I feel Baz’s presence before I go on stage
AKING people laugh comes naturally to Paul Elliott – and clearly lockdown wasn’t going to stop that.
Paul – one half of legendary comedy duo The Chuckle Brothers – has been busy delighting fans with online performances from his garden, singing, dancing and telling jokes.
“I did dance moves in my deckchair as I was recovering from Covid-19 – and the video had more than a million hits,” marvels the 72-year-old, talking on the phone from his home in South Yorkshire.
“My first instinct is to perform, so as soon as I could get out of bed, I wanted to do little videos to cheer people up and make them smile,” adds Paul, who contracted the virus in March (“my wife was worried I might die at one point – it was horrible”).
As well as this, Paul is still dealing with the devastating loss of his brother, Barry, who died in August 2018.
“It’s like losing my right arm being without him,” he confides. “Working on stage with him is what I miss most. No one could make me laugh like he could. We started out in showbusiness together when he was 18 and I was 15, and we were never apart from then on. I was the feed and he was the comic – the Ernie Wise to his Eric Morecambe.”
The pair found enduring fame with BBC children’s show ChuckleVision, which ran from 1987-2009. When it ended, they carried on touring – performing in packed theatres, nightclubs and student venues – and Paul is still widely recognised and fondly greeted with their famous catchphrase, “To me, to you!”.
Their cult status was further enhanced in 2014 when they recorded a charity single, To Me, To You (Bruv), with grime artist, Tinchy Stryder. It had three million downloads and led to them performing at Bestival.
The brothers were working on a comeback series, Chuckle Time, for Channel Five when Barry, 73, who had bone cancer, became too ill to work.
He was cared for at home by Marie Curie nurses – and Paul is now supporting the charity’s emergency appeal.
“Baz didn’t want to stop working, so kept his illness secret for a long time. He didn’t want treatment or sympathy and only told me just a few months before his death,” he reveals.
“He received such incredible care and kindness from the Marie Curie team. The charity rely on donations from the public to survive, and just as they are gearing up to care for even more people, with the current crisis, their fundraising income’s been seriously compromised. They desperately need funds to keep their work going.”
Continuing with performing without his brother has taken courage – but doing so has been important for Paul, who returned to the small screen earlier this year in the BBC’s The Real Marigold Hotel.
“Baz made me promise I’d carry on and I still love the business. The first clubs I did after his death, the audiences just stood up and cheered as soon as they saw me. Anybody under 50 has grown up with the
Chuckle Brothers and there was so much love coming across the footlights, which was heartwarming,” he says happily.
“Baz comes to me in my dreams, and I feel his presence when I’m waiting in the wings before I go on stage. He inspires me with gags. I’m doing a lot of the lines he used to do, and I feel he’s there helping me get laughs, so I can time them the same as he did. I have so many happy memories of our time together that I’ll never lose.”
Sadly, he’s no stranger to grief. In 1975, his three-month-old daughter, Nicola, died from a rare liver problem. In what he describes as “the worst day” of his life, Paul was forced to perform on stage hours after her funeral. Show organisers had refused to release the brothers from their contract and threatened not to pay them if they didn’t appear – and in those days, they were too hard up for that to happen.
“I went to the funeral at 11am and was on stage in Glasgow by 8pm. That was the lowest I’ve ever been. It was really, really tough and I don’t think we were very funny that night,” Paul recalls.
“I went through hell after losing her, but if you start thinking, ‘Why me?’, that doesn’t do you any good. In the end, you realise you just have to accept that these things happen in life, live with it and carry on.”
He relished his time in India filming Real Marigold, where he opened up about his feelings of loss to the group, which included former