by Paul Daniels
As she came over and the cameras rehearsed their moves to cover the action, I stopped and asked if she wouldn’t mind going for a coffee while I rehearsed with the cameras. She wouldn’t go, saying that she wanted to watch what was going to happen. I said that I’d rather it came as a surprise to her on the actual recording so that the reactions would be greater. She said she wanted to see what was going to happen. There was ‘lively’ discussion between Miss Bassey and me. Eventually, as it was going nowhere, she pointed out that it was her show. I pointed out that I was a guest, and as the same producer who had asked her to do the series had asked me to be a guest that maybe she should trust him. With a full Bassey glare, she said that I had better be good at what I was doing. I pointed out that I was so good at magic that if I had been a singer they would have called me Bassey. Shirley cracked up laughing as only she can. It’s a great laugh. She went off to her room. The Producer grabbed me by the lapels and said, ‘don’t you ever do that to me again.’
When I am feeling a bit cocky with myself, I watch a videotape of me on a New Year’s Eve special for Granada, where I am singing and dancing. Ugh! When I am feeling a bit down I watch the recording of The Shirley Bassey Show. The trick worked so well. Shirley didn’t know what was coming and was so natural, especially when she folded up laughing at one of the lines. We meet from time to time and she looks as gorgeous now as she did then. Now that’s a star.
In truth, I have always thought the term ‘star’ is used too easily. Once, on the radio, I heard that if Rod Stewart is a singer then there ought to be a better word for Pavarotti. Perhaps there should be some kind of international agreement or committee and representation would have to be made to them to see whether a person can have the title. Nowadays, stars come and go in months. I think that the title should only go to the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Goldie Hawn, Tom Hanks, Roger Moore and Sean Connery. Maybe then you would also have regional, national and international stars and you would know what you were getting for your money. OK, I know, I’m meandering, but I can’t be the only person who thinks this way, can I?
Funnily enough, in the world of television, the television production crews don’t think that ‘stars’ are very special at all. They treat them like items on a conveyor belt in the fun factory. Celebrities come and celebrities go with such regular monotony that they are treated as commonplace. Add to that the number of television shows being produced on a conveyor belt system and you start to understand why so much television programming is just filled with unexciting dross.
You can’t really blame the production crews. To them it’s just another job, most of the time. Let’s take a mental leap and consider death.
What?
Death.
To most of us it is something to be feared and we shut away all thought of it. We protect ourselves by not thinking of its coming and we are shocked and hurt when it calls.
Way back, when I was an auditor visiting the Eston Cemetery, I had to spend time in the cemetery lodge checking the accounts. Hearses were always pulling up outside and the attendants would get out of the long black cars. Half-bowing reverently to the mourners and smiling sadly, they respectfully made their way into the office, gave one last sad glance at the bereaved and closed the door behind them, whereupon they took off their hats and clapped their hands together saying, ‘Watcha, guys. Get the kettle on ‘cos it won’t take us long to drop this one!’
To a young man this was shocking, but I soon realised that they meant no disrespect. To these chaps it was just a job. A corpse to them held none of the fear and worry that it meant to the rest of us and was simply part and parcel of their everyday life.
It’s the same in hospitals. Doctors and nurses, in the main, grow immune to the cries of pain and suffering and only occasionally are jerked into a realisation of what is really happening, no matter how much they care. Maybe it is the brain’s way of handling the situation. So, if such giant emotional happenings as sickness and death can become so normal, what chance has a television show got?
Nevertheless, this was a time when television meant a lot to the public. Shows were getting many more millions than they do now and I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that the viewers now have many more channels to choose from. Television was not something that we had grown up with. Nowadays, it is much more of something playing in the background while the family get on with other things.
Despite all the guesting and the small series that I had done on television, it took the mad week in my life, which culminated in the Royal Variety Show, to open up the prime time slots for me. As the Seventies were coming to an end, the BBC approached me with their first offer of a full-blown TV special, with the possibility of a series to follow, with my name in the title. The Paul Daniels Magic Show took several weeks to put together and record but was finally scrapped. The show was just like all the other variety shows, with guest singers and the like. Somehow it just didn’t seem to be different enough. John Fisher, the original producer of the BBC’s The Magic Show, was given the job of sorting out the concept.
John flew out to Hollywood, where I was having what I felt was a well-earned holiday. I’m still not sure how he found me. I hadn’t told anyone where I was staying, having picked a small motel at random on Hollywood Boulevard. Nice place, with a central swimming pool, but a bit noisy at night with a lot of people coming and going. It turned out my motel was used extensively by the ladies of the night! I didn’t tell John. Coming and going? Bad choice of words, perhaps.
We agreed that the format of this new show should be given over to magic and speciality acts alone, the two elements of showbusiness in which we were both experts. Other shows on the box were offering more and more pop groups and singers, but no one was giving space for the peculiar world of jugglers, black art (a specialist form of mime and puppetry), fire-eaters, cowboys and contortionists, as well as the world’s finest conjuring talent. We felt there was enough interest in this aspect of the business to grab a decent audience.
This would be the first real magic show on television since The David Nixon Show. David was a magical superstar who filled that early time on television, but sadly, he recently died after several months of being very ill with cancer. I was with him on the Royal Variety Show, where he was part of the celebrity gathering for a scene from My Fair Lady. I was a bit embarrassed about this and I knocked on David’s dressing room door and apologised for the fact that I, Mr Nobody, was doing the magic spot, which I felt was rightfully his.
Having been lying down in the dark by himself, the gentle giant raised himself to sit upright and smiled, ‘No, it’s all right, Paul. I’ve had my time. Now it’s yours.’
That was the last time I saw him. He really was a gentleman.
So, with David gone, the BBC enlisted the talents of George Martin, David’s scriptwriter and a very funny comedian in his own right, and Ali Bongo, who was David’s magical adviser, for the first of these new-style Paul Daniels’ Magic Shows. At the initial meeting we sat around discussing the format and what I was going to do.
Of course, George and Ali had a lot of reminiscing to get through, which was nice, but when it got down to actually doing the tricks they kept coming out with, ‘Well, when we did it with David, it would go like this …’ or ‘David would do it this way …’
I really did try to keep pulling the meeting around to me and to my way of working but eventually I felt I was left with no choice. Knocking on the table I said, ‘I’m sorry, fellas, but we really do have to get something straight. I am not David Nixon. I don’t want to be David Nixon, just as much as I’m sure he didn’t want to be me. We’re different and, much as I loved the guy and what he did, that was then, this is now. This is going to be The Paul Daniels Show and it’s going to be done in the style of Paul Daniels.’
If my wording sounds strange to you, let me explain. I have always talked about Paul Daniels as a product. In meetings, I often revert in my mind to being Ted
Daniels in order to disassociate myself from the ‘product’ that is known as the magician Paul Daniels. How else can I talk about myself, or ‘him’, if you know what I mean?
I went on, ‘if you can work with that, fine. If you can’t, then it’s over because I can’t be David Nixon.’ I felt awful having to say it, but it had to be said.
George Martin chose to leave and we parted on good terms, while Ali Bongo decided to stay. There is no way that you will ever get me to knock David Nixon. He had his own wonderful style that was right for his time. Within the secret side of magic that uses manipulation, he was a bit limited and it didn’t matter one whit. He used other methods and that is as good a way to work magic as any other. I had my own way and that did include some manipulation skills (known in the trade as finger flinging!) that used to scare the hell out of Ali when I chose to do them in front of the camera. He often thought it too risky whereas I believed it would just work. His ‘You can’t do that,’ or ‘Oooh no, you won’t be able to do that,’ were a constant source of encouragement to me to make it work. Directors, too, used to shooting exactly what was rehearsed, took a lot of getting used to me. I like being ‘free’ during a routine to go where I feel like going and doing what I feel like doing at any particular time. I am a jazz magician.
Ali was to remain with me as my magical consultant for the next 15 series of The Paul Daniels Show, spanning 16 years and beyond. I was always astonished at how good he was. Ali is quite a unique character who, it seems, has worked with magic since time began. If you want anything made in paper, cardboard, gluing, felt or rubber bands to make something unusual happen, Ali is the man. He also sat show in and show out next to the various directors we had over the years, telling them where and when they could ‘cut’ the shots so that the magic could be clearly seen not to be camera tricks. That was a very important aspect of the show. We always had a live audience and performed the magic in real time in front of them. Once, we even had an audience made up of journalists to prove further that we didn’t use camera tricks.
While keeping the entertainment factor as high as possible, the shows did go on subtle crusades sometimes. The Bunco Booth, one of the most popular items we did, was designed to show the people at home that they really couldn’t win if they played the gambling games that you see on the streets or at racecourses. You really, really, really can’t win, so no matter how sure you think you are that the ‘Queen is over there’ or ‘the pea is under that shell’ or ‘this loop will catch my finger’, I promise you, you will be wrong and you will lose your money.
In later shows, we would do pseudo-psychic magic to try to make people at home think that perhaps the charlatans out there should be looked at a little more closely. Once, when we were discussing a ‘psychic’ bit for the show, Ali told me that at one time in his life he was performing on a pier and the gypsy who normally did fortune-telling had unexpectedly died, having signed a contract for the whole summer. Why is that funny to me?
Ali was given the job and said how, after a couple of weeks, he was able to ‘read’ so much from the customers’ ages, clothing and style that he became an adept fortune-teller. There is an awful lot about people that we observe instinctively, but never analyse, he said.
Along the same lines, when the live touring magic show was in Bradford, I remember how the members of the company all thought it hilarious that the ‘psychics’ from the Psychic Fair opposite our theatre kept asking us where the car park was. Didn’t they know?
The moment the first series aired, it doubled The David Nixon Show’s viewing figures. From day one, the television show was extraordinarily successful. That first series I only did small magic, interacting with the audience, and left the illusions to the guests. For example, I would do the cut and restored £5 notes, a ring melting through a solid stick, a three-card trick and David Devant’s Eternal Triangle which is a very old and amazing card trick with which the viewers at home were able to join in. Special guests included Hans Moretti who fired crossbows at a target on the trigger of another crossbow and so on until one of the crossbows fired a bolt to split an apple on his own head – all this while blindfolded. (Moretti, not me.) All that in 30 minutes. The first programme went out on 9 June 1979 and the run contained four programmes and finished with a Christmas Special.
Mervyn, my manager, used to go to his local pub after the shows aired and sit and listen to our Yorkshire audience talking about it. We learned a lot from their observations. In one show, for example, Hans was upside-down and swinging on a burning rope above razor-sharp bayonets trying to escape from a straitjacket before the rope burnt through and he plunged to his death. Well, what do you do for a living? In the same show I did a card trick where blank cards became printed. That night and the next day, all the people in the pub talked about was the card trick. That was when I learned that the big illusions and the huge spectaculars are as big as the screen, that’s all. In a much later series, we had a young American guest who became a headliner in Las Vegas – Lance Burton. He came to my house and watched shows we had recorded in the past. After hours of viewing he watched me show, in extreme close-up, a large matchbox to be empty. From it I produced a couple of mice and they, as I said, filled the screen. I heard him say, almost to himself, ‘shit, you don’t need tigers!’
When a new series was commissioned even before the last one had been screened, I knew we were on to a winner, but the team and I had one big worry. Where could we find all the new effects, tricks and speciality acts that were required? Did enough exist for another series, this time with eight programmes? Well, as we found enough for 15 series which included more, longer shows, as well as specials for Christmas and Easter, I guess our worries were unfounded. It became, however, a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year mental exercise to find and create the material. I would record ideas on dictaphones while driving the car; I would wake up in the middle of the night and jot down illusions that I had just dreamt up, literally. It got to the point where I would take a notebook to the toilet. Looking back, if someone had told me that I was heading for more than 600 television appearances with thousands of tricks, I would never have believed it possible.
The creative team was an essential part of the show and included my friend Graham Reed, he who had dropped the book off at the Palladium stage door and who joined the team at a later stage. Graham was in marketing and advertising and was an ideas man. He would come up with a plan for a trick or stunt but had no conception of how it could be carried through. That was for others to work out!
‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea, Paul, if you escaped from being tied up between two powerboats while on a raft?’
He had no method, just a plot for the play, which would get us all thinking. I liked this way of working, particularly as it would cause great laughter in the room as we invariably took the mickey out of Graham, when he confessed to having no idea if it was possible. Come to think of it, all of Graham’s ideas involved me getting into danger. Maybe he fancies Debbie more than he tells me?
Over the years, the team was always Ali Bongo and me, to whom we added Gil Leaney, Graham Reed, Barry Murray and an Irish magician called Billy McComb who was with us for only one season as he never came up with any ideas. All he kept saying was ‘Pigs are funny,’ but never suggested how we would use them.
As I told you, Ali was great with the small stuff and the occasional illusion. Gil Leaney had been a warm-up magician for a legendary radio show starring Wilfred Pickles, and was a builder of beautiful props with an intimate knowledge of the design and construction of illusions. He had built illusions for the great illusionists in the heyday of theatres. Barry Murray was a brilliant researcher who was able to dig out information from any magazine that had been written at any time and had been involved in the pop world. A great ‘dreamer’, he brought a historical and musical element to the programmes.
Others would drift in for a week with an idea that we would develop and adapt to the style of the show, but mainly the shows came o
ut of the minds of those named above.
For most of the early years, John Fisher was the producer and also the researcher. I believe that research was really his forte, as he knew so many people in the worlds of magic and circus who would feed him ideas.
Debbie, who joined the television series later, became the ‘critic’. Coming from outside the world of magic, she looked at the performances with a different eye and would frequently pick up on aspects of the effects that, as magicians, we couldn’t see because we were too close to the subject. We ‘understood’ what was going on and Debbie would point out that the viewers wouldn’t even know what I was talking about.
Our team would get together for a brainstorming session once or twice a year and then practically live together for three months as we compiled the series. I spent the next 16 years of my life in a whirlwind of activity, constantly trying to think up new concepts, or unique ways of presenting old ones. Sometimes people would discover me sitting alone in a corner, ask me a question and back off when I didn’t answer, thinking I was in a strange mood. They probably thought that I was rude if they didn’t know me. In reality that was how I rehearsed best. I would logically working through a presentation and I would ‘see’ what it would look like, who would stand where, what could go wrong, what I would do if it did, and so on.
