Paul Daniels

by Paul Daniels

  ‘So we have to do it better so that we can just smile and say, “Yes, but the end product is not as good, is it?” ’

  The commercial channels could never be as good for me, anyway. I hate just getting into a good play, or interesting show, only to have my interest shattered by the overblown sound of the commercial breaks. I don’t want the show to be interrupted at all!

  Once again, America came into my life. They had seen what I had done with the American game shows in the UK and they wanted me to go over there and present them in the same style. Most game shows came from America. I turned them down. My family was, and is, very important to me and I hate being too far away from them. I even get twitchy on holidays abroad. The Americans, as is their way, thought it was a money thing and upped the offer. It was very hard to explain to them that money didn’t come into it and they went away, no doubt muttering about the crazy Limey.

  ITV made me an offer to cross the channels and go to work for them. I considered this carefully and said that I couldn’t go without my production team. They offered to take on the production team and put John Fisher, the Producer, on their permanent staff. We would all be on increased salaries. I reported this back at the next planning meeting. John Fisher said that he would not leave the BBC, believing that his future lay with them. Despite the considerable increase in money that it would have brought me, I decided not to break up the team and I stayed with the BBC. In retrospect I think that was a mistake, but I have no regrets. Spilt milk and all that jazz.

  Time was flying by, shows came and went. Huge illusions and tiny tricks poured out of the studios and into the living rooms of the nation. Every week hundreds of letters would arrive asking about the various effects we created. To the general public they were entertaining. To the magicians they mostly commanded respect because they realised that hardly any trick arrived on the screen without being either a totally new invention, a totally new presentation or just twisted around somehow in the method. Some magicians copied the stuff, some got jealous. It didn’t matter, that is the way it has always been.

  The biggest talking points over the years were the Bunco Booth, the Magic Kettle that poured out any drink asked for by the audience, Silverstone race track with Jackie Stewart, the Vanishing Elephant, the British Library book test, the Disappearance of a Million Pounds, the Houdini Water Torture Escape, my ‘death’ on Hallowe’en, the chimpanzees and the Christmas Specials.

  The Magic Kettle was a very old trick and we did it more than once, each time adding a new twist in method and presentation. A man called Robert Swadling, a great designer and maker of magic, had come to John Fisher with a new way of doing it and I had added a presentational touch so that four members of the audience could merely think of a drink, clean a glass out, pick up the kettle themselves and pour out the drink that they were thinking of. That made one magic magazine write that we had used stooges in the audience to do the trick. John was incensed and made them retract the statement. I hate stooges in the audience. American acts even ‘plant’ people to stand up at the right time and ‘lead’ a standing ovation. How do you ever know how good a standing ovation really is if you do that?

  In series seven in 1985, I was taken to Silverstone and taught how to drive a racing car that had been designed by Jackie Stewart. The idea was that I would be handcuffed, tied into a sack and that would be locked into a large wooden crate. The whole box would be swung up into the air by a crane and lowered into the middle of the track. As this was happening, Jackie would get in this car and drive it once around the track and, as he completed the circuit, aim it at the wooden box in the middle of the track. He was to crash through the box, but to the viewers’ astonishment, it was me who got out of the car and Jackie was seen to have been driving the crane. This was a difficult illusion to make work on screen because we had to make it obvious that no camera tricks had been involved. No camera trickery was ever used in my shows, because there just wasn’t any point. If you use such methods, and I have seen them used in magic shows, then anybody could have done the stuff we did.

  So I trained hard to drive the car at high speed. I was a genius. I could take on the world. I spun Debbie and others around the track to show off. Then Jackie Stewart, three times World Champion, turned up and drove me round Silverstone. I had been going backwards with the brakes on. He was the genius. The trouble was that Jackie burnt out the clutch. He had his own mechanic with him who refused all help but managed to replace the clutch in under half-an-hour. A few weeks later, the clutch went on my own car and the garage told me that it would take three days. I told them I would pay labour for half-an-hour. I knew about such things, you see.

  As we got closer to the first real run-through, I noticed a man getting into a crash helmet and I asked him who he was.

  ‘I’m the stunt man,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do the first drive through the box to see what happens.’

  I don’t think that I am any braver than the next guy, maybe just a bit more stupid, but I couldn’t let him do it. Nobody knew for certain what would happen when the car hit the crate but, as it was my idea to do it, I couldn’t risk someone else getting hurt. I drove the car and I can tell you that as you approach such a solid-looking object all your instincts scream out for you to turn away and miss it. What happened was that, every time we tried it, the box exploded over and under the car. So that was all right. The ‘mistake’ that we made, but it turned out to be a bonus, was that we used a red sack. We had never intended to tell the guest commentator, Mike Smith, what was going to happen anyway, so that we would get a real reaction from him, but when he saw the sack being dragged under the car after the impact, he thought that not only had I not escaped, but that it was me being dragged up the track. He nearly fainted because it looked like I had been thrown all over the place. It gave Mike a very bad turn and I don’t think he got over it, asking that it never be shown on television again. It was good TV though.

  In the great age of the Variety theatre, or vaudeville as it was known in America, one of the most publicised illusions of all involved the disappearance of a very large elephant. John Fisher came to an early prerecording planning meeting and asked me whether I could vanish such a large mammal. Of course, I knew all the methods that had happened in the past and I outlined them all. Elephants, as everyone knows, vanish in boxes or cages and usually in a theatre or even a cabaret environment.

  ‘No,’ said John, ‘I want it to vanish outside.’

  John had two good qualities. He was the best of researchers and he always tried to get me to push the limits of what had gone before. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could vanish from a football field?’

  ‘Yeah, right!’

  The team didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I did what I usually did in such situations – let it fester away in my mind. At the next meeting, I came up with a logical, but very expensive, way of vanishing an elephant in the middle of a field, football or not.

  Note the word ‘expensive’. I could never understand the BBC’s thinking when it came to expenditure. We were getting millions of viewers who were all paying their licence fees but we had a smaller budget than other programmes that had much lower ratings. Ah, if only I had been artistic, darling, I would have understood it all.

  Off I went on my merry way, conjuring around the world, because that was what I had to do in between all this television world of wonder. The lads were growing up and I had a life outside the studios. Incidentally, it was while I was doing one gig that I was ferried in a bus from one venue to another, or maybe it was back to the hotel, I can’t remember. I do remember that a young comedian called Jim Davidson got into the bus with his girlfriend and on the way I did a couple of card tricks. The Krankies were also in this minibus as I recall. Years later, in his autobiography, Jim wrote that I tried to ‘pull’ his girlfriend and was rather uncomplimentary. What he obviously didn’t know was that I do card tricks for everyone. I always have a pack of cards in my pocket and it’s good practice f
or me.

  The other thing is that I didn’t fancy her at all. Jim has his taste in women and I have mine.

  I came back to the next planning meeting and, surprisingly, there were all the technical boys from the visual effects department.

  ‘Go on,’ said John. ‘Tell them the details of how you want to vanish the elephant.’

  Well, to be honest, after gallivanting around the world, I couldn’t remember. It had been months since I had muttered my offering. Gil Leaney, magical adviser and a lovely man, offered help.

  ‘We are going to use your method,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye, peering into my face, as I desperately tried not to look confused.

  ‘It’s the one with the tent,’ prompted Gil. I couldn’t believe they were going to spend that kind of money.

  My brain kicked into gear and I laid down the details of what would happen. The football field, I was told, was one the Gurkha Regiment used in their barracks. These lads are great soldiers and you don’t want to upset them, believe me. I kept it as simple a plot as I could.

  We would drive on to the field in a Land Rover. I would be with the Commanding Officer and a celebrity, Johnny Morris, the presenter of Animal Magic. Alighting from our vehicle we planned to walk over to and across the back of the tent. We could do this because all the sides would be laid flat. Volunteers would be allowed to stamp around or poke whatever they wanted, in and around the tent.

  The greatest elephant trainer in the world, Bobby Roberts from the Roberts Circus, would bring on an elephant with Debbie riding on top and lead it into the tent. I would fire a cannon, the tent sides would fall down, a crane would lift the top off into the air and all that would be left would be Debbie. A spectacular vanish.

  And that is what we did, exactly that. From concept to recording. Perfect. It cost a fortune to set up and rehearse. The elephant had to come overnight in a special truck all the way from Scotland and the trick was over in a few minutes of recording time.

  The effect was so clean one newspaper printed that it had to be a camera trick, which it wasn’t. Then they said that we had carefully chosen the camera angles to hide the elephant behind the tent top, which we didn’t. What they had forgotten was that, as always, we had a live audience there on the field with us.

  It was a great trick to pull off and when anybody asked me where did the elephant go, I always replied, ‘Have you ever seen Debbie eat?’

  The person it seemed to affect most was Bert Weedon, a wonderful solo guitarist and the author of the famous Play in a Day book. He couldn’t let it rest. He wouldn’t let it rest.

  ‘Where did it go?’ was his constant cry every time we met. Of course, I wouldn’t tell him so he asked me to whisper it in his ear on his deathbed. I refused. Knowing Bert, he might recover.

  The years went by and I asked Bert to come to the studio and play his guitar ‘behind’ a trick I was doing at Christmas called Spirit Painting. A member of the audience chose Marilyn Monroe from a list of celebrities and, as her picture appeared on a plain white piece of paper, Bert played ‘Candle in the Wind’. Elton John wrote this famous piece of music, so we had a visual and audio link. Lovely.

  The trick finished and the audience applauded.

  ‘You think that you were only here to play the guitar, don’t you Bert?’ He nodded, obviously puzzled. A clap of my hands and stagehands appeared from everywhere and totally dismantled the set. All we were left with was the concrete floor and the bare walls of the studio. The audience were invited down to examine everything and Bert stood there as puzzled as a man can be.

  ‘Look up in the air and, as you can see, we have a silk tent. As it comes down, please hold the sides and the corners.’

  The audience did this and I turned to Bert.

  ‘What’s the one thing that you are always asking me? Over and over again, you want to know where the elephant went. Well, Bert, it went here.’

  The tent was pulled up into the air again and standing next to Bert was a three-and-a-half-ton elephant. The same elephant, in fact. You had to be there. Bert’s face was a picture. The trouble is now he keeps asking me where it came from. And I never tell.

  There is a very well-known trick where the magician, playing the part of a mind-reader, has someone in the audience think of a word in a book and the magician tells them what that word is. How do they do that? Pushing the limits again, we got permission to shoot an outside broadcast in the British Library. Magnus Magnusson and Lord Soper were allowed to pick any word in any book. When they did so, a librarian who we had in the studio opened a dictionary only to find that we had previously marked the same word. This was a good trick and full of interest. During the effect, the page from which they were choosing the word was shown in close up and we got hundreds of letters from people who had chosen the same word on the screen. That doesn’t surprise me. It is how so-called psychics and clock starters and stoppers get their results. With millions of people watching, the odds are way in your favour of something happening somewhere.

  On one occasion, we did a trick whereby I spoke softly and made people turn up their sound systems. Then I made them come closer and closer to the screens. Suddenly, there was a loud BANG and we transmitted a shattered screen ‘effect’ which we held on screen to give the impression that we had ‘shot’ their TV set. It was a good gag but we got half-a-dozen people claiming that we had broken their sets. Pure coincidence, because a transmission cannot break a television set.

  Under the strictest security of all time, we borrowed f1 million from Barclays Bank, and got it to the studios surrounded by their security men and the BBC’s own team. It was brought into the studio in a large safe, checked and counted by Barclays staff and verified by Robert Maxwell, the newspaper magnate. Then it was placed into a metal box with windows on the side, which was raised up on a table so that you could see under it. The table was surrounded by laser alarms and pressure pads on the floor. Suddenly, I activated the alarms, the box filled with smoke and the money was gone. Where was it? Back in the safe! This was a really good illusion to pull off because the people involved knew that we didn’t have a second million. That would have been an easy way to do it but my current account was a bit thin at the time.

  The strange thing was that my letter from the BBC, which set up the train of thought in the first place, merely asked me to vanish f1 million. Nowhere did it ask for me to bring it back again. I wonder what the legal ramifications of that would have been because I did work out a way to get it out of the building, despite all the security, while all the ‘checkers’ and the audience still thought it was there.

  So, we vanished £1 million and, if you remember, Robert Maxwell was the man who managed to make a lot of money vanish from his workers’ pension funds. Maybe we gave him the idea.

  John sent someone to the Houdini museum at Niagara Falls to do research on the Water Torture Escape. This was arguably his most famous illusion and attempts had been made to copy the effect over the years. What we managed to do was to remake the illusion using the same dimensions and, more importantly, utilising the same method that the Master himself had employed. It was truly ingenious. Gil Leaney made the contraption and my son, Martin, was the performer. I don’t think that I have ever taken more care over the risk factor. Paul Jnr came in as well to act as back-up safety and we spent the night before the recording going over and over the procedures should anything go wrong, particularly as Martin had hurt his ankles in the rehearsal and he had to be hung upside down to enter the water.

  Some magicians criticised the presentation, which was very fast as a result of the injury. My instructions were, ‘don’t mess about in there. The pain may make you gasp and you will intake water. Get out as fast as you can.’ He was out like greased lightning. The magicians thought we should have had more suspense: the public thought it was miraculous.

  Some of the illusions we do can be quite dangerous, although the audience would not realise this. It’s often the most dangerous-looking ones whic
h are the safest because they are so tried and tested and rehearsed to perfection. However, I do design illusions for Debbie to vanish into very quickly, where she could easily hurt herself if she didn’t concentrate fully.

  I also have to look out for apparatus made by construction firms who may be used to working with scenery but not with magic. On one occasion, the head of a screw had not been removed and it punctured Debbie’s shin. She still has a small scar, evidence that somebody forgetting to cut a bolt head off has marked a perfect pair of legs.

  Imported illusions have to be carefully checked as well. A Czechoslovakian box was on standby for a future show, but we had to bring it in at the last minute when a guest artiste failed to appear. We normally dissect any new prop and check absolutely everything, but on this occasion we didn’t have time and we used it straight out of the crate.

  Debbie could fit in it, but it needed to be made a little more exciting. We decided to push long flaming torches through the holes where Debbie was supposed to be, ‘proving’ that she had disappeared. All the stuff we make is fireproofed and we assumed that this would be the same, but the blinds inside the box were certainly not. With Debbie trapped and bolted inside the box, the blind caught fire. I had walked forward to take a bow, looked round and saw the smoke. I don’t think that I have ever moved so fast in bringing a trick to a conclusion. The flames were shooting upwards. This was OK, as Debbie could crouch low in the box, the problem was the fumes. They were filling the box rapidly and Debbie was starting to cough and retch with the plastic smoke. Fortunately, we got her out in time, she stood there smiling until the director said ‘Cut’ and then went into a coughing fit. Still, the audience were unaware, and that’s what matters.

  I’ve also had a few close calls myself when attempting some of the grander stunts for the series. The escape from a raft made by the special effects department at the BBC was one. Robinson Crusoe they were not, as the raft barely kept afloat and I still couldn’t swim. Over the years, I had tried everything but with no success. Once I even met the coach of our National Swimming Team and I joined them for an early morning training session at the swimming baths. After an hour or so, he was sitting with his head in his hands in despair.