Paul Daniels (17 page)

Our portable concert party proved to be a big hit in the smaller clubs where our offering of a whole evening of various entertainments must have proved very economical for them, but there was change afoot. The working men’s clubs were developing into large and glamorous institutions, although it was still the working lads that were running them. There were hundreds of clubs, probably thousands. In Barnsley alone, a small market town, there were 27 venues you could work as an entertainer and two of them were for full-week engagements.

Out of these developed the nightclub scene where entrepreneurs were keen to capitalise on the trend towards this new form of entertainment. The nightclubs, however, made a decision that they wanted more than just a ten-minute silent act, forgetting that those acts provided the variety between the singer and the comedian. You can’t juggle for 45 minutes. You can’t throw knives or spit darts or do any of the other wonderful things that the speciality act does for more than six or seven minutes. Those acts condense the excitement and really make a difference to a show. The result of this was that we lost all the thrills and spills of our speciality acts to venues abroad. My answer to this was to provide some of the missing speciality within my own act and I split my Eldanis act into two, put patter in the middle and went back to the music for the finale. The patter grew and grew and eventually I dropped the music. That was a major breakthrough for me. I looked carefully at myself and decided that I wasn’t tall enough to look good in tail suits and that my hard Northern accent did not lend itself to posh, patter. I read everything I could on comedy and, like the magic, tailored it to make it fit me.

Far and away the most successful TV presenter at the time was Bruce Forsyth. For me he still is the greatest presenter of a game show that we have ever had, getting more out of the
participants than anyone since. His style was ‘pleasantly insulting’, taking the mickey out of the players but doing it with no nastiness at all. There is a very old theatrical poster of a magician and the by-line says ‘All done by kindness’. So that was the approach I decided to adopt. I would poke fun, but never with malice.

The act worked fine, but it was the clubs themselves that were a bigger stumbling block to the acts than the audiences. The local club committees had seen their authority grow enormously, with many becoming power-mad little Hitlers, but having no idea at all about showbusiness. Three stages of bureaucracy operated in the venues: the committee (these words were always said in a way that implied mysterious power and total control – the COMMITTEE were to be revered!) consisted of a dozen guys who appointed a Concert Secretary who dealt with the agents and booked the acts. Often, if he had got his own act together, he would take back-handers from all the agents. The final member of this team would be the chairman who, with no experience in appearing before an audience, would be master of ceremonies and compere the evening.

This job was a throwback from old-time music hall where the chairman would sit in a little box at the side of the stage and announce each act with wonderfully effusive English and a bang of his gavel. The concert chairman still had his own box somewhere in the room, but his use of the English language left a lot to be desired:

‘Ladies and Gentleman, we’ve got an act here that I don’t think is going to be any good, but we’ve paid for it so we’ll have it anyway,’ could easily be your entrance speech. Half-way through a song would come the announcement from the corner, cutting off the singer’s microphone, ‘Pies have come and are on sale at the bar.’ Girl singers who were not going very well would have the audience quietened with ‘Come on now. Give
ORDER. Give the poor cow a chance.’

They also knew nothing about staging, lighting or sound. They had saved up and bought the equipment, but they didn’t know how it worked. Why should they? They were steel workers and lads from down the pit.

For me, each new arrival at a club was like being thrown into a battle with the system and, with up to eight acts a night treading their boards, I realised that they had ‘seen everything’. With the notion that ‘if you want something doing well, do it yourself ’ firmly established in my head, I would arrive early at each venue and focus the lighting, adjust the curtains and tweak the sound to help it reach its full potential. The lights were invariably pointing at the drummer’s feet, while the loudspeakers would be aimed into the roof. The amplifier would be set to full bass. Often, I found that the lights hadn’t been cleaned for years and contained enough dust on the lenses to emit about a candle-worth of power. After my efforts, I may not have been the best act they’d ever had, but I was certainly the brightest!

The concert chairman walked around with an air of false dignity and knowledge but in reality was usually no help whatsoever. Telling one girl singing act in the interval how lousy they were, he threatened to pay them off. This meant only giving the act half their agreed money and was often used as a way of getting cheap acts. The leader of the girl troupe suggested that the wonderful harmonies they were producing were going over the audience’s heads.

‘OK then, lass. I’ll let you have another go and this time we’ll lower the speakers.’

It was the period when the Labour Government had lost control over the industrial areas of Britain, giving in to every union demand and pricing us out of the world market. The unions were running the marketplace and electricity strikes,
among many others, were frequent. On two occasions the lights went out in the middle of my act, but I continued with the use of some candles and torches. Believe me, working in those conditions, with no microphone and cigarette smoke down to floor level, really kills off your voice. At one point, I announced the next trick, clapped my hands and all the lights came on. It was pure coincidence, but the audience thought I was a real wizard.

Another chairman proudly showed me his gas-run, an emergency stage lighting system. From a huge orange gas canister, borrowed from a set of roadworks, ran a rubber pipe, which went across the ceiling and was connected to a lamp hanging precariously over the stage on a metal hook. I am not very tall but even I had to duck every time I passed this ingenious lighting device. The Concert Chairman had resolved not to be outdone when faced with a power cut.

Despite the fact that the gas lamp, had it been lit, would probably have quickly set the stage on fire, I asked how the electronic organ would work.

‘That’s easy, he can just unplug it and play it like a piano.’

The awesome ‘wisdom’ of these men kept us acts amused for hours, and the tales would be told over and over again in the digs at night when we all assembled with our take-away Indian and Chinese meals. We always had the last laugh, as we could earn in one night what they earn in a week. The average wage before 1970 was £20 a week, so for them a whole shift would bring in as much as we got in half-an-hour. This caused some Concert Chairmen to view us as ‘over-paid ponces’, but they forgot the expenses involved. I had to have a car, a telephone and the clothes and equipment for the stage, alongside the agent’s commission and the high rate of taxation, all of which soon ate into the fee.

I got away with the tough audiences because they admired the skill, particularly with a pack of cards. I could do things with
a pack of cards that they definitely couldn’t do, but they would have loved to have the ability so I grabbed their respect one way or the other. If I didn’t astonish them, I would make them laugh and vice versa. Unfortunately, I witnessed how a lot of comedians quickly ‘died’ in places like this where they had no choice but to wage war against the stage facilities, the badly designed rooms and the Concert Chairman before they even reached the stony audiences. Some comedians had it written in their contract that they would never play Sunderland, the most feared of all the areas for clubs. One of the clubs on a Sunderland estate even had gravestones drawn on the wall of the only dressing room, with the names of the acts that had ‘died’ there, with a few blanks reserved for ‘new members’.

‘Just look who’s died here!’ they would proudly point out as they showed you to your room. It wasn’t the best way for any act to prepare for a night’s performance. The clubs were different to any other entertainment venue in the universe.

On my first appearance at a particular Sunderland working men’s club, Redhouses, whose name still strikes terror into the hearts of comedians who played there, I was booked alongside a comedian I had admired ever since I saw him at the Windmill Theatre in London. Known during the war as ‘We never closed’, it was later adjusted to ‘We never clothed’ on account of the strippers, who were not allowed to move. It was also the birthplace of most of the period’s top comics and I had sneaked into this world of wonder as a pimply teenager to sample both delights.

There was obviously something seriously wrong with me at the time as I really enjoyed the comedians and found that the girls, for me, were the ‘intervals’ – all except one girl who was absolutely stunning. Remember, I was still a teenager when I saw her and I was greatly upset that she never waited for me and while I was in the Army she married Tommy Steele. Why
should she wait? We had never met. This is very similar of course to the ‘affairs’ that I have had with Goldie Hawn, Jodie Foster and Meg Ryan. It’s OK. Debbie knows about these ‘other women’ in my life and smiles sympathetically at me. Wives do that, have you noticed?

Meanwhile, back at the Windmill the performances would run all evening and into the night, with a rolling audience that would arrive and leave as necessary. The men around me had their coats rolled up into a bundle, so that as soon as a seat became vacant in front, they would hurriedly throw it down to reserve the space. Thus, over a period of hours, a man could work his way into the prized front row to ogle directly at the box of delights.

Spending two hours suspended somewhere between arousal and laughter, one comedian really stood out, although he never became famous. This guy was experienced at holding such a distracted and constantly changing audience and I was very impressed with his skill. His rapid-fire songs and gags hit the audience between the eyes and he survived each one of his ‘slots’ with a good round of applause.

Years passed and this same comedian now faced a Sunderland audience. The weekend lunchtime gig is the one at which the men decided whether to bring their wives that evening. You were always booked for the noon and night shows. I had gone well. I was on first and opened with my usual fancy shuffles all performed to gags. My act went well. May I be allowed more than a little conceit here? My manager says that I am the only act who he has had over the years who has never ‘died’. I think it is because I have such a good time being on stage that it is contagious and the audience come along for the ride. As soon as I finished I decided to stay on and see the comic that I had enjoyed in the Windmill Theatre all those years beforehand.

That lunchtime the whole of the bar counter had been
covered with half-filled pint glasses. There must have been several hundred or so and I don’t think I had ever seen so many lined up in one place. At about ten minutes to opening time, the bar staff began frantically filling the glasses to the top, making sure each one had the customary ‘head’. As the doors to the club opened, the rush of men’s bodies was astonishing and could only be described as a Northern man’s Harrods sale. Making straight for the bar, these men bought their pints and downed them in seconds before purchasing the next.

‘You ready now?’ asked the Concert Chairman with a strong Geordie twang, as the comic put the finishing touches to his make-up.

‘Yes, mate. Now what I need you to do is go out and introduce me, at which point I’ll stick my head through the curtains and shout, “Hiya, fellas!” You hit the music and we’re off.’

The Concert Chairman, on this occasion, did exactly what was required of him and introduced this great comic. The comic stuck his head through the curtains and shouted as planned, ‘Hiya, fellas!’

Now there’s no way you can account or prepare for what happened next. As one man, 800 voices shouted, ‘FUCK OFF!’

The band played and as the curtains began to open at the top, the poor guy hung on to the bottom shouting, ‘don’t open these curtains!’ Too late. He’s dead. Within ten minutes the room was empty.

On one of our touring concert party events, Gladys made her exit to no applause, I survived with laughter but no applause and poor Billy Hygate ended his ‘star’ spot in complete silence, except for the clinking of beer glasses. As we made our way out through the audience, which, as usual, was the only way out, one of the lads we passed said, ‘Well, ya the best concert party we’ve ever ’ad ’ere.’

I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was taking the mick and
asked, ‘so why didn’t you clap?’

‘Why, ya canni clap wir a glass in ya ‘and.’ One evening, a guy from an audience in Yorkshire shouted out, ‘Arr don’t like thar suit!’

‘That’s a shame,’ I replied. “Cos I like yours. Not a lot, but I like it!” The contrast made the audience laugh and I used a very old comic technique going back to the line a few times in my act: ‘You’ll like this, not a lot, but you’ll like it.’ By the end of the act I had a catchphrase and it was one of the major factors in my later climb to fame. This catchphrase was well known all over the North of England long before I made it on television. So much so, that other businessmen in Doncaster would say to Mervyn, my manager, ‘Paul must be in the area again, my workers are saying “not a lot” all the time again.’ Years later, this catchphrase, credited to me, was put into the
Dictionary of Colloquialisms and Common Language.
I thought that was better than getting a Royal Variety Show!

The amount of work I was now involved in was incredible. Not only did I own and operate a successful grocery store and a mobile shop, but was adding several gigs to my bulging diary each week. Almost every weekend I was out, increasingly now on my own, as Martin and Gary, our newest family additions, needed Jackie at home full-time. The mobile shop was fun, although, to be honest, I have always liked selling things, whether it be in a shop, at a trade fair or even on stage and ‘selling’ the act.