I’m fronting Blind Date for our Cilla
PAUL O’Grady says he simply had to front the newly revived Blind Date – to honour his late close friend Cilla Black.
In a candid interview with Radio Times, he explained how family and friends of the singer, who hosted the show for 18 years, told him: “You have to do it, because she’d want you to do it for everyone.”
O’Grady, 61, also revealed how the memory of “our Cilla” had haunted him as he filmed the reboot of the dating game show, admitting: “She should be here, not me.” Presenter and author Cilla died just under two years ago after falling at her holiday home in Spain at the age of 72.
She had been the face of shows including Surprise Surprise and Blind Date, which screened between 1985 and 2003.
The new version returns on Channel 5 later this week.
O’Grady, who was friends with fellow Liverpudlian Cilla for many years, told how filming the revamped show had been a highly emotional experience.
“It was a shock at first when I heard the music, and they said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your host, Paul O’Grady’,” he said. “I thought, ‘This isn’t right, it’s so synonymous with Cilla, she should be here, not me’. I felt like I shouldn’t be doing it. It was her show.
“But then I spoke to her sons and lots of people who knew her and they said, ‘You have to do it, because she’d want you to do it for everyone’.”
After a hugely successful run, Cilla gave up presenting Blind Date 14 years ago.
And she and O’Grady had never discussed the possibility of resurrecting it in a more modern form. “No. We never spoke about work, me and Cilla,” he said.
“We used to go out and enjoy ourselves. Work was the last thing on the agenda. Too busy out having a bloody good time, because she came into her own when she hit 60, Cilla.
“She’d never been a party animal – she’d always done the show and gone home. After Bobby (her husband) died she said she was sent a guardian angel but it had hooves and a tail, and that was me.”
But he said he had only happy memories of the much-loved star who he described as “very down to earth, and very, very funny. A hoot.”
Asked why he thinks the format still works, he replied: “I think it dates back to an innocent time when boy met girl – or boy met boy or girl met girl, which is what’s happening on the new show – at a party or in a bar rather than through a dating app like Tinder, Grindr and Bag of Fish, or whatever it’s called.
“This is the old-fashioned way of dating.”
Blind Date returns to our screens this Saturday on Channel 5 at 7pm.