by Paul Daniels
Eventually, ‘Where are the trucks?’
‘Trucks?’ I replied.
‘Oh, are we getting the cats?’
‘Cats?’ I replied.
Astute readers will have noticed that I was not holding the brightest conversation here. Then the light dawned on me. They were expecting an American-style magician, with big boxes and cages, lions and tigers. I pointed to the small box on the floor. ‘My act’s in there.’
The guy with the clipboard yelled again, ‘Close the doors, fellas, we got us a weirdo.’
Wasn’t that nice of him?
I was shown to a dressing room and went through my rehearsal. There was another act on the bill called Barclay Shaw. I had seen him before and he had a brilliant puppet act, although he was also a brilliant illusionist. He got very bitchy when he found out how long a spot I had been given and, covering that up, gave me lots of advice, as it was my first time in Las Vegas. This ‘advice’ made no sense to me at all and, if I had taken it, I am sure I would have ‘bombed’, as they say over there. I listened, but decided I would do my own thing my own way.
That night all the dancers (there must have been over 100), the other acts, the casino staff and even the kitchen staff came out and stood at the sides to see what the little Englishman was going to do for over half an hour. The stage was the widest and the deepest that I had ever been on but I was ready. I had spent three weeks learning American. I could communicate. I heard my name announced and walked on to face 300 Japanese!
Immediately I said ‘Kon ban wa’, which is ‘Good evening’ in Japanese, and I bowed low. Three hundred Japanese stood up and bowed in response. I found out who spoke English and organised my own translation team. The job became easier because every time I said something funny I would wait for them to translate and I would bow and they would all stand up and bow. This was a great running gag for the Americans who were all seated behind them.
In all my shows I get people out of the audience and, obviously, decided to get a couple of Americans up from behind the Japanese. To the first one: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Randy,’ came the reply.
I acted shocked and then, breaking from America-speak into posh English, said, ‘Well, dear boy, if you ever go to the United Kingdom, you must never say that. You must say, “Hello, I’m Randolph.”
‘Now why the hell would I want to say that?’
‘Let me explain. The word Randy, in England, is exactly the same as if I went up to a young lady over here and said, “Hello, I’m Horny.” ’
The audience roared, the Japanese translated, the Japanese laughed, so I bowed. They all stood up and bowed. They sat down.
‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ he said.
I found out the other man’s name and made something of that before turning back to Randy.
‘What do you do for a living?’
Now I know you are not going to believe this, but it’s true. He came back with, ‘I’m a venereal disease inspector.’ The lid blew off the cabaret room. I jumped back about 6ft. ‘Isn’t that dangerous? You know, a HORNY VD GUY?’
Some nights you just don’t have to work hard, the audience do it all for you. Barclay Shaw realised that I knew what I was doing and we became friends.
I really liked my month in Vegas and the management wanted me to stay and sign a long, long contract. That was not for me. I had just done a long stint in the West End and couldn’t face what, to me, would become an office job. I have quite a few friends in Las Vegas who have signed ten-year contracts and longer. True, they earn fortunes, but I have never taken a job just for the money and so I left Las Vegas and went on holiday.
This was a really strange time of my life. Debbie and I were still in our ‘on and off ’ stage which was all my fault. In between times, I was going out with a stunning solicitor (no, not the American version, the legal kind) but it wasn’t that that was creating the confusion. I didn’t want to perform any more. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I was exhausted from the long run of shows. I had been doing live shows, television and radio flat out and intermingled. It had all become too much.
How British Airways found out that photography was my hobby I don’t know, but they came up with an offer to Mervyn that I leapt at. They would fly Debbie and I around the world for up to three months, all flights and hotels paid for, if I would take pictures that could be used in a book and possibly their brochures. I agreed to all of this but just before we set off, I received an invitation to a Variety Club luncheon at the Hilton on Park Lane.
On the day, I went in by taxi, and as we arrived there were mountains of photographers and television cameras. ‘There must be someone important coming,’ I said. It turned out to be me. Months before, someone had muttered that if the Variety Club were to offer me an award would I accept it, and I had said, ‘Yes, thank you very much.’ What I didn’t realise at the time was just how big the Variety Club were and how prestigious was the award. I sat through the whole of the meal wondering what the hell I was going to say but I think I did all right and, of course, enjoyed the accolades. It did occur to me, however, that I had won all the working men’s clubs awards and had never done one again, won all the nightclub awards and had never worked in a nightclub after that. Would I work again in theatre now that I had this?
Debbie and I packed up the gear and off we went. What a trip that was. We flew to Calcutta first and, when we landed, they came around spraying the plane and us to kill the bugs. I don’t know why because when we got off the plane there were more than enough bugs to go around anyway. The city was a real culture shock. Hong Kong had poverty when I was there but nothing like Calcutta. At the time, they were building an underground system. The machines that we would use in the UK stood idle as woman after woman came out of the hole in the ground with baskets of earth balanced on their heads. Both here and in the next city we went to I found it hard to contain my anger at the cruelty and torture to children, bones broken and twisted to make them into beggars’ tools. You could rent one of these poor, skinny, distorted children and take them out on to the streets to beg and make a profit out of their condition. Awful.
In the film Gandhi, there was a scene in which the great man takes a tray from a man serving his group with tea. He said something like, ‘How can we expect to stop the British from treating us like servants when we treat our own people like servants?’ and some of the people in the cinema applauded. All I could think was that I have never thought of a waiter in a restaurant as a servant. A good waiter can make you have a really good night out, for example. Italians seem to do it best. In that one action, Gandhi, an undoubtedly great man, took away a job from a man who could probably not do anything else very well. I never thought of a rickshaw or trishaw man as a slave or a servant, I just admired their fitness and strength. When they were removed from the streets, they fell into extreme poverty because they didn’t know how to do anything else. Not everyone is as well educated as Gandhi. Another of his major ‘reforms’ was to limit imports of foreign-made goods to practically nothing. This didn’t work; it only made a few families very rich.
Countries have to trade with each other. You can’t make everything for yourself. The quality of life will go down. India was poor beyond belief. What their Government spent their money on I don’t know, but it wasn’t for the benefit of the people.
One of the items that I wanted to photograph was the Howrah Bridge. The driver would not let me do this. Apparently, a German tourist had photographed it the year before and had been thrown into the river by the public for being a possible security risk. I pointed out that the bridge had been made over the road from where we lived in the prefab in South Bank and that it was probably one of the things that had turned our tulips black. It made no difference. I was not allowed to take a photograph. I pointed out that there were now satellites in space that could take a photograph of the minutest detail of any part of the earth. The answer was still no. I walked on to the bridge and saw the plaque tha
t verified Dorman, Long and Co of Cleveland had built it. The next day, an urchin offered me some photographs of the Howrah Bridge for a few rupees.
Debbie and I left Calcutta for Bombay and we had to fly on the internal Indian air service. I do hope that by now they have improved this service. As we walked through the metal detector doorway in Calcutta it bleeped. We stopped and were immediately asked to move on. We explained that the door bleeped and were told that it was supposed to bleep. As we watched, everybody who walked through it made it bleep. I guess it was set too high. We got on the plane and couldn’t sit together. The plane stood on the runway for an hour-and-a-half. The only thing on offer to alleviate the heat was water and you really cannot drink the water in the East. That is not an insult. I know that when the Indian cricket team came to the UK with their wives, years ago, some of the wives got very ill when they drank our water. Our stomachs must get used to our own germs.
After what seemed ages, the plane took off and we flew across India. Debbie and I would get up and talk to each other from time to time. Night fell and in the middle of a conversation I told Debbie to get back into her seat and belt up. ‘This plane is going down,’ I said and I was right. The plane landed while people were still standing, shooting them forward in the aisles. Then the voice came over the loudspeakers, ‘We are now landing at Bombay airport.’
When we got off the plane, there was no one there to meet us. We stood waiting by the carousel for our luggage and Debbie, tired out, took off her shoes. ‘I’d put them back on,’ I said. She asked why and as she did so the luggage carousel started up. Rats ran from under it and Debbie was immediately hanging around my neck. Thank you, rats! We had no contact telephone numbers so I walked out of the airport and hailed a taxi. As the driver spun the cab around at high speed to stop in front of us, I should have spotted that his turban was angled to one side and that he seemed overly happy. He threw our luggage on to the top of the car, as there was too much to go in the boot. We got into the car only to find he had a friend sitting in the front seat, equally happy. ‘Where to, Sahib?’ he asked and I told him to take us to the best hotel in town.
The world lost a great racing driver when nobody signed him up for Formula One. We went like a rocket into Bombay with him ducking and diving across the lanes. As he drove, he and his friend would pass a cheroot backwards and forwards that smelt awfully sweet. Then he would aim the ‘bullet’ at a gap that wasn’t there and it would open up just before he arrived. We marvelled at people sleeping head to toe along a parapet on a bridge that we crossed. They had obviously learnt to sleep without rolling over. The pavements were full of people sleeping in the open.
Ahead of us I saw the traffic lights changing to red. We were in the third, outside lane at the time. As the cars in front of us slowed to a stop, blocking all three lanes, he went through the traffic on our left without slowing down at all and bounced the car up on to the pavement, horn blazing. People scattered and he took the car between the traffic light and a building, bounced it off the pavement again and straight into the traffic that was now moving through the lights at right angles to us. Debbie pulled her wide-brimmed hat down over her eyes and I did a bit more than cross my fingers. If only I had worn my brown trousers for the trip.
We cleared the traffic into an empty road ahead and I told Debbie we were all right. ‘What about the luggage?’ Debbie whispered. She was right to worry. We had shot all over the place and he hadn’t bothered to tie it down when he threw it on the top. Unfortunately, the driver had good hearing. Without altering his driving style at all, he swung his left foot, which normally he would have used to stop the car, across and on to the accelerator. He opened the car door, held the side of the steering wheel and swung himself out of the car hanging on to the wheel and the door. Standing up he looked on to the roof, got back in, shut the door and said, ‘luggage OK, Memsahib.’ Debbie went back under the hat for the rest of the journey.
We checked into the Taj Mahal Hotel by the gateway to India. We were shown to a beautiful room and went to bed. We had actually arrived at the very hotel British Airways had intended us to be in so we had got lucky. The next morning, I used the toilet and washed my hands. As I was drying them there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was a man outside who said, ‘Good morning,’ and took my towel and handed me a clean one. From then on it became a great mystery. Every time either of us would wash our hands he would be there with a clean towel. We even opened the door to see if he was there and he wasn’t anywhere in sight, but if we washed our hands there he was, the Genie of the Towels.
BA gave us a driver, Joseph, to take us anywhere we wanted to go. ‘Would you like to go and see the bodies burning?’ was his first question. We didn’t. Apparently there were trucks that went around on a morning collecting the bodies of people who had died on the streets during the night. Not my scene and I couldn’t imagine that British Airways would want the photographs. I took lots of pictures that they wouldn’t want to use.
One night we went to a nice restaurant with a good band. We were the only people dining. As we have found all over the world, the singers, who are native to the country, sing in perfect American but talk in their own lilting accents. It is a very strange phenomenon. Debbie and I were seated at a round table that was so large we had to shout to each other. I ordered lamb chops and asked for the wine list. This took for ever and I had to ask quite a few times. Eventually, the head waiter came over with some embarrassment and offered us the only two bottles of wine that he had. I had never heard of either of them and when we did drink one of the bottles it tasted strangely of curry. In a country where nothing can be imported, everyone suffers at every level.
The lamb came in a pastry-covered pot with the bones sticking out of the pastry. The smell was not good and the bones were as clean as a whistle and not connected to the meat at all. The meat tasted like it smelt and I didn’t eat too much of it.
As we drove back to the hotel, I told Joseph about the meat. Next morning he explained, ‘I went back to the restaurant because you were not happy, Mr Daniels, and they told me that they were very embarrassed because you ordered lamb but they did not have any lamb. They served you dog but the real problem was that it was not a young dog.’ Somehow this explanation did not make me feel any better about the night before.
Thanks to the Variety Club Award news being sent around the world, everywhere we went on this trip either the local news stations or even the television companies themselves were always there trying to get me to work. I didn’t want to work but it is very hard to say ‘no’ when people are being so complimentary. I agreed to do a television programme for children and went out and bought some packs of cards, tissue paper, string and the like to make up some small magic tricks for them to see.
I was taken to a small television studio where the facilities, to say the least, were primitive. The lights were the small, portable lamps normally used in domestic video making, hanging on Dexion framing. The television cameras themselves were rectangular boxes that only recorded in black and white so they decided to shoot my part on film, not tape. They found a table for me to work on and it was an ex-British Army metal desk that made a strange blump-blump noise every time you touched it and the middle went up and down. They brought in a group of small children and sat them on metal and plastic chairs that squeaked every time a child moved.
The camera was a collectable. An old German film camera with an enormous magazine mounted on the top. When it was eventually started it made a sound like a tinny machine gun.
In came a beautiful young Indian girl who was the regular presenter of the show. She sat down and the director gave the order to roll the camera. Then, and I am sorry to say, I laughed out loud, when, in the midst of the blump-blumps, squeak-squeaks and the machine-gun, he shouted, ‘QUIET, ACTION.’
He hadn’t a hope in hell of getting quiet in that racket, but he didn’t seem to care. Then I got one of the biggest surprises of my life. The girl smiled at th
e camera, paused, and very slowly said, ‘super … cala … fragilistic … expiali … docious. Super … cala … fragilistic … expiali … docious.’ Delivered in that lovely, lilting Indian accent, these were the last words I expected. My jaw dropped and she went on, ‘that is right, children … Magic,’ and she turned to look at me. It took a couple of seconds to realise that it was my cue to work. I’d love to see that film because I must have looked a right wally for the first few minutes.
We flew from Bombay to Hong Kong and the reception there was the opposite of Bombay. We were met at the door of the plane and practically jogged through the airport. Our luggage was first off the carousel and loaded into a car before we could blink. We were across the other side of the harbour before we knew it and into the hotel in about seven minutes.
As we were signing in, Barry Norman, the television film critic, said ‘Hello’. It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.
From a lot of reminiscing in Hong Kong, and a trip to a monastery that painted Jesus, with Chinese eyes, on a donkey on dinner plates, we went to Japan. Tokyo was just like every other major city in the world. The hotel had the biggest foyer of any hotel I had ever stayed in and I liked the fact that none of the staff expect a tip. I got the impression that they thought it an insult. Perhaps by now, the Americans, notorious for their over-the-top tipping, have changed them and, if so, that’s sad. We also experienced the efficiency of the Japan Travel Bureau. One evening, I decided that if we were really to experience Japan, we had to get out of Tokyo and at about 5.45pm went into the JTB office. They found a man who spoke a little English (in those days it was very difficult to find any written English on any of the signs) and I told him that I had looked at his brochures but did not want to go on any of his organised trips around Japan. I explained that I wanted to go to various bits and pieces of each trip and gave him my list. He was gone for half-an-hour and returned with two books of tickets, one for Debbie, one for me. All these tickets were printed with our names and properly bound in a book.
