Did I like magic when I first met Paul? Not a lot
DEBBIE McGee has revealed she hated magic when she met her late husband Paul Daniels.
The 61-year-old said she had auditioned for a dance company in 1979 in Great Yarmouth and was put on a show with magician Paul, famous for his catchphrase: “You’ll like this, not a lot, but you’ll like it”.
She said on her Spill The Tea podcast: “I had no idea who Paul was. So when I got home I rang all my friends and said to my parents, ‘I’ve got a job with this guy Paul Daniels, what does he do? Is he a comedian or something?’
“And then they said ‘He’s a magician’. I went ‘Oh...’ because I hated magic.”
However, Debbie soon realised working with the man she went on to fall in love with wouldn’t be all that bad. She said: “The only thing I’d seen Paul doing when I met him in rehearsals was Blankety Blank. Paul had played a joke.
“He stood on his chair, opened his jacket and had a Superman T-shirt on and also red underpants over his trousers.
“So I burst out laughing and thought ‘Oh well, it might not be so bad because he seems a really, really funny guy’.
“When I met Paul it was about the fourth day of rehearsals. I can
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remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. I’m always early so I was sitting outside on the wall, and Paul’s always early so we actually had some banter before everyone else arrived and we just clicked.
“But he was keeping me at arm’s length. He thought I was far too young for him because I was 20 years younger than him.”
Debbie became Paul’s stage assistant and they were married for nearly 30 years until he died aged 77 in 2016.
We told yesterday how Paul gave his mother-in-law a dead tarantula as a Christmas present for a joke. Debbie said she and her husband had been given the huge creepy crawly as an unusual gift while out travelling in Belize and decided to take it home.
Debbie said: “Paul, who we know was a wicked joker, wrapped it up that Christmas for my mum – which really wasn’t fair. He did get reprimanded for trying to scare his mother-in-law but he was always getting into trouble with her so it wasn’t anything new.”
The couple starred in the hit TV series The Paul Daniels Magic Show which ran on BBC One from 1979 to 1994. Paul also presented TV game shows including Odd Man Out, Every Second Counts and Wipeout.