Thatch magic
TODAY the toupee worn by magician Paul Daniels is up for auction.
His widow Debbie McGee is selling his collection of magic memorabilia, including the dark brown wig which he started wearing when his hair began to recede. While it has a pre-sale estimate of £300, his previous hairpieces sold for almost £1,000.
NADINE LINGE has 12 more magical facts you’ll like... not a lot!
1 Daniels was born in 1938 in north Yorkshire as Newton Edward Daniels. He took his stage name from his son Paul, born in 1960, as he felt it worked better for showbiz.
2 Before becoming a magician he did national service and trained as an accountant. He then set up his own grocery business, doing magic in clubs at night.
3 He performed with first wife Jackie, whom he married in 1960, and came up with his catchphrase “You’ll like this... not a lot, but you’ll like it” to deal with a heckler at a club in Bradford.
4 Daniels got his break when he came second on Opportunity Knocks in 1970. TV work followed including his BBC series, The Paul Daniels Magic Show, which ran from 1979 until 1994.
5 He met his long-time assistant and future wife “The Lovely Debbie McGee” in 1979 when she was 19 and he was 40. She got a job at his Great Yarmouth summer season. They tied the knot in 1988.
6 Daniels claimed to have slept with more than 300 women and Debbie branded him a “rampant bull”. He boasted about their “sexathons” once finding her in bed wearing an eye mask bearing the words “Do Not Disturb” and a pair of knickers with the word “Disturb”.
7 His marriage to Debbie sparked one of comedy’s classic lines when Caroline Aherne’s Mrs Merton asked her: “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
8 A Conservative Party supporter, he threatened – but failed – to leave the country if Labour won the 1997 election, and also hosted game shows including Every Second Counts and kids’ TV favourite Wizbit.
9 Controversial moments included offering to help Soham murderer Ian Huntley end his life, questioning whether Jimmy Savile’s accusers were “for real” and saying he had limited sympathy with the homeless as he’d “grafted” his way out of a poor background.
10 In 1997 he was duped into leading an appeal on Chris Morris’ Brass Eye about an elephant who has “her trunk trapped up her anus”. In 2011 he ended up in hospital after Sooty threw a pizza and whacked him in the eye.
11 He drove a car with the personalised number plate MAG1C, described fellow magic man David Blaine as “not very original” and reckoned there’d been no good impressionists “since Mike Yarwood”.
12 In 2016, Daniels died from a brain tumour aged 77. Speaking about the auction of his magic collection, Debbie, 64, says: “It’s giving me lots of pleasure to pass on his legacy.”