You know Paul ("not a lot") Daniels. TV magician. Little fellow with the toupee. The one who married his lovely assistant Debbie McGee, a babe before the word was invented. Now 62, he no longer wears a toupee (he doesn't even comb what's left of his grey hair across his pate). But he's still married to Debbie, who's still a babe, whistle-thin, legs up to here, Monroe hair and dressed this morning in an acid-green two-piece, trousers flaring over black ankle boots. Not quite what this sedate hotel in Henley-on-Thames is used to, one suspects. Or perhaps it is. Showbiz millionaires of that generation seem to like this corner of England: Wogan, Brucie.
Paul wears the traditional golfing sweater. They're just beginners, he explains, but someone has already bid £2,500 to play in competition with Debbie on the notorious Burma Road course at Wentworth next year. "It's a lot of money," says Debbie nervously, "I couldn't say no." Not for her, you understand. For charity. "You'll be wanting both of them, I take it," his fast-talking Lancashire-based agent had said. I hesitated. The format for the Thursday Interview was usually just the one, I explained. "Well, you'd be turning down a real opportunity. Think about it." So here we are, the three of us, having breakfast. I spotted Debbie's car in the car park. Nothing flash, just the DEB number plate gave it away.
They've only been playing golf a year, Paul explains, because they were too busy before. Before the BBC axed The Paul Daniels Show, that is. No explanation, Paul says, they just didn't renew the contract, though they're currently re-running his quiz show Every Second Counts. ("I used to say to all the contestants: `You've got to remember where it's being shown. England. If you lose they'll love you. If you win they'll hate you. So try to lose.' It made them relax.")
Still, after 20 years he had expected more - although nothing to do with TV surprises him now. Take a recent American import where "one of the world's greatest magicians" shows how illusions are done. For a start he's not a great magician, says Daniels, just hard up. Must be. And, anyway, that might be how he does those illusions, but it's not how Paul Daniels does them. And if wasn't so boring, they'd be killing the golden goose. "TV people are crazy. They seem desperate for an innovative thought. `We've got half an hour to kill,' they say, `so let's put on a cookery programme.' In the theatre shows I say to my audience: `You've been here two hours, you've missed four cookery programmes'." It brings the house down, he says. "Then I say: `Hands up all those who have ever cooked anything they've seen on a TV show?' No one. But they're very, very cheap. Television is so plastic now, you know what's going to happen next. I don't like it when it's all perfect, I want to see the errors. And that's the good thing about The Magic Show, you never know what's going to happen next." So how scripted is it? "Years ago when I very first joined the BBC they wrote and said: `Dear Sir, Will you please submit your script so that our legal department can vet it'. and I wrote back: `Dear Sirs, Script? Yours sincerely, Paul Daniels'."
Paul Daniels turned professional in 1969 although the world of entertainment was always part of his life. "When I was a boy my father had a cinema, so for a time I worked as a projectionist. But I just really wanted to be a magician."
But that wasn't any kind of career for a bright lad from a steel and shipbuilding town in north Yorkshire, though staying on at school or taking articles were not options either. "My parents weren't that well off, so I thought I'd take the job round the corner in the council office and come home for lunch." He ended up as an internal auditor.
It was a different story for Debbie, Paul says. Her parents were very supportive and put her through the Royal Ballet School. When she left she got a job in Iran, guesting with a local dance company. "She got trapped when the Ayatollah came in, escaped and came back to the UK with zilch." So she went along for an audition advertised in The Stage. "With a chap called Paul Daniels," she told a friend when she knew she'd got the job, "Have you heard of him?" "He's a magician." "And I said: `But I can't stand magicians!' " And Debbie's tinkling laugh blends with Paul's as they share a well-loved family joke. That was 20 years ago. "When I proposed to Debbie," says Paul, "I said: `Look, I'm not very tall or good looking and I'm older than you and all that jazz, but the one thing I promise you is it'll never be boring.' " And Debbie nods, all agreement, and Paul ticks off where they've been this year: Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Nairobi, Cape Town, Sicily, Italy, Turkey, Belgium. And tomorrow off to Vietnam to raise money for a children's hospital.
Daniels is a workaholic. During the 14-month run of The Magic Show in London's West End, he somehow found time to record two BBC series, make a handful of commercials and do a six-month stint as a BBC Radio 2 DJ. Earlier this year he took over from Eric Sykes in Moliere's School For Wives at a week's notice. "I just went to see Carmen Silvera who was in this play with Eric Sykes, Peter Bowles and Henry McGee, a wonderful actor who used to stooge for Charley Drake - I thought he was the best thing in the play. Afterwards we went to dinner. And Carmen said: `What do you think?' And I said I thought it was hysterical. And I told her it was only when they did that very French, classical-style bow at the end that I realised I'd been laughing at 400-year-old jokes. You suddenly realise that comedy is timeless if it's done really well. And she said: `Well, would you like to be in it? Eric wants to go off and write a book, and the show has a couple of months to run.' `When are we talking about?' I said. `Next week.' `Well,' I said, `I'm working in Chicago tomorrow.' "
In Chicago, he found a translation that was "close enough", he says, and learned the part of Alain. "Then two afternoons rehearsal and I was on in the West End. " Paul Daniels only needs four hours sleep. Not so his missus. Rumours that she's the power behind the throne are quite untrue: "Paul is definitely his own driving force," she says. As for the sleep, "I found it much, much harder in the earlier days". Paul nods. "I would say: `Don't try to keep up with me. You are your own person.' " Debbie nods. "But although he's still manic, we don't burn ourselves out anymore." Paul Daniels has never forgotten that the second word in show business is business. He didn't turn professional till he was 32. "I was watching where show business was going, and it was going Bruce Forsyth. I watched Forsyth with his ability to go on, attack and grab. I thought this is a better approach and I'm not very tall and therefore I would have looked ludicrous in tails and doing that wiffy-waffy stuff. I had the Robbie Burns sense to look at myself and decide what I was.
"Whereas most magicians at that time were doing cards, billiard balls, silk handkerchiefs and so on to waltzy classical music, I hit the stage in Lurex with rock'n'roll music going and lighting and lots of smoke and everything going mad. It took David Copperfield 35 years to catch up with me."
A note of professional jealousy, I suggest? "Not at all. David and I have talked about it." Humour was always part of it. His cabaret act has won all the comedy awards in the clubs in the north of England. Even here with an audience of one, no opportunity for a joke is spared. ("Did you know that Tony Blair MP is an anagram of I'm Tory Plan B?" "You're irrepressible," I say. "I wouldn't say that. I'm very pressible.") But isn't the comedy simply there to divert the audience from the mechanics of the trick?
The master magician says nothing, but takes a battered pack of cards from his trouser pocket, shuffles them, puts his finger to his mouth. No talking. Shows me a card, moves it to his other hand. And back again. By which time it's a different card. Only a teapot away, yet I don't see a thing. And not a quip to distract me. "I don't care how close people get. The patter is only there because without the words, it's boring." "I'm from the north and that tends to give you an accent that's better for comedy. Equally the best Irish humour I think comes from the north, because it's a harder sound. And when I work on stage, I actually take my voice up a notch, so that it cuts through, harder." And he demonstrates as he speaks. He learnt voice control in the army doing National Service.
This hard, "very strong, driving attack" caused problems when he first did TV. "People of the south thought I was being rude. They thought I was conceited, aggressive. And it was none of that. If they'd been in the north they'd have realised we take the mickey out of each other all the time anyway."
And what about the business of the lovely assistant? Isn't she just there to distract the audience? Not at all, says Daniels. "A magic show is a play. Magic does not in truth exist. Psychic things do not in truth exist. The conjuror is an actor playing the part of a magician. When you go to see a magic show you go to see a magical play about a man who can apparently do anything and defy all known forms of science. Historically, right from Sir Galahad, it was the fair damsel who gets rescued by the knight. So she's the one that's sawn in half, she's the one that's put in the box, she's the one who is impaled, he's the one that puts it all right." It's what audiences expect, he says, like the glitz and the glamour.
Nothing, however, will ever match the glitz and glamour of the charity do at the British ambassador's residence in Brussels a month ago where tickets cost £1,000 each, to raise money for a world data bank of cancer information.
"It was royalty and countesses and barons and earls - the wealth of Brussels was in this room - and I did the best show I have ever done in my life. All the experience came together to top the act that was on before me: the world's greatest violinist, Maxim Vengerov. And he was just absolutely sensational. And then this chap stands up and says: `And now we've got a real treat for you. Paul Daniels.' And I got on a roll. And that is the job. If you're not on last you tend to not work to your absolute capacity. It's like an instinctive thing. If you really love show business, you will let the show build. And if you're on last, no matter what's come before, you have to top it. For the benefit of the public, not for yourself. That's what they come to see."
The Magic Show with Paul Daniels is visiting Cork and Galway later this month
