Interview Paul Daniels
From his own show on the BBC to variety with The Krankies, the former TV magician talks to Ben Johnson about touring, sausages and what he really thinks of David Blaine
Interview: Paul Daniels
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It’s only five minutes into my conversation with Paul Daniels and we’re already talking about sausages. “This year we were judges during British Sausage Week and it was fantastic to taste sausage from all over the country, but by far and away the best ones were from the heart of Yorkshire. There’s a farm in Golcar, just outside Leeds, and it was ... hang on, I’ll ask the oracle…” The ‘oracle’ is “the lovely Debbie McGee” - his wife for over 20 years and long-serving assistant on ‘The Paul Daniels Magic Show’, which ran from 1979 to 1994 and, at its height, regularly attracted up to 15 million viewers. She yells something in the background that I can’t make out. “Bolster Moor Farm!” he is reminded. “They make the best pork pies and sausages.”
From their many recent misadventures and dubious TV exploits (the eccentric couple interviewed by Louis Theroux in 2000; a hideous celebrity version of ‘The X Factor’; judging a sausage competition in Golcar), it is refreshing that a relationship borne out of the unstable and highly competitive world of television should prosper for so long. When Mrs Merton famously asked McGee “what attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels”, the joke was as much a sly comment on their age difference as anything else: Daniels is now 71, McGee is 51, but the two are much more than just a brand. They are that, obviously, but as he lovingly puts it, “when we’re together, we’re together. But she’s not an integral part of the performance. She just comes on and interferes with it.” But McGee won’t be on hand when Daniels ventures out on yet another mammoth tour in August due to “a simple matter of geography”. “I’m booked for what I am: international sex symbol and bodybuilder.”
He is, actually, still the country’s most popular magician of both stage and small screen, and a huge influence on children growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, especially if you were the proud owner of a Paul Daniels Magic Kit, complete with magic wand and double-sided coins, or if you caught his many public appearances. The new live show (which travels to both Bradford and Huddersfield, but not Leeds) is essentially a throwback to the pre- and post-war variety tours of music, entertainment and comedy which Daniels was not only a fan of growing up, but also a key player. He has been touring quite consistently for over 40 years. Also on the bill are Syd Little (one half of Little & Large), The Grumbleweeds and The Krankies (“Janette Krankie is the funniest woman on the planet”), all compered by (who else?), Christopher Biggins.
And this, as Daniels is quick to point out, is the best way to see a magic show - live, without the editing of the TV cameras. This is a touchy subject for Daniels, someone who made sure that, when filming his own TV show, he used plenty of audience participation to prove the authenticity of his tricks, not to mention guarantee a better reaction. Television may have moved on since Daniels’ day, but the process and traditions of today’s magicians are still the same, from Derren Brown’s mind tricks to David Blaine’s street magic. So what does he make of these new tricksters? Well, he likes Brown (“quite old style”), even if he does dismiss his most extravagant brainteasers as “just magic tricks”, like when Brown televised his successful prediction of the National Lottery results. “On my shows we’ve predicted the football pools, bingo, and the lottery is the latest thing… but if you start to think this stuff is real then you’re on cloud cuckoo land, you’ll start to think that superman can fly, it’s the same game.”
But he doesn’t like David Blaine. “What I don’t understand about some of the modern, particularly American magicians, is why they do magic that uses stooges and is created in the editing suite or using camera angles to create the trick.” He continues. “When I watch it (Blaine’s TV shows), it’s so heavily edited that I don’t know if he can really do it, so I don’t have a lot of respect for him.” But herein is the difference between the roots of a simple trick - of which Daniels has always been the childlike advocate - compared to the magic show as a spectacle of glitz and glamour, of David Copperfield’s flying illusions and David Blaine’s attempts as a modern day Houdini. People just love to their reality tested, and Daniels has never lost the affection for the gift that a good trick can offer. “I learn all the time. I’ll leap up in the middle of Debbie’s favourite TV show and say, ‘take a look at this!’ I’m learning all the time, adding all the time, changing all the time.”
The Best of British Variety Tour 2010, 23 September, St George’s Hall, Bridge Street, Bradford, BD1 1JS, 01274 432 000, 7.30pm, £26.50
Posted on Wednesday 3rd March 2010
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