Davidson: Brucie never spoke to me again after I did Generation Game
I was always the upstart, comic says
JIM Davidson has told of his secret feud with the late Bruce Forsyth – after the comic replaced him on The Generation Game.
Jim, 63, succeeded Brucie in 1995 on the hit BBC show and the showbiz legend never spoke to him again.
Davidson said: “One day there was a knock on the door and a man said, ‘Jim, we are recording The Generation Game tomorrow and Bruce has gone sick. Can you step in to do it?’
“I said I would give it a go. I was not particularly good, but it made Bruce get better really quickly.
“When negotiations came for Series 34 for Bruce they used me as a chess piece to say, ‘We can’t go to that [his fee], Bruce. We have this guy’. I took over and I don’t think Bruce was very happy. He did not speak to me again for the rest of his life. He did not speak to me much anyway. I was always the upstart.
“So I did it and I loved it. It was fantastic.”
Of Mel and Sue bringing back The Genera- tion Game, he said: “It was of its day. I would rather watch Ant and Dec do it.” Davidson said he was not now recognised at ITV, despite once being the highest paid star on TV. “They would not let me in today,” he said on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV. “They did not know who I was.” He added: “I went to BBC Southampton to do some recording. A pretty lady walked up to me and said, ‘Have you come to fix the printer?’.”
Davidson revealed he had not spoken to his daughter Sarah, 45, for 18 months after he said she got drunk at an event with the then Home Secretary Theresa May and minister Michael Gove.
He claimed she was “collapsing all over the place” at the event at the Dorchester Hotel in Central London.
He said: “Michael Gove said, ‘There is a really drunken woman behind us’. I said, ‘It is my daughter’.”
Davidson, now with his fifth wife, Michelle Cotton, reveals his divorces have cost him £60million on Life Stories, to be broadcast in the coming months.