sleep.

I think Debbie felt that I should have done more to protect her, but she’s the one who can swim, not me.

The next morning was still rough but it had all calmed down by lunchtime. The ship had been hit by a 93ft wave. That would have gone over the top of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. It certainly went over the top of the
QEII
and you have to stand alongside her to realise how big it must have been. The water had gone over the top of the bridge and some had even gone down the funnel.

None of the crew had ever seen anything so big at sea and the damage must have cost many thousands of pounds. We had lost life rafts, the front mast, winches, foghorns and the supporting beams under the foredeck had been bent at right angles despite being extremely thick metal. The foredeck itself was wok-shaped.

Amazingly, no one was hurt. In a rolling sea I have known people to break limbs, but in this head-on collision no one was even bruised. That was even more amazing when you realise that Hurricane Luis was the worst recorded storm in the twentieth century. It was a tribute to the great shipbuilders of the Clyde that the Queen sailed through it. The British press headlines read that she ‘limped’ into New York, but that wasn’t true. This great ship went in at normal speed and did us proud.

Because of the delays during the repairs, I couldn’t stay on board for the return trip. I had four TV shows to record on the Monday so I disembarked in New York and flew back. Some trip. Debbie stayed on board with our friends for the return trip and gave me one of the best laughs I have ever had. The fax read, ‘Darling, do you remember all those waiters we thought were gay? Well, it’s amazing how many of them aren’t.’

Every year we have managed to fit in a tour of the UK and,
whenever possible, Ireland. This large illusion show is mostly based around comedy and both Debbie, who is now even doing illusions, and Martin joined in the fun. Touring is damned hard to set up and damned hard to sell, but it is great fun to do. Mervyn thinks we are all mad because there are much easier ways to make money in this business. What does he know, we ask.