Debbie McGee: Pocket Rocket

SPOT Debbie McGee shopping at Waitrose in Twyford or in the audience at the Mill at Sonning and the first thing you notice is how tiny she is.

 

But do not be fooled by her diminutive dancer’s stature. Debbie is actually a pocket rocket and much more than her soubriquet as the entertainment industry’s most well-known widow would suggest.

 

Since her magician husband Paul Daniels died five years ago, Debbie has been a regular on TV and there doesn’t seem to be any task too daunting for her to take on.

 

We’ve seen her take part in Strictly (she came second), Celebrity MasterChef, Celebrity Come Dine with Me, Celebrity Mastermind, and that’s not to mention her several panto appearances, her Strictly arena tours and her own self-penned one-woman show at the Mill at Sonning. Oh, and her Radio Berkshire Sunday morning show which she hosted for a whopping 12 years.

 

Her specialist subject on Mastermind, incidentally, was Dame Margot Fonteyn, as befits a former ballet dancer. And Debbie may have come in last but how many of us would actually have the nerve to step up to that big black chair in the first place? Yet as John Humphrys announced the results, there was Debbie, as pretty as a picture in pale blue satin, accepting defeat while smiling like the true professional she is.

 

Debbie, 63, sometimes can’t quite believe it all herself. She says: “I am very aware how lucky I am. After Paul died I knew that when one person from a double act passes, the other one struggles for an identity and I still cannot believe that I have managed to create another career without him.”

 

Now Debbie is taking on yet another challenge by appearing in her first “straight” acting role playing a psychic in an adaptation of Peter James’s supernatural thriller The House on Cold Hill.

 

If it’s true that we make our own luck, then Debbie is reaping the rewards of being born “busy”.

 

The eldest of three children, at 16 she won a place at the Royal Ballet School in London and by 19 was a soloist with the Iranian National Ballet Company in Tehran.

 

The country’s revolution in 1979 put a stop to that and Debbie had to flee back home in dramatic fashion to look for work.

 

She ended up applying to the Bernard Delfont Organisation which staged summer shows at UK seaside resorts and landed a job in Paul Daniels’ season at the Britannia Pier Theatre in Great Yarmouth.

 

She had never heard of Paul Daniels but, when they met at a rehearsal, the attraction, she says, was instant.

 

“There was definitely chemistry,” she says. “We made each other laugh.”

 

But there was a problem – Debbie was not quite 20 while Paul was a 40-year-old divorced father of three.

 

She explains: “When I met Paul, it was about the fourth day of rehearsals because the dancers started first. “I can remember it as if it was yesterday. We were rehearsing in a studio at a church in Shepherds Bush. I am always early so I was sitting outside on the wall. Paul was also early and the studio wasn’t open and nobody else had arrived so we actually had some banter and we just clicked.”

 

In those early days, however, it was Paul who she says was “keeping me at arm’s length”.

 

“He thought I was far too young because I was 20 years younger than him.” But a year later Debbie was booked again to support Paul in his summer season in Bournemouth, followed by his London stage show that December which, by the time it closed 14 months later, had become the longest running magic show ever to play in the West End.

 

She went on to work as “the lovely Debbie McGee” on the Paul Daniels Magic Show until 1994, one of the BBC’s biggest success stories, selling to 43 countries worldwide and winning the Golden Rose of Montreux.

 

The pair married in Buckinghamshire in 1988 but even marriage didn’t stop the sarcastic comments that somehow Debbie was a gold digger.

Caroline Aherne’s famously funny question “and what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” on The Mrs Merton Show in 1997 couldn’t have helped.

 

And though she now says it was “hilarious” it must have grated on a grafter like Debbie. “I suffered from this for so many years,” she says. “The people who make stupid comments have probably never been in love.”

 

The couple’s move to their riverside love nest in Wargrave established them both as very much part of the community. It is where she and Paul spent his final days together and she has no plans to move.

 

“I feel I am in a very caring community and I have no desire to leave,” says Debbie. “I am so settled here and feel so very lucky to have wonderful friends here who kindly brought meals round when Paul was ill.”

 

Her role at the Mill will also keep her close to home until the run of The House on Cold Hill ends on March 24.

 

She says: “I am overflowing with excitement and nerves but I have always wanted to act and because I love the Mill so much I cannot think of a better venue to step into a new world.

 

“When Paul and I first started going to see productions there 20 years ago we were always amazed at the quality of the plays at such a small venue. But it is actually that intimacy that makes it so special.”