Paul Daniels (44 page)

As Mam and I stood over Dad, he started to have another fit. Mam, having been a nurse, knew the signs and ran out of the room. My dad, having been forever my hero, was finally leaving me. I couldn't help him so I ran after Mam.

I was very upset at the funeral, but I have never really cried for him since. We were great mates, Dad and I, and we had a grand life together. There seems no point in grieving because it is the law of nature that we are all going to die. When Dad died, I was aware of the fact that life had moved on and I had to move with it. I believe that life continues in our genes, our chromosomes and DNA, and I feel sometimes that Dad lives on in me. I am a continuance of his life and believe that he, and I, will travel on in my sons and grandchildren, too.

This really came home to me one night when I was working a short season at the Prince of Wales Theatre again. The night before, I had some shrimps in a restaurant and I must have had a bad one, a really bad one. The show started and I felt a bit queasy. Martin was to close the first half and I made it up to my dressing room but by now I felt really ill. As I entered the dressing room I felt faint and dropped to the floor deliberately so that I wouldn't hurt myself if I fell over. I crawled to the toilet bowl and tried to be ill. Waves of dizziness came swirling around me and
I became
my father
. I know that sounds weird. It wasn't a dream. I was still me, but filling me were all the feelings of my father.

Early in the second half of the show, I passed out in the wings and they took me to hospital where, for a while, life stopped for me but they brought me back again – obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this. That was the only time I missed a show through illness.

We sold the house in Spain and Debbie bought me a boat. We called it
Not a Lot
and it was a very fast petrol-engined Bayliner capable of over 40 knots. She really could fly. The problem was that although she was only berthed in Port Solent, near Southampton, I could rarely get down to see her. We loved it when we did but there was a period of about 18 months when we couldn't. Regular performances, as well as charity work, filled the days, the weeks and the months.

Charity work takes up so much time but it is good to give something back. We once kept every charity request for a period of 12 months and it added up to an average of 27 requests a day. You can't do them all so I homed in on a few. I am a Water Rat of the Grand Order of Water Rats. This charity is over 100 years old and originally was put together to look after people in showbusiness, but now looks after a wider range of charitable needs. Great names of the past – Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier and the like – were all Water Rats. As I write this, we have Bob Hope, Jimmy Tarbuck, Bruce Forsyth, Sir Harry Secombe and so many more amongst our membership. From film stars to pop stars to Punch and Judy men, the Water Rats work for charity. I am proud to have been elected King Rat twice. I also work for the Royal Theatrical Fund, an even older showbusiness charity. More publicly I am involved with the Yorkshire Cancer Campaign, a Barker of Variety Club, the Children's Charity and a patron of Dystonia and the Multiple Sclerosis Centre in
Reading. It's all go sometimes.

Debbie and I decided it was time that we had a rest and went down to the boat for at least a long weekend. I telephoned an engineer that I know down there and asked him to clean her up, top to bottom and back to front. ‘It'll be nice to see you again,' he said.

Port Solent has fantastic facilities for sailors and we drove down to arrive in the early evening.
Not a Lot
looked great and I looked forward to taking her out the next day. That evening we dined in the marina, went to the pictures and used the shower and toilet facilities, always immaculate, on the dockside. We went to bed on board and fell sound asleep.

At about 6.30am I got up and used the toilet. Thankfully, as it happened, I only had a ‘jimmy riddle'. The toilet had a small handle by the side with which you pumped water into the bowl to flush it. No water came through. I peered at the various instructions stuck on the walls because it was a long time since I had used this loo. I pumped and pumped and twisted and pumped and nothing came through.

I went back to bed. I lay there for a couple of minutes and my nose started to twitch at a particularly bad smell that was coming from somewhere. After a while, I couldn't take it any more, got up, went back into the loo and pumped and pumped and pumped the handle. Nothing.

I went back to bed again. Debbie, who normally has a terrible sense of smell, snuggled in and asked, ‘What's that smell?'

‘I don't know,' I answered, ‘but it is getting worse.'

I got up, pumped a lot more; I ran taps to see if we had water on board and we had; I took up the floorboard that gave access to below deck and stuck my head down the hole. Below decks was immaculate, as new, and I offered the suggestion, after a few more pumps of the handle, that maybe the smell, now vile, was
coming from outside.

Shorts were pulled on and I went out into the morning sunshine. Not many people were about to see the half-naked conjurer sniffing the morning air like a Bisto kid. No smell out there. Several times I tried to go back to bed but couldn't go back to sleep,. Eventually we got some Jeyes toilet fluid and poured that down, pumping all the time but it would go away.

The back end of this boat (back end is a very nautical term) was very streamlined and where it sloped towards the water there were two locked screw caps, fitted flush with the bodywork. One was for fresh water and the other was for pumping out sewage. Not the best design, putting those two alongside each other, I thought.

Debbie passed me the special tool for opening the caps, a double-pronged key. I should point out at this stage a couple of things, one I knew and one I didn't. What I knew was that, even though we were tied up, Debbie was always very careful about getting on and off boats, once on the Norfolk Broads, she had fallen in while jumping ashore. What I didn't know was that for hours I had been pressurising the toilet compartment. The pressure under the cap prevented me from unscrewing it, jamming it fast.

I got Debbie to pass me a towel and increased the leverage on the key handle. It wouldn't budge. I hit it hard and the cap spun very, very quickly out of its socket in the bodywork. In a replica of an oil gusher, a shower of shit shot into the air over the Solent, just missing my ear as it rose high into the air. Debbie, Miss Careful, leapt off on to the quay and was 50 yards away instantly. We have a law of nature that applies everywhere but which, unfortunately, did not come to mind at the time. As I looked up, gravity took over and the gooey, evil-smelling fountain changed direction.

I was covered, head to toe. The stuff hung off me like thick
cobwebs. Debbie was rolling about on her back screaming with laughter. Why do women find this stuff funny? Where's the sympathy? All I could think about was, ‘I haven't been here for 18 months. This stuff isn't even mine!' Sorry.

Debbie hosed me down with icy cold water from the supply normally used for re-filling your tanks. She stayed upwind.

We have a very funny, happy life, which again seems to upset some reporters who expect all showbusiness people to get divorced. We are always pulling gags on each other and as a comedian I have to express regret that, so far, Debbie is ahead. She pulled a superb gag that finished up with me literally rolling on the floor.

When I write or design, I hate being interrupted. It stops the ‘flow'. One day, in an old drawer, I found a small leather tag, rather like a bookmark, with ‘do Not Disturb' imprinted in gold. I put this on the back of my collar so that Dierdre, my then secretary, and Debbie, my then wife (that'll keep her on her toes), would leave me alone. It didn't work. They thought it was hilarious.

Hours later, I went upstairs and God only knows how long she had been waiting, but Debbie was lying stark naked on the bed. Eat your heart out, fellas! She was wearing the sort of sleeping blindfold that you get on long haul flights. Printed on it was ‘DO NOT DISTURB'. Further down her body she had a sign that said, ‘DISTURB'. Perhaps ‘rolling on the floor' was not a good choice of words.

Every year of my life was getting better and better. It's time I namedropped and, OH BOY, can I name-drop.

I was invited to do a Royal Variety Show for the Queen Mother and I knew how Prince Charles adored her, so I wrote to the Prince, who is, after all, a member of the Magic Circle and a Companion of the Grand Order of Water Rats and I had the nerve to ask him whether he would like to appear out of a
box, on stage, as a surprise for his grandmother, who wouldn't know he was going to be there.

A ‘standard' letter came back expressing regret that Prince Charles would be unable to assist. I just assumed that some member of the Royal Household had given the idea the brush off. On the night, I did an act and Prince Charles and Princess Diana were in the Royal Box with the always lovely Queen Mum.

After the show, they all walked around the cast, complimenting them as they do, and eventually Princess Diana came to me and said, ‘I am so sorry that my husband couldn't help you, Mr Daniels. We thought it was a wonderful idea but I am afraid that it was turned down by security.'

I had a wonderful picture of the royal couple sitting at the breakfast table, her in curlers as they ate their cornflakes and opened the post.

‘Ooh, look at this, Charles. That funny little man off the telly wants to stuff you in a box.'

Princess Michael of Kent asked me to do a children's party for her. How do you say ‘no'? I hadn't done a children's party since Newquay but I got some props out and went down to the house. When it was my turn to perform I gathered the children around me and everything was fine except for one child who was a terror. There's always one. Nothing seemed to work to keep him down. I invited him up to do a trick with me, the classic Chinese Linking Rings. This routine never lets me down and a lot of the credit must go to my son Martin, who wrote the routine with me when we were at the Prince of Wales. This routine had been a major factor in my television show winning the Golden Rose and was a total baffler because, unlike most routines, in this one all the rings are handed out and in the possession of the helper at some stage.

This child had some knowledge.

‘There's a hole in one of them.' I showed him in great detail there wasn't. He grabbed one end of the chain as I held on to the other, leaned back and he yelled, very loudly, and despite being able to see that if there was a ‘hole' the chain would fall apart, ‘I KNOW THERE'S A HOLE IN ONE OF THEM.'

He was starting to spoil the party. Not his fault, he was just over-exuberant. I pulled him towards me. ‘What's your name?' I asked. ‘William,' he said.

Someone in my eyeline nodded and I can clearly remember thinking, ‘Oh, that William.' Too late to stop now, Daniels, I grabbed him by the lapels and held him nose to nose with me.

‘Well, now listen, your Royal Highness,' (it's very strange saying that to a child), ‘one day you may well be King of England and have my head chopped off, but in the meantime you will sit down there, shut up and BE GOOD.'

The latter was shouted louder than he'd been shouting. He looked at me in amazement, sat down, shut up and was good. What he didn't know was that if he had bitten me, I'd have bitten back. Been there, done that.

As a fund-raiser for charity, Prince Edward organised three other members of the Royal Family to be team captains in a television show called
It's a Royal Knockout
. How he got them to agree to this I don't know. I was asked to play the part of a judge, a sort of super referee. It seemed like fun but I already had a booking for that evening. No matter, I was told, the event would start rehearsing early and be over by midafternoon. Even so, the Knockout was in the Midlands and my show was at the Savoy Hotel in London. I said I would do it and went off on the day, with Debbie, to join in the madness.

Because it was for charity and even more so because it involved the Royals, the stars came out of the woodwork to take part in games that you normally couldn't have got them to do for money. The morning rehearsal took place and the most
senior Royal asked for a special meeting to discuss the rules.

I had studied all the rules most carefully as, if I got them wrong, perhaps I would be exiled, or worse. Perhaps Prince William had gone home and told his family. Ted Daniels, now Paul, from a two-up, two-down in South Bank, sat down at the head of the table. On my right was the Duchess of York, popularly known as Fergie, and next to her was Prince Edward. Directly opposite Edward was Prince Andrew and on my immediate left was Princess Anne who would become the Princess Royal a few years later.

Most of the items were trivial and easily dealt with, but suddenly Princess Anne asked that the rules be changed completely for one of the games and it didn't make a lot of sense. The other captains had no real objections, but I had. I refused to change the rules and the Princess looked deep into my eyes. You never think of the Royals as sexy, do you? Well, I am here to tell you that Princess Anne can make your hair curl, and I think I was wearing a wig at the time.

‘I'm sorry, Ma'am, but I think that you only want the rules changed because at rehearsal this morning Tom Jones couldn't pull himself out of the water and climb the rope. You picked your team and I am afraid you are stuck with it.'

I got the look again and wondered if William had squealed on me to his auntie. Her Royal Highness let the matter drop and I walked away.

The recording ran late – very late – and it was early evening when it finally wrapped. I ran across the field to say my goodbyes and to apologise for having to dash off. Princess Anne asked what the rush was and I explained that I was late for a private cabaret at the Savoy. Without hesitation she took command.