by Paul Daniels
Arriving in Denham, West London, I drove up Tilehouse Lane and turned into the drive of Sherwood House. There was no ‘if ’; this was what I had been looking for. Set in 12 acres of grounds, divided equally between natural woodlands and formal gardens, it was perfect. Designed by Gilbert Scott, the architect of Battersea Power Station and the original red post office telephone boxes, it boasted five bedrooms and one of those had its own lounge, six bathrooms (nobody would be able to call me filthy rich), eight toilets (there would never be a panic, one was bound to be vacant), and the ground floor had everything that a home should have. More than that, there was a balance in the house that a Feng Shui designer would have loved. Incidentally, have you ever wanted to go to the counter in WH Smith and complain that the Feng Shui books are in the wrong place?
At the end of the drive there was a lodge cottage, bigger than the flat Mam and Dad had at Giffard’s, so they could be part of the experience. Large garages would make perfect workshops.
There was only one problem. It was over £1 million. Mervyn – manager, accountant, keeper of the Daniels purse – was with me on that first viewing. I asked if it was possible to find the resources to buy it. He said it would be a stretch, but it would certainly be feasible. The negotiations went on with the American owner for months and I thought I would never get the place. Debbie saw it and thought it was wonderful. I couldn’t be there when Mam and Dad came down to view the property. The groundsman and housekeeper had been living in the lodge cottage and were preparing to vacate when my parents turned up to view. They had a good look at all the rooms where it was proposed they would live and at their garden and where they would park their car and so on. As they drove away Mam asked, ‘What do you think, Hughie?’
‘Well, I don’t think it’s big enough,’ he replied.
‘Well, it’s bigger than where we are at the moment.’
‘Is it? When our kid moves in with all his stuff, it’ll be a very tight squeeze.’
‘He’ll be living in the other house, Hughie.’
‘What other house?’ Dad asked.
Dad had assumed that the Gatekeeper’s cottage was where we were all moving into. He hadn’t seen the huge main residence and couldn’t believe it when he did. I purchased the whole package lock, stock and barrel, complete with furniture, and my solicitor, on the day the deal was struck, held out a cheque for over £1 million for me to sign. It’s a really funny feeling when you do that. He walked away and all I had to buy for Sherwood were a few mirrors. Fine, but that meant I had two houses and all their furnishings to sell. Once again we moved in just before Christmas. We were even further away from South Bank.
Sherwood House had once belonged to Roger Moore, he of Ivanhoe, The Saint and, of course, James Bond fame. When I eventually bought the place, the villagers were very confused because Roger and I looked so much alike!
One of the main reasons for buying such a grand place was that I had planned to ask Debbie to marry me. I had given up asking her to go away and find someone else. We were together and, above all else, really good friends. I made her laugh a lot and I still do. It’s a bit off-putting when you’re trying to be a sex symbol. We had an ‘arrangement’ and knew we would get married one day. One day, in late August 1987, it was sunny and in the early evening Debbie and I were seated on a swing seat on the patio. I had a bottle of champagne hidden in case I got lucky. I had decided to propose. I was now nearing 50 and Debbie 30. Surely the press wouldn’t be interested in the story now? At 30, Debbie was mature enough to have made her own decisions about life, so where was the scandal?
‘Debbie, I may not be very tall, I’m not very good looking and I’m going a bit bald, but the one thing I will promise you is this; it will never be boring. Will you marry me?’
She cried and I said, ‘does that mean yes, or does that mean no?’
She said, ‘Yes.’
We kissed. I opened the champagne and considered that I had got lucky.
It was a time for weddings, apparently. My best friend at the time, Ken Jones, the musical director from the BBC and the man responsible for all the backing music for my television shows was a man who lived life to the full. He told me that he was getting married but as he was a bit strapped for cash at the time could I suggest what he could do about his honeymoon. I offered my house in Spain. He was overjoyed.
It’s funny how your values change. While I was out looking for a place to live I had come across a golfing complex at La Manga, in Spain. At that time I only played holiday golf, once a year or so, but the houses were magnificent. Debbie and I decided to have a villa built on the course and we were full of excitement. We had all the trimmings and I altered the design of the house to give better aspects and all that jazz. Between ordering it, planning it, visiting other similar properties and seeing it nearly finished, we bought the truly wonderful Sherwood House. When we went back to La Manga, good though it was, it wasn’t the dream home any more. That title was held by Sherwood.
Ken came up with a strange request. ‘Will you come on honeymoon with me? We could play golf and that would give me something exciting to do while we are there.’ Ruth, his wife to be, hit him.
Eight of us went on Ken and Ruth’s honeymoon – Ken and Ruth, of course; Debbie and I; Mervyn and his wife, Sylvia; and a couple who were to become great friends, Peter and Jean Hodson. We arrived at the villa in the evening and all of us fellas, but not Ken, had raided sex shops and catalogues for toys and goodies. This had to have been the most hilarious wedding night of all and you should have been there. We had video cameras pointing at their bed, floating sex manuals in the bath, an inflatable sex doll was sat on the loo and a mountain of sex toys on their dressing table, stool and bed.
One of the ‘kits’ was a honeymoon kit for men and Ken kept going into the bedroom and coming out wearing all this kinky gear over his normal clothing, which somehow made it look worse but at the same time very funny. Eventually, we all went to bed and then we heard Ruth shriek as she found the sex doll. Mervyn and Sylvia gave up and went to bed as Ken came out into the corridor carrying the doll. How men are turned on by these things I don’t know, we found it hilarious. I stood it up against Mervyn’s door so that when they opened it in the morning the doll would fall on them. As we stood talking, Ken suddenly started to laugh again. The doll had a slow leak and the legs were buckling. ‘She’ slid down the door and appeared to be looking through the keyhole. Mervyn heard the screams of laughter, opened the door and the doll fell forward, but much lower than we had intended. From that moment on Mervyn and the doll were inseparable. We laughed all week.
As our wedding got nearer we planned it down to the last detail. I couldn’t be two-faced and I felt it was inappropriate for me to get married in a church. Sadly, there seemed no alternative to a church service, other than a registry office. I suggested to the authorities that we had the ritual in our garden, but they said it had to be in a place of worship.
‘But this woman worships me!’ I said, but they wouldn’t accept that. Luckily for us, our local register office in Beaconsfield seated 200 and that was where we decided to hold the wedding. Having hired a glass horse-drawn coach, I was determined that our celebrations would be as grand as possible. If Debbie wasn’t to have a church wedding, then I had to make it as special as I could for her. We asked guests to wear the full formal outfit of tailcoats and top hats, while Debbie was to be in a fairytale white wedding dress and veil.
Five months before, when Ken had married Ruth, the registrar had performed a Derek Nimmo version of a vicar as he recited the vows. His ‘floaty’ voice caused some giggles at a time that was supposed to be very solemn. I thought it best to have a word with the guy beforehand to see if I could persuade him to be a bit more ‘normal’. I also needed permission to get married on a Saturday afternoon.
Over lunch, I approached the subject of a late wedding and was told that it was out of the question. I asked why this was so.
‘We close at twelve.’
‘The problem is, you see,’ I said, starting to wear my diplomat’s hat, ‘this is going to be an awfully big wedding and there will be a lot of press there. I know it sounds odd, but if we had ours in the morning, it would interfere with everybody else’s weddings on that day. Also, if we can have our wedding in the afternoon, you’ll get an invitation to the reception.’
‘You’re on,’ he said.
Then I carefully addressed the subject of his voice.
‘Do you know that when you talk to me now you sound quite normal, but when you speak at the wedding you sound a bit strange?’
‘Oh yes,’ he smiled. ‘That’s because I think it gives me a little more authority and importance at a key moment.’
‘Oh no! You’re much better when you talk normally. You don’t need to change your voice at all, in fact I’d like our wedding to be more relaxed and friendly.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Oh yes!’
Mission accomplished. My reasoning for an afternoon slot was that I didn’t like the idea of having to get married first thing in the morning and then having to celebrate all day long with it all petering out at the end. I wanted the whole event to have the atmosphere of a steady build-up followed by a big-bang finale and carriages at eleven.
Big bang was appropriate terminology, as I employed a fireworks company to provide the climax to the day. Le Maître was a French-based company that concentrated on giving the very best displays possible. A youngish man on a vintage motorbike, encased in leathers, helmet included, turned up one day and introduced himself as the firework designer. The young chap was frightfully well spoken and we went on a walk around the garden. He was a real character.
He explained how the fireworks were all fired by computers that played the music and moved the ignition back in time for the duration of the fuse so that the explosions matched the music. He liked the Georgian windows in the marquee so that even if it was raining, the guests would still see them. He would put small fireworks close to the guests and the marquee, larger ones would rise from behind the first hedge and off the main lawns and then the really big ones would be fired from down near the woods. The speakers would go into the hedges so the music surrounded us as we watched. This was a long way from ‘light the fuse and retire’. My uncle did that – lit a firework and never worked again. Boom boom.
He counselled against having the fireworks spread out; rather, he suggested, it was better to have them all go off within ten minutes or so. It would be much more exciting and create a bigger impression, he believed.
Once again I asked how much it would cost. This time he ducked the question with a discussion on my choice of music. I picked ‘Zadok the Priest’ from the Coronation Suite by Handel and any reference to my Dad’s name was purely intentional.
‘Great, that’s five minutes and seventeen seconds!’ he announced. ‘We’ll throw them all up in that and you’ll get a superb display, for £2,500.’
‘So, what would I get for £5,000?’
He paused, his eyes lighting up. ‘You’d get another walk round the garden!’
Three days before the wedding, Debbie and I were walking around our garden hand in hand when a car pulled up in our drive. A woman emerged and introduced herself as a journalist from the Daily Mirror.
‘We’ve found your first wife, who is living in a council house in the north-east and is prepared to sell us her story,’ she said.
‘Are you really telling me that people are interested in a junior clerk and a typist of 30 years ago? I’ve been divorced for 20 years. If you don’t get out of my drive within two minutes, I’ll call the police.’
The reporter got back into her car and drove straight up to Jackie declaring that I didn’t care if she talked to the Mirror. Jackie was paid a few thousand pounds and the story, by now distorted, was spread across the tabloids on the day we got married. From that moment on, we decided never to buy, or read, another newspaper.
The press still haunt me for stories about my private life, but what is there to say? When I refuse to answer their questions, they write answers themselves about distorted, out-of-date stories that I can’t believe people actually want to read. The most recent one which has been following me around for the last few years is that I am supposed to have said that if the Labour Party got into power, then I would leave the country. That is not what I said. My true words were that if the Labour Party got into power and changed a whole list of things, then I would leave the country. As it was, the Labour Party did get into power, but just carried on with Conservative policies. So what’s the point of leaving now?
The Mirror didn’t just run the story for a day. They dragged it out for a week. They talked about Jackie, in the early days, living on the breadline, but never mentioned that I was sleeping in the back of a car. They never mentioned the cars and the money that I did send, which was always more than the court order. They even cut up and then featured a letter in which I was quoted as saying to my ex-wife, ‘there is no court in the land that can make me buy you a house.’
Now that was absolutely true, but it was in reply to Jackie asking me to buy a house for her and her boyfriend. I didn’t blame Jackie; she just wasn’t used to what the hacks can do to the truth.
I don’t understand why the press thinks that slagging people off is a good idea. Surely there are enough newsworthy stories without needing to resort to that.
A worse, but then much funnier, thing happened. Ken Jones, he of the hilarious honeymoon, came to see me. Absolutely pofaced, which wasn’t like him at all, he asked, ‘Have you seen these?’
There is a classic old gag of a man being approached by a ‘wide boy’ and asked whether he has any ‘dirty pictures’ of his wife and when the man, angry at the question, says ‘no’, the guy asks him if he wants to buy some. Ken had ‘dirty pictures’ of Debbie. These weren’t just dirty, these were disgusting. My face must have been a picture and then I looked up to see him in convulsions. I don’t know who had done the job and, now that I am into computers, I know you can do magical things with images, but on these you really couldn’t see the join. Having doctored the images using photos from God knows where, they had then taken the trouble to transfer them to Polaroids. I could’ve killed him. I guess he got me back for leaving the inflatable sex sheep in his bed on the honeymoon night. It was his Welsh origins, you see.
The big day, 2 April, arrived and Debbie was driven from her hotel in her coach with the large glass windows so that the crowds who were lining the streets and hanging out of the windows could see her. She looked absolutely stunning. Her dress was made by one of the costumiers at the BBC who specialised in designing spectacular costumes for film dramas. The pure white silk bodice was covered in tiny beads and silver wires and looked magnificent.
My brother drove me to the wedding in the Ferrari. He was over the moon as it was the only time he ever got to drive it.
The register office was on the first floor. Hundreds of people were gathered on the front lawns and cheered our arrival. This was great for us, but I couldn’t help wondering why they were there. We were only a couple getting married who just happened to be on TV. Still, it was very nice of them all to come to the wedding.
As Deb alighted from her carriage and walked up the steps into the register office, a newspaper reporter jumped out at her and shouted, ‘Is that dress supposed to be special, Debbie?’
The prat had hidden in a broom cupboard all morning and Debbie’s dad showed enormous restraint in not hitting him. It was the last thing we wanted on what was a very special day.
We were determined that this press invasion wouldn’t spoil our big day, though, and once the reporter had been removed, everything went ahead as planned. As we drove back from the church in the glass carriage, the sun shone down upon us and we waved at the crowds lining the road from Beaconsfield. People were leaning out of their windows and cheering and it felt just like a Royal wedding. Even the Blackpool Spotters had driven dow
n to wave and cheer.
It had taken three days to build the tent in the garden, which Debbie insisted should be called a marquee. I wasn’t showing off, I just wanted it to be the best I could possibly manage. One of our friends, Jess Conrad, a very funny guy, said, ‘the food in that tent was better than in any restaurant I have ever been to.’ A dance band, guests doing cabaret and then the fireworks brought the evening to its peak.
We had written to all our neighbours warning them to keep their pets indoors at this point, but to join us for this part of our celebration. The whole village turned out to see the remarkable pyrotechnics and we all ‘ooohed’ and ‘aaahed’ together.
Just as the fireworks climaxed, a full moon rose over the trees in the clear night air and Mervyn asked, ‘And how much did that cost?’ Ever the accountant.
It was truly magical.
As Mickey Mouse showed our guests to their cars at 11.00pm, Debbie and I prepared for our honeymoon and for the rest of our lives together. We went on honeymoon to Los Angeles where the Magic Castle Club guys gave us a party, to Las Vegas where our friends gave us a party and then had three wonderful weeks in Hawaii and we didn’t take Ken, Ruth, Peter, Jean, Mervyn or Sylvia. I wish we had taken Ken and Ruth. They went skiing and in the last week of our honeymoon I got a message to say Ken had died, quickly and painlessly, but he was gone. I didn’t tell Debbie. I couldn’t. We were staying in a room built on the beach and I walked down to the water’s edge and threw a flower into the ocean. ‘Bye, Ken.’ I told Debbie when we got back.
The other sad message I received while we were away was a call from Joyce to say that John Fisher, the Producer who had said he would never leave the BBC, had left and gone to Thames Television, an ITV company. I immediately got the BBC to sign up the rest of the team on sole contracts. It was interesting that when we got a producer for the next series, who didn’t know anything about magic, the show appealed more to the general public and less to the magicians. TV life was not over yet.
