by Paul Daniels
The Paul Daniels Magic Show became a major part of the nation’s viewing but, because we were all so close to it, I guess we never really noticed just how successful it was. We had our personal moments, of course, when we enjoyed the success. There was the Christmas that we became the first show to knock Morecambe and Wise off the top of the ratings. Now that was a mixed feeling! I loved Morecambe and Wise. They were the gods. Early in my career, I had to stop watching them because I found myself talking and timing like Eric.
I’m reminded of a charity event held one night at Grays, Essex, in a large nightclub. Prince Charles was there and a lot of star celebrities. It was a dinner and cabaret evening and the stars were sitting at one long table with me perched on one corner as a relative unknown. Do you remember how Eric had a running gag in their TV shows? He used to lift the front of Ernie’s hair and say, ‘You can’t see the join.’ Eric, this night, decided to go to the toilet, stood up from the table and, as he passed my corner, grabbed hold of my wig, lifted it a little, said, ‘You can’t see the join, you know,’ and walked on. Nobody noticed in the dark and the noise of the club.
As he came back past me I grabbed his jacket and pulled him down to say, ‘that could have been embarrassing.’ Immediately he came back with, ‘It was. I didn’t know you wore one,’ and walked on. He was just so funny.
Nevertheless, knocking them off the top spot did feel good. Another great success came when the show being repeated on Tuesday nights on BBC 2 was at number one in their charts at the same time that the new show, aired on Saturday nights on BBC 1, was at number one in theirs. This was so unique that the BBC took me to lunch. During the lunch, the executives said that there was now nowhere to go! I suggested that we should go for the Golden Rose of Montreux, which is possibly the most prestigious television award in the world.
Well, they weren’t too sure about this at all. They had an ‘alternative’ comedy show lined up for that and John Fisher and I pointed out that to have any chance at all, the judges from all the other countries had to understand what was happening on the screen. They still weren’t sure, but they eventually said we could go ahead.
Where John got the funding from I don’t know, because the show was expensive to make. Good shows always are. It took three days to shoot the Easter Special and off it went to Montreux. The executives went with it and we stayed at home shooting the next series. Phone calls flew back and forth.
‘We are up against specials from Bette Midler and Sammy Davis Jnr.’
‘There is a lot of talk about the show.’
‘The judges laughed and people have asked if they can see it.’
Eventually, on a recording day came the call, ‘WE’VE WON.’
The BBC went mad. Everyone was running down the corridors and shouting the news. They hadn’t had a win in something like 17 years.
That same year, a show called Spitting Image, a puppet show that featured famous and infamous people as puppets and included me among them, won the Bronze at Montreux. If you watched the national news you would have thought they had won the Gold. ITV really blew the trumpet and the BBC hardly gave us a mention. They never did know how to publicise themselves and their shows.
It was just after this award that I got a telephone call from a friend who said he had seen the registration plate MAG 1C for sale in the Times. For the benefit of any Americans who are reading this let me point out that in the UK you can’t buy any plate you would like for your car. You have to make ‘words’ up out of sets of numbers. Jimmy Tarbuck, for example, has a car with the number COM 1C. I had tried to buy MAG 1C years before, but was told it had never been issued.
To be honest, I wasn’t really all that bothered. I had never really been much of a car man even though, over the years, I have had some really nice ones. Cars I do remember are a huge Peugeot Familiale, which looked like something out of an Al Capone movie, and the Scout Group borrowed it for just that reason for a parade they were in. The engine blew up when I was near Newport and I had to buy a car in a hurry to do the rest of the clubs for that week. An organist in a club was getting married and didn’t need two cars so he sold me a Triumph Herald, on the spot, for £150. When I got into it, I laughed at his eccentricity. It had a small racing steering wheel, a stubby gear stick, rev counters and, most peculiar, a huge lump in the middle of the car. I had never been in one before so I just put the latter down to bad design.
I trundled it around the Welsh Valleys for the rest of that week, never looking under the bonnet. The idea was to just run it into the ground while I looked for another car.
On the Saturday night, I set off for Yorkshire and hit the road out of Wales just after midnight. I was going uphill alongside a convoy of Army trucks on a two-lane highway when some prat came up behind me flashing his lights. Where he thought I would go I have no idea but I changed down and accelerated. Immediately, I was pushed into the seat as this little Triumph Herald took off like a rocket. It left Mr Prat miles behind. Top gear and it still kept accelerating. When I got to the first available stopping place I pulled in and lifted the bonnet. I was looking at the engine from a Spitfire sports car.
After that, I had great fun waiting for sports cars to come alongside me on the motorways and then pulling away to leave them standing. I imagined them going into their garages and asking for their cars to be tuned up, ‘because I was left standing by a Triumph Herald’.
Coming over the Pennines one night, very late after a gig, I hit a bump in the road and the chassis snapped. I guess the combination of the weight of the oversized engine and the famous rusting of the box chassis was what did it. Somehow I nurtured and coaxed the car out of the mountains and down towards Barnsley. I pulled into a Ford garage at about 2.30am and went to sleep in the car. As soon as the garage opened, I went in and bought a new Cortina. The salesman asked whether I had anything to trade in and I pointed to the Triumph parked at the other end of the forecourt. He asked the year and we did a deal. I insisted that the new car had to be taxed and insured immediately as I was going away that afternoon. While all that was being done, I just prayed that he wouldn’t go and look at the Triumph. After what seemed like an age, I drove away and I never dared to go back for a service.
When I was with Melody, she had a Citroen and I drove her in to get it serviced. Standing on the forecourt was an unbelievable car that later I saw in a movie at Beaulieu Motor Museum as the ‘Car of the Future’. You have to remember that, at the time, cars were very ‘boxy’ and only Jaguars had any real roundness to them. This car was streamlined beautifully. Even the front headlamps were behind an all-glass front end that was designed to be part of the bonnet. The Citroen SM had a Maserati engine and was way out in front of any other car when it came to design. This was the first car I had ever lusted after. I phoned Mervyn and the deal was done. I owned my first supercar.
The first morning I picked it up from the garage and drove it out and around the London north circular road into the early morning rush-hour traffic. Everyone was turning their heads to look at this very rare and beautiful car. It broke down. Well, it stopped. It was out of petrol. What possesses a garage to let you drive out without petrol? The other problem was that it had an ‘improved’ Citroen suspension, the one that goes up and down. Well, when this car lost power it sat down on the road, low and heavy, and you couldn’t push it. It took ages to get some juice and get it rolling again.
I had owned it for about a week when I had a show to do down near Dover. After the show and very late at night, I set off for home. Melody fell asleep. I lowered the steering wheel on to my lap, for no other reason than because I could, and drove up the M2 motorway. ‘I wonder how fast this thing goes?’
I put my foot down. At 110mph I changed into top gear and away it went. I really don’t know how fast I was going when I flew past a sign that said the end of the motorway was in one mile.
‘I wonder how long it takes to stop?’
Well, it slowed down and I continued on up the A2. Af
ter a couple of miles I could see a flashing blue light and a policeman waving cars past, until he saw me, that is. He waved me into the side of the road and walked around to the driver’s side of the car. Well, it would have been except that the car was left-hand drive. He bent down, looked in, expressed disgust at his mistake and walked around the car to my side, where I was sitting with the lowered wheel. As he walked round, I lowered the car to its lowest position.
He bent over and knocked on my window. As I lowered the window I raised the car so he had to straighten up a bit.
‘We have had a report of a car going along the motorway at very high speed,’ he said.
‘Well I never saw it,’ I replied.
This came as such a surprise to him he burst out laughing. I lowered the car and he bent over to say, ‘that’s the coolest answer I’ve had in the ten years I’ve been stopping people. It was you.’
‘Ah, now that’s a problem,’ I answered. ‘I have only had the car a week and it is all in metric so I don’t know how fast it is going.’
‘You mean you don’t know how to convert kilometres to miles?’
‘No.’
‘Just a minute.’
He got on to his radio system and asked how to do it and told me to divide by eight and multiply by five. I had raised and lowered the car during most of this conversation, watching him bend and straighten up all the time. I thanked him. Suddenly, he noticed he was doing aerobics. ‘What the hell is going on with this car?’
‘It’s just come off the motorway and it’s panting,’ I answered. Again he laughed. I must have been working well. He stood back and looked at the car.
‘I’ve never seen one of these. What is it?’
I told him and gave him a conducted tour of the car. He got his mate out of the parked police car and I showed them how the headlights went around the corners when you turned the steering wheel. I showed them how the steering wheel was fully adjustable and how the same went for the luxurious leather rolled bucket seats. I showed them how the car went up and down at the touch of a lever to let you drive through fords and flooded roads. I showed them how the car, when jacked up, lowered the rear wheels from under the arches. They asked if they could look under the bonnet and I lifted it to show the engine, six cylinders of pure power served by three split carburettors. One of them pointed forward to a small, single-cylinder ‘engine’ sitting close to the front.
‘What’s that?’
‘That is possibly the best feature on the car. When the big engine breaks down you can get home using the small, single-cylinder two-stroke.’ They were really impressed by that, gave me a warning, and I drove away. Melody asked me what I was laughing at and I told her that I was just imagining these two coppers going back to the station and spreading the legend of the car with a ‘breakdown engine’.
‘So what?’ said Mel.
‘Well, I was actually showing them the air-conditioning unit!’
When it came to the MAG 1C number plate, however, Mervyn said that as I was always buying stuff for other people, I should buy myself a present. He arranged for the seller to bring the car round. A beautiful red Ferrari pulled up outside my home. I had to buy it. How could you not buy it? This was, and is, the greatest car in the world to drive, and I do mean DRIVE. The owner said how glad he was to be selling it and when I asked why answered, ‘Because I am sick of people asking me if this is Paul Daniels’ car.’
Wow, I had some fun in that car. I loved it. Eventually, however, it spent more and more time in the garage as I toured more and more. I needed something with more boot space for the clothes and the act props so I got a Bentley. I have had a couple of those now and they are the greatest touring car for comfort. So there you have it: Ferrari for fun, Bentley for comfort.
When it got to the stage where I hadn’t used the Ferrari for a couple of years, I decided to sell it. It’s only a car. The advert went out and someone bought it. They came and collected it on a trailer and, as it went down the drive and out of my life, I cried. I never thought that I would do that over a car, but I cried.
CHAPTER 11
DISCOVERING DEBBIE
It seemed as if the rest of the world was toppling down. The Berlin wall was the first to go in 1989, uniting Germans once again, quickly followed by the dismantling of Lenin’s statue in Riga, USSR, which symbolised the end of the Cold War between the East and the West. Costing £6 million, the huge EuroDisney theme park opened near Paris and Paul prepared for some thrills and spills of his own.
Now that the BBC television series had started to roll, Richard Mills offered me the top-of-the-bill spot in Great Yarmouth. The show would be a full-blown Variety show featuring both large and small magic and lots of acts and dancers. There was a full orchestra and tons of scenery. I provided all the necessary tricks and illusions and Delfonts did the rest. So it was that on 23 May 1979, that I turned up at the rehearsal room in Shepherd’s Bush, London. I was carrying a few props and, as usual, I was early. The rehearsal room was underneath a church and I was not the first to get there. Sitting on the low wall that surrounded the building, waiting for the building to be unlocked, was a very pretty dark-haired girl. I made the usual greetings and found out that she was going to be one of the dancers in the show. Waves of normality swept over me but, goodness me, I couldn’t get involved. I was the star of the show and had to be equally friendly with everyone.
Eventually the others turned up and we went through the usual getting-to-know-everyone routines. The dancers got into their leotards and leg warmers ready to rehearse. This is always a wonderful moment for any red-blooded man and I noticed that the girl from the wall was not only pretty but had a great figure. She reminded me of the little drawings of a girl that used to separate the paragraphs in the Penthouse magazine, which I only bought for the jokes, of course.
We had to place some of the dancers into the illusions and I picked her out. During our brief conversation, I had noticed that she had personality and a great laugh. She was petite, lithe and a fabulous dancer. Her name was Debbie McGee. So now you know why 23 May was mentioned. She won’t let me forget it!
Later, I was to find out that Debbie had been a soloist with the Iranian National Ballet and that she had been trapped in Iran when the Ayatollah returned to power. The English dancers had to hide and a friendly Iranian at the airport who fancied Debbie shoved her on a plane home. Although primarily ballet trained, Debbie had studied all forms of dance and needed a job as soon as she arrived back in England. Seeing a notice in The Stage newspaper, she auditioned and got the job in Yarmouth.
Thrilled at gaining work so quickly, Debbie telephoned a friend to break the good news.
‘But who is Paul Daniels?’ she asked her mate.
Having been out of the country for so long, she had not seen this new magician (and sex symbol!) appear on the scene.
Her friend said, ‘if you switch the telly on, he’s on now.’
Debbie, running to her TV, pushed the power button and Blankety Blank sprang into life. This game show, hosted by Terry Wogan, was at the height of its popularity.
I had ‘guested’ on several of them and asked the Producer if I could ‘send the show up’. He said ‘yes’. Often trying to go way over the top in being silly, on one occasion I ran out into the car park, snapped off my car aerial and ran back into the studio with it. Terry used a microphone on a long, thin stick so I produced mine and we ended up having a sword fight. Every show I did I would try to come up with visual gags.
On the day that Debbie tuned in, Superman, the Movie had just exploded on to our cinema screens and everybody was talking about it. Before the programme, I told Terry’s scriptwriter the gag about Superman being stupid because he wears his underpants on the outside.
I had taken a bit of a gamble, hoping that the scriptwriter would tell Terry the gag before the show. I had also concealed a Superman T-shirt with a big red ‘s’ under my velcro-attached shirt and tie. Sitting down at the Blankety Blank desk, I to
ok a pair of red Y-fronts out of my pocket and pulled them up over my trousers while everyone was busy setting up the show.
Right at the start of the show, Terry picked on me. ‘Oh no, it’s not you again, Daniels!’
‘Don’t you start with me, Wogan,’ and I pulled my shirt open to reveal the ‘S’.
Bang on cue, Terry said, ‘Superman’s an idiot, he wears his underpants on the outside!’
I immediately stood on my chair, exposing my red Y-fronts and said, ‘What’s wrong with that?’
The huge explosion of laughter was so loud, that the sound engineer hadn’t time to turn his buttons down and the sound went into distortion. Meanwhile, this was Debbie McGee’s first view of Paul Daniels! Debbie’s eyes widened at the thought of spending a whole season with this idiot and phoned her friend again to say so.
‘No, don’t worry,’ said the friend, ‘he’s normally a very good magician.’
‘Oh no,’ said Deb, ‘I can’t stand magicians.’
What a great start to a romance.
The season started and Debbie and I just sort of got along. I was still with Nikki but Debbie and I started seeing more of each other away from the theatre and both of us wanted it to go further. Eventually we ‘snuck’ away for a day and I rented a boat on the river. Being the flash, splash-the-money-about kind of guy that I am, this was a small day boat with a tiny cabin. It’s a good job that we are both small in stature or our love life may never have taken off. From the moment that I lassoed a small bush on the riverbank and tied her up (the boat, not Debbie), passion took over and tidal waves were announced on the local weather stations as we rocked and rolled the boat about.
