by Paul Daniels
Mam agreed to look after Paul during the day, giving me time to work out a more permanent solution for him. Work got back to normal and after a week of washing, cooking and cleaning, I felt that we were making some headway. Then there was a knock at the door.
She stood there looking as though she had been in a wrestling match. With hair unkempt and traces of tears in her eyes, she spoke first.
‘Ted, I’d like to come back.’
They say you think very quickly. I did then. A million thought processes instantly wrestled within me as we stood staring at each other for a moment. Paul needed a mother. I had no one else. Did I want a wife? Paul came first. I invited her in, feeling nothing much at all, really.
I have tried to work out whether that was a mistake. I will never know. It would never be the same as it was before, not because of her, but because of me. I couldn’t forgive her. Everything I felt had been betrayed, abused and destroyed to the point at which I couldn’t accept her at face value. I had changed so much in that couple of weeks; it hardly seemed true, or possible. As far as I was concerned, Jackie had decided that our marriage was over and I had reluctantly bitten the bullet and let go. On the other hand, it is impossible to live with someone for a long time and not have some kind of friendship. I guess that’s the most I can say. We settled down into a life again. Jackie never ever said that she was sorry.
We lived together for the next seven years. A kind of falseness pervaded everything we did together. She said she wouldn’t go dancing any more but, on consideration, what difference would that make? The damage had already been done. My family life became strangely detached from my career and despite the fact that we soon had two more beautiful boys to join us, Martin in 1963 and Gary in 1969, home life was never to be the same again.
An even stranger phenomenon was that Jackie took a keen interest in my magic and became a very good magician in her own right. I threw myself into magic and the clubs. Trevor went off to Loughborough Teacher Training College with the aim of becoming a teacher and I started to put together a new act with a lot of help from Martin Marshall, one of the judges who had watched me at the Middlesbrough Circle of Magicians.
Using an anagram of ‘Daniels’, I gave this new act the horrendous title of ‘The Eldanis’ (it sounded exotic at the time) and crafted it purely for magic convention competitions. There were many opportunities to enter, as there were so many. The Middlesbrough Circle was very good in that its members tried constantly to perform magic, unlike other clubs where they seem to just sit around and talk about it. This is really where I started to move towards a professional career, even though it was still a few years away. Each time I gave a performance in front of my fellow members, they would carefully take it apart with their own thoughts and suggestions on improving it. This way it was possible to hone and refine my act in a way that was impossible elsewhere. There was no sense of jealousy or maliciousness among my colleagues. It was just good, honest, constructive criticism and we enjoyed encouraging one another in this practical way. Martin Marshall, known as Martini (we thought it was exotic at the time) was of particular help and became such a good friend that, later, I was to name my second son after him.
The fine-tuning meant that when the club produced a public show, everyone knew it would be of the very highest quality. We would spend weeks designing, building and painting scenery, props and illusions and I tried my hand at everything. These annual performances in which a whole stage show was built from scratch in the Middlesbrough Little Theatre, were always a great success, as were the competitions. Martin was the driving force behind the shows.
One night, Martin told me a story ‘against’ himself that still cracks me up to this day. I can be driving along the road and suddenly burst out laughing as I replay what happened in my mind’s eye.
You have to understand that Martin was not a young man when this happened and used to wear those drawstring pyjama trousers that tie off at the front. It so happened that a company called G-Plan had created the latest fad in furniture design. Martin decided to buy a dressing table in the new design and showed it off to everyone who came to visit.
‘Look at this,’ he would say, and demonstrate that the 8ft-long single drawer would pull out at the corner without hesitation. ‘That’s real craftsmanship.’ I admit I thought it odd at the time that it also had a long, low, horizontal mirror the whole length of the cabinet when everybody knows the human body is vertical. I was such an innocent and never connected the horizontal mirror with the bed in the bedroom. I don’t think Martin or Freda, his wife, did either.
One night, Martin was about to climb into bed next to Freda when she asked, ‘is that a boil on your nose?’
Martin went to the dressing table with its low mirror and saw a spot on the bridge of his nose.
‘No, I don’t think so, I think it’s just a spot,’ and with that he bent over the dressing table to squeeze it.
As he bent over, his balls (sorry, Mam) swung out of his pyjamas and into the very long top drawer. Not only that, but his body weight, leaning forward, closed the drawer with his thighs and he was literally ‘trapped by the balls’. He yelled, as you would, and tried to open the drawer but the handles were too wide for him to reach. Freda would have helped but she was screaming with laughter and rolling about on the bed. Women are funny like that.
The Will Fleet Trophy, an in-house competition held over several evenings each year, was named after one of the best-known magicians in the north-east and awarded for excellence in all categories of magic. Each competition evening was given over to a different aspect of the theatre of magic. One night would examine the use of silks, another card magic, one liquid magic, another tricks from a book or spherical objects and a night of illusions. Each act should last more than four minutes, but no longer than six, so timing was a good discipline to learn. All the magicians were examined for what they could do in each grouping, with points awarded for first, second, third and even just for competing. The magician who accumulated the most points at the end of the year won the trophy.
It would have been useless simply to perform stock tricks that everybody knew and bought from a magical dealer. What really appealed were the tricks that were different in approach and presentation and thinking up new ways of achieving miracles was the challenge I enjoyed the most. I wanted, needed and took pleasure in being different and something inside me suggested that this was the only real way forward. I soon developed the ability to pick up a trick and practically convert it to my own style. This was to become an essential ingredient in the television work that was to follow, where rehearsal time was limited. In television, I was to learn, anybody could do the act they have done for years and sparkle with it. You know your regular stuff so well. It’s when you come to do something that is not your act where it counts. I’ve always believed that it was the Middlesbrough Circle of Magicians that trained me and laid essential foundations for my future career in television.
At that time, however, magic was still a hobby and any real thoughts of earning proper money from it were just an illusion. I was so involved with magic, however, that it wasn’t my relationship with Jackie or Paul that suffered, it was Eston Urban District Council. The time spent on magic became very detrimental to learning about accounting, which in turn prevented me from climbing the ‘real’ work ladder and maybe I should be grateful for that. I soon moved to Redcar Borough Council as an internal auditor.
We formed The Eldanis as a couple and rehearsed until we had it perfected, with a few jobs dropping into our laps here and there. Having gained a little publicity about the colourful and unique nature of our act, we had been booked to appear at the Fiesta Club in Stockton. Supporting ‘Little Miss Dynamite’ Brenda Lee on the Sunday and the great Frankie Vaughan the rest of the week seemed like a dream come true, but we never anticipated our potential and saw each gig as purely one-off.
What made this magic act different was that we abandoned the old ‘waltzy’ kind of dreamy mu
sic that magicians usually worked to and replaced it with rock ‘n’ roll. Soft rock, yes, but it was a million miles away from what had gone before. For its time, it was also quite sophisticated with both of us wearing matching lurex outfits (yes, folks, I was in lurex before Elvis!) and a good lighting plot. The heart of the act consisted of a selection of small to mid-size trickery, big enough for a good-sized room, but not like illusions where you have the daunting task of packing and travelling them each night. We worked the magic both together and separately throughout the act. One of the better conventions, Blackpool Magicians’ Convention, booked us to appear in their gala show at the famous Blackpool Pleasure Beach and a gentleman approached us immediately after the act and asked us if we had a Summer Season.
To be honest, I was so ignorant of the real workings of showbusiness that I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said ‘no’ and he invited us up to his office where he produced a contract and said, ‘sign here.’ The light slowly dawned on me and I blurted out that he didn’t want us, he wanted one of the professionals who were still working downstairs.
We were just a couple of amateur artistes having fun, and despite being the owners and originators of a very good act I felt like a summer season was right out of our league. How could we ever give up our day jobs? I was still an internal auditor at Redcar Borough Council.
‘I’m offering you a glittering contract for a 20-week season in the Mecca of showbiz,’ he repeated.
I turned it down. I wonder what and where I would be if I hadn’t. Despite the fact that Jackie and I could still work together, that deep-down friendship, that I longed would return, still eluded us. The loving relationship had gone and the bare shell of an acquaintance was all that remained. A solid steel wall of hurt had cut us in two and this time there seemed to be no escape.
Jackie’s affair had had a deeper impact on me than I had first imagined and I felt it was some kind of a failure on my part that had caused the split. Maybe it was. I had a sense of utter and total rejection. It never went away.
The way I dealt with my own rejection was to have a series of one-night stands, to prove to myself, I suppose, that I was able to attract and arouse women and in the process somehow claim back my lost masculinity. In retrospect, I am not proud of this period of my life at all. At the time I never even thought much about what I was doing, I just did it. Those scenes in the back of cars and in tiny flats had nothing to do with what I really wanted. Why none of the woman said ‘no’ I do not understand. Here was I, unable to believe in myself and, despite my obvious insecurity, nobody said ‘no’. A sequence of affairs with varying degrees of success followed, though none of them lasted.
All this only served to drive a deeper wedge between Jackie and myself and it was clearly inevitable that we were on the downward slope and gradually drifting further apart. As much as I would have liked it, I didn’t have whatever it took to ‘bridge’ that ever-widening gap. I still have many regrets, but I am resigned to the fact that the wounds of this chapter in my life may never be healed.
As our marriage went gradually downhill, I not only threw myself at women, I also transferred my energies more and more into my magic. Ironically, it was a woman who unexpectedly gave me the opportunity to put my skills to better use. When Betty Hygate knocked on my door, she struck me as a very forthright but honest businesswoman and I was interested to hear her proposals. Her son was something of a local celebrity, having won the Stubby Kaye Silver Star Award on television. Now, in his mid-teens, Billy was still working in the clubs as a guitar vocalist and seemingly making some good money out of it.
Betty must have been eyeing up my Ford Thames Dormobile-style van parked outside our house, for it was this that had obviously caught her imagination. Betty dived straight into the point of her visit.
‘How do you feel about doing a joint tour of the clubs in your vehicle?’ she offered.
To be honest, I wasn’t all that bothered. My life had settled down into a circle of work, playing with Paul, Martin and, of course, my magic toys. Us men never grow up, you know.
‘I’ll get the bookings, but not charge you commission as an agent might, and you drive the show round in your van. Billy will be the star and do his guitar spot; there’ll be an opening singer called Gladys Ford; and you do a magical comedy spot in the middle.’ Betty reminded me yet again how Billy was destined to be a star and was sure that he would remember me when his name was finally up in lights.
By now, with the enormous help and support from the local magic club, I was used to winning endless competitions and my skills had broadened and expanded enormously. I had subtly grown in my ability to entertain with magic but I said that maybe we should try a couple of nights out and see how it went.
They went well and we started to do more and more working men’s clubs around the north-east. There was one small problem – I finished up being the roady for the show and humped the gear in and out. Well, that wasn’t too bad because by now I was 28 years old and had given up local government. Mam had bought a shop in Uvedale Road, South Bank, and I worked for her. Lifting sacks of potatoes was building my muscles. I had taken the job as it gave me more flexible working hours and was also ‘insurance’ in case the club work collapsed.
It was also a good time to change my name. Ted Daniels never rolled off the tongue successfully and was misinterpreted in a number of different ways. When it was announced by the concert secretaries it either had a stutter in the middle (‘Ted-d-d Daniels’) or it became one word (‘Tedaniels’). It could have been worse, I suppose. A very good act called Les Pollux I heard being announced as Les (as in Leslie), and Bollocks (as in need I say more!) When the compere had his attention attracted by the band, they tried to tell him that it was French, ‘Lay’, and that there were two of them. He turned back to the microphone and announced the Two Bollocks.
On another occasion in another club, Les Aristos became Harry Stowe, and so on. This last act did mind-reading and in Sheffield one lunchtime he predicted the tote double numbers for the night-time draw (a sort of lottery) and left his prediction in an envelope pinned to the wall of the stage. That night, when the envelope was opened and the prediction found to be correct (it’s a trick, folks), a man in the audience stood up and claimed that the only way he could have known was if the tote double was a ‘fix’. Another man stood up, said he was on the committee, and that it wasn’t. The first said he was a liar and all hell broke out. I think everyone in the club, male and female, was fighting. Throughout it all, Peter Aristophanes stood on the stage, bowing.
Having tried several name variations, I chose that of my firstborn son, Paul, and it just stuck as if it was meant. Paul Daniels was a mellifluous name and easily rolled off the tongue in any introduction. Encouraging everybody around me to use my new name so that I could get used to it, Mam still called me Ted, but then mams are special anyway. Nowadays, though, even Mam calls me Paul and the only time Ted turns up is when I send birthday or Christmas cards to Mam and Trevor.
Our mini concert party spent the next two years doing one-night stands within a couple of hours’ travelling distance from home and the biggest miracle was always that the dilapidated Ford got us there and back in one piece. At one point, I was driving the van with my hand inside the engine to operate the accelerator. This old van did us proud as we slowly rumbled our way across Yorkshire and Durham to reach our destination. The fact that the engine was contained in a big lump of metal between the two front seats was extremely useful. In the freezing winters I would lift the metal top off the engine and it would quickly warm the interior, so we always arrived snug and warm even when the van’s regular heater broke down.
Our portable concert party proved to be a big hit in the smaller clubs where our offering of a whole evening of various entertainments must have proved very economical for them, but there was change afoot. The working men’s clubs were developing into large and glamorous institutions, although it was still the working lads that were runni
ng them. There were hundreds of clubs, probably thousands. In Barnsley alone, a small market town, there were 27 venues you could work as an entertainer and two of them were for full-week engagements.
Out of these developed the nightclub scene where entrepreneurs were keen to capitalise on the trend towards this new form of entertainment. The nightclubs, however, made a decision that they wanted more than just a ten-minute silent act, forgetting that those acts provided the variety between the singer and the comedian. You can’t juggle for 45 minutes. You can’t throw knives or spit darts or do any of the other wonderful things that the speciality act does for more than six or seven minutes. Those acts condense the excitement and really make a difference to a show. The result of this was that we lost all the thrills and spills of our speciality acts to venues abroad. My answer to this was to provide some of the missing speciality within my own act and I split my Eldanis act into two, put patter in the middle and went back to the music for the finale. The patter grew and grew and eventually I dropped the music. That was a major breakthrough for me. I looked carefully at myself and decided that I wasn’t tall enough to look good in tail suits and that my hard Northern accent did not lend itself to posh, patter. I read everything I could on comedy and, like the magic, tailored it to make it fit me.
Far and away the most successful TV presenter at the time was Bruce Forsyth. For me he still is the greatest presenter of a game show that we have ever had, getting more out of the participants than anyone since. His style was ‘pleasantly insulting’, taking the mickey out of the players but doing it with no nastiness at all. There is a very old theatrical poster of a magician and the by-line says ‘All done by kindness’. So that was the approach I decided to adopt. I would poke fun, but never with malice.
The act worked fine, but it was the clubs themselves that were a bigger stumbling block to the acts than the audiences. The local club committees had seen their authority grow enormously, with many becoming power-mad little Hitlers, but having no idea at all about showbusiness. Three stages of bureaucracy operated in the venues: the committee (these words were always said in a way that implied mysterious power and total control – the COMMITTEE were to be revered!) consisted of a dozen guys who appointed a Concert Secretary who dealt with the agents and booked the acts. Often, if he had got his own act together, he would take back-handers from all the agents. The final member of this team would be the chairman who, with no experience in appearing before an audience, would be master of ceremonies and compere the evening.
