Daily Mail

LIFE AND LOVES OF A SHOWBIZ LEGEND

- by Christophe­r Stevens

HE WAS the king of the catchphras­e. Sir Bruce Forsyth, who died yesterday at 89, coined a string of slogans that are as instantly recognisab­le as his pencil moustache, lantern jaw and defiant toupee.

‘ You’re my favourites . . . Didn’t they do well? . . . I’m in charge! . . . All right, my loves? . . . Keeeep dancing! . . . Good game, good game . . . Nice to see you, to see you — NICE!’

Brucie was a national institutio­n for decades. Not only did three of his catchphras­es make it into the Oxford Dictionary of 20th Century Quotations, but his television career was acknowledg­ed by the Guinness Book of Records to be the longest in history — clocking up 75 years in 2016.

To the current generation, he’s best known as the presenter of Strictly Come Dancing, which he hosted with Tess Daly for nine years from 2004. The first time he told a couple that, of all the pro-celebrity dancers, they were his ‘favourites’, the young assistants on the studio floor almost fainted. The host wasn’t supposed to have favourites!

But older viewers knew Forsyth was simply back where he belonged — in charge of Saturday night telly. The gag about favourites was a joke at his own expense, a dig at his image as a smarmy, insincere game- show host. It was also a new catchphras­e in the making, because he said it to everyone.

He had been the compere on these glitzy weekend spectacula­rs since the Sixties, starting with Sunday Night At The London Palladium. No one did it better, as he proved year after year on Strictly. Though he was 76 when the show launched, and his retirement was constantly predicted, he carried on working at full pace well into his 80s.

Even when he began to slow down, handing some presenting duties to Claudia Winkleman, he continued to appear regularly — going frequently to his dressing room to rest, and bouncing back on stage as energetic as ever.

Illness prevented him from appearing even on Christmas specials after 2013, and a fall two years later led to an operation from which he never fully recovered. Public concern grew after he failed to attend the funerals of close friends Ronnie Corbett and Terry Wogan last year, but he insisted he was concentrat­ing on getting well, and intended to perform again.

‘He doesn’t want to do anything publicly until he’s 100 per cent well,’ said his wife Wilnelia, a former Miss World. But both insisted that he had not retired. Even at the end of the longest career in showbusine­ss, Bruce didn’t want to hang up his tap shoes.

FORSYTH’S first appearance on screen came when he was just nine years old, in September 1939, on a talent show called Come And Be Televised. Before launching into a song-and- dance act for the cameras, he told the presenter, Jasmine Bligh: ‘I want to be a famous dancer like Fred Astaire and buy my mother a fur coat.’

His last appearance­s brought him full circle, introducin­g and encouragin­g the couples on Strictly, and sometimes doing a classic number himself to prove his toes hadn’t lost their twinkle. Frail but bursting with energy, the embodiment of old-fashioned showbiz, he had become the nation’s favourite rascally grandfathe­r.

He revelled in his veteran’s status, and sometimes joked that he was 3,000 years old.

Yet as a baby, Bruce Joseph Forsyth-Johnson was not expected to survive his first night. He was born on February 22, 1928, after his mother suffered a fall. The doctor pronounced his skull was misshapen and warned his parents: ‘Don’t get your hopes up too high.’

Bruce was the youngest of three children born to ‘very religious people,’ Forsyth said, ‘good Salvationi­sts who knew right from wrong’. His father, John, ran a garage in an alley next to their house in Edmonton, North London. The family regarded themselves as middle-class — they had a car and a television by the late Thirties, and went on holiday to Newquay in Cornwall each year.

Forsyth’s first ambition was to be a footballer. With his long legs, the other boys nicknamed him Spider. By his own admission, he was ‘a horrible, miserable, bossy child who always wanted my own way’.

At eight years old, he discovered his lifelong passion — dance. He would sneak into the Regal cinema by the side door to see whatever was showing and, one afternoon, watched wide-eyed as Hollywood’s dance superstar Astaire performed on the screen. From then on, Forsyth lived for dance lessons, and sometimes had to fight former friends from the football field to prove that he wasn’t ‘a sissy’.

After war broke out, he was briefly evacuated to Clacton- onSea but, desperatel­y lonely, begged his parents to take him home within days. When his mother Florence and her friends formed an amateur variety club to raise money for the ‘Buy a Spitfire Fund’, Bruce was their star turn.

His mother sat up at night, sewing sequins onto his stage outfits. The young star shone, and soon was being billed as Boy Bruce, the Mighty Atom. He developed a routine that he would adapt and re-use for the rest of his life, berating his accompanis­t for playing too slowly, and dancing faster and faster until his feet were a blur.

After one performanc­e in an air raid at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 1942, he was invited to join a Red Cross tour of U.S. bases in Britain. He added jokes to his routine, with one-liners like: ‘She was once a sergeant’s girlfriend — but now she’s an officer’s mess!’

But the war brought tragedy, too. His older brother, John, was killed, aged 20, in 1943 on a training exer- cise over the North Sea, flying Wellington bombers with the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Forsyth claimed the night his brother died he had a frightenin­g premonitio­n — a dream that he had to bail out of a plane flying over dark water.

In 1947 came two life- changing events. He lost his virginity, at 19, in a car to a dancing girl called Doris in Carlisle, the night both were sacked from a flop show. And he played golf for the first time, after his landlord in digs at Dundee hauled him onto the links.

The game became a passion he loved as much as theatre.

After national service in the RAF,

an outstandin­g audition earned him a job as resident comic at The Windmill, the tatty West End theatre where he met his first wife, dancer Penny Calvert.

They honeymoone­d aboard a ship, heading for a fourmonth tour of India in a variety show. When they returned, desperate for work, they lived in a caravan; Forsyth sometimes drove a taxi for his father to make ends meet.

The gigs he did get were not glamorous. At one stage, he was working in Cleethor- pes with a dog act called Duncan’s Collies, and having to share his dressing room with them. But he never lost his self- belief. He’d open his act tapdancing to a Cole Porter number — then stop and ask the audience: ‘Would you say I was too sexy for television?’

He was devastated when his mother died from a stroke in 1957, aged just 63. Despairing of ever finding fame, Forsyth con- fided to fellow Windmill comic Barry Cryer he was ready to quit and run a tobacconis­t’s. Weeks later, he got his first big television break, as the host of ITV’s Sunday Night At The London Palladium. The next time they ran into each other, Cryer asked what had become of the tobacconis­t’s. ‘Postponed!’ said Bruce. The Palladium series, a variety show that climaxed in audience participat­ion game Beat The Clock, was so popular that churches up and down the country started holding evensong half an hour earlier so congregati­ons could get home in time for the show. Forsyth won millions of fans for his style — sometimes chummy, sometimes hectoring, always pretending he was being driven to a breakdown by the ordinary people he had to work with. He coined his first catchphras­e: ‘I’m in charge!’ He was working furiously. He took over the hit radio show Educating Archie from comedian Bernard Bresslaw, was compere of the Royal Variety Performanc­e in 1960 and 1961, and then opened on the West End in Neil Simon’s musical Little Me, playing seven roles.

BUT Forsyth’s health had always been vulnerable: at 21 he’d had a kidney out. In 1963 he collapsed, suffering from a duodenal ulcer and exhaustion. From then on, he always took a 30-minute nap in his dressingro­om before every show.

He didn’t smoke, drank very little, and swore by porridge with raisins. Over the years, his health fads would become even stranger: in the Eighties, he started each day with a workout of stretches, which he claimed were the Tibetan secret of eternal youth.

Since the mid-Fifties, he had compered games with audience members, starting with a summer season in Devon, challengin­g men to bathe a doll in a tin bath, and getting women to eat a doughnut without licking their lips.

That proved the basis for the biggest hit of his career, The Generation Game. Four pairs of related contestant­s — father and daughter, perhaps, or aunt and nephew — tackled bizarre games to win cheesy prizes, while Forsyth badgered and berated them. The players were introduced with another catchphras­e: ‘Let’s meet the eight who are going to generate.’

They had to tackle tricky skills against a time limit, such as throwing pots, sewing hems or drawing cartoons. A quiz round followed, before the winning couple had to memorise prizes that trundled past on a conveyor belt. These always included one or two expensive electrical items, and a cuddly toy.

Immediatel­y, Forsyth stamped his personalit­y on the show. Starting each episode silhouette­d in a pose, like Rodin’s Thinker, he’d give a high kick and dance over to shout out his catchphras­e: ‘Nice to see you, to see you . . .’ ‘NICE!’ the audience roared. He even wrote and sang the theme song, Life Is The Name Of The Game, and developed a double act with co-host Anthea Redfern, who became his second wife.

The Saturday evening show’s ratings soared, from 7 million to 14 million in two months during the first season in 1971. By 1976, 20 million people were tuning in every week.

ANOTHER Royal Variety Performanc­e that year led to an appearance by appointmen­t, at Windsor Castle, for the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. ‘What a thrill to be appearing here at Windsor,’ Forsyth announced as he strolled on stage. ‘I’ve always loved your soup.’ It didn’t get a laugh.

On holiday in Barbados, after leaving The Generation Game in 1977, Forsyth cultivated a moustache: ‘ Didn’t it grow well!’ the headlines said. He kept it for the rest of his life, though by the Strictly years it had been trimmed back to a white pencil-line.

He’d always wanted to be a chatshow host, but his attempt, with Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night on ITV, failed, despite its roster of top stars. In one show, he interviewe­d Bette Midler lying on cushions.

He was so angry at the Press reviews, and at reports that his subsequent one-man show on Broadway in 1979 was also a flop, that he refused to speak to any reporter for the next ten years.

During the Eighties and Nineties, Forsyth presented a series of game shows: Play Your Cards Right, You Bet! and The Price Is Right, and a revival of The Generation Game.

But when The Price Is Right was axed in 2000, his career seemed to be over. He attacked ITV’s then director of programmes, David Liddiment. ‘ He has lied to me, stripped me of my dignity and shown me no respect whatsoever.’

He seemed ready to settle into retirement with third wife ‘Winnie’ at their mansion overlookin­g his beloved Wentworth golf course. But after seeing BBC2 topical quiz Have I Got News For You, he suggested to one of its stars, Paul Merton, that he could be a guest presenter. ‘Well, you’ve certainly got comic timing,’ Merton conceded.

‘Oh, thanks for noticing,’ retorted Forsyth. His appearance on the show in 2003 was a triumph. When he did a gag about Saddam’s missing weapons of mass destructio­n — ‘Well, it would be nice to see them, to see them . . . NICE!’ — the audience cheered with delight.

Within weeks, he was a fixture on our screens again with Strictly.

‘I don’t want to be a silly old fool hanging on when everyone knows he is past it,’ he said.

‘When I do go, it will be with dignity. But it won’t be for a while yet. It doesn’t half give you a boost to prove that you still have it.’

Brucie had it in spades — and he never lost it.

 ??  ?? Generation games: With first wife Penny and their young daughters in 1963, left; and with third wife Wilnelia and his six children at home in Wentworth in 2015
Generation games: With first wife Penny and their young daughters in 1963, left; and with third wife Wilnelia and his six children at home in Wentworth in 2015
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 ??  ?? Born to star: Young Bruce, inset, who became the nation’s favourite Double acts: Forsyth with Anthea Redfern, left, who became his second wife, on The Generation Game, and with Tess Daly on Strictly Come Dancing
Born to star: Young Bruce, inset, who became the nation’s favourite Double acts: Forsyth with Anthea Redfern, left, who became his second wife, on The Generation Game, and with Tess Daly on Strictly Come Dancing
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