I can’t face Christmas at home without Paul Debbie McGee on lasting pain of losing magician husband
March. “It has been totally overwhelming. It’s fantastic,” she says. “What’s so lovely for me is that it feels like people have taken me into their hearts. “I go shopping and people hug me. They don’t say anything. It happened first of all in my village and I was stunned and taken aback, but since then it happens a lot when I’m out and about.
“Paul and I are people where showbusiness was our job. It was ‘the norm’.
“We never thought of ourselves as being famous. We weren’t A list celebs on the TV every day. We thought that side of it had all gone.
“We always stayed down to earth. I can’t believe the support I’ve had from people. It’s helped me to keep going.” Debbie first met Paul back in 1979 during rehearsals for his touring magic show. “I immediately picked up on his unselfishness,” she says.
“He always appreciated people with talent. That could be the bin man that’s collecting your bins, but doing it well.
“He loved people and that’s why they loved him back.” She was his stage assistant between 1979 and 1994, marrying him in 1988.
Now Debbie – always introduced by Paul on stage as “the lovely Debbie McGee” – is deter- mined to carry on working. In the New Year she will be back on TV, appearing in new Channel Five reality show Carry on Barging, alongside stars such as Nigel Havers and Lorraine Chase.
She says: “The one good thing for me was I kept my own career going like my BBC Berkshire radio show. I’d always done other things like personal appearances, so I’ve something to carry on with. And that’s been very important to me.”