When it’s your time, it’s your time: Paul Daniels goes home for his f inal days
PAUL Daniels has left hospital to spend his final days with his family after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour.
His son Martin said the magician, believing that ‘when it’s your time, i t’s your time’, declined radiotherapy after he was told it would not help him to live longer.
Martin said every day spent with his father is ‘a bonus’ for his family, who have chosen not to ask doctors how long the 77-year-old has left to live.
Daniels was diagnosed after he lost his balance and fell at his Thameside home in Berkshire. His wife Debbie McGee, 57, took him to hospital where a scan showed the brain tumour.
Martin, 52, said: ‘Doctors haven’t said how many weeks or months he might have and we haven’t asked. He knows things are not in his hands now.’
The magician’s son added: ‘ He has said before, “when it’s your time, it’s your time” and that’s how he is trying to face up to things.’
In an interview with the Sunday Mirror, Martin praised Miss McGee for her ‘24/7’ care of his father, saying she was‘ absolutely amazing, absolutely astonishing ... They are inseparable .’
Martin said seeing his father in hospital had been ‘ unbearably difficult’ adding: ‘ We said we’d fight what lay ahead together. The whole family would. We cried, we laughed, we talked.’
Even in his hospital bed Daniels acted the showman, a skill he honed entertaining 20million viewers on his BBC programme Paul Daniels Magic Show, which aired from 1979 to 1994.
Martin said: ‘He went round the beds saying hello, making jokes. He sat at the nurses’ stations.
‘He was doing a little ditty by the door to the ward saying, “roll up, roll up, visiting time is over folks”. But that’s Dad.’
Daniels began performing with Miss McGee in 1979.
The couple, who were married in April 1988, are one of the world’s most established magician-and-assistant acts. Miss McGee – along with Martin and his brothers Paul,
‘He knows it is out of his hands’
55, and Gary, 46, all born to the magicians’s first wife Jacqueline Skipworth – has barely left his side in the past fortnight.
Daniels had lost his balance at home several times before Miss McGee took him to the Royal Berkshire Hospital.
It was initially thought that the entertainer had suffered a minor stroke until the cancer diagnosis. Now back at home in Berkshire, Daniels i s said to have been buoyed by the amount of support from fans.
Martin said: ‘We are together as a family. It is all we can do. We are trying to stay strong for dad and strong for each other. It’s the only way we can be.’