Des O’Connor: “The place I really got the bug for the theatre was the Embassy, Peterborough…” 

[prev] …terrible. You can actually hear the silence of 3,000 people… I remember thinking to myself ‘You just told that joke…’ – and it hadn’t even got a laugh the first time. It was all part of an apprenticeship, though – sustaining it, on a wet Monday night, when you’re not jammed full… You’ve still got to go out and entertain them, because they’ve come for that. What a wonderful job, though. You don’t hear of a brain surgeon getting a standing ovation…

THEN THERE WAS YOUR CHAT SHOW, WHICH FEATURED JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY WHO WAS ANYBODY…
It’s easier to say who wasn’t on that show! In fact, we had Frank Sinatra booked, but then he was ill with bronchitis and couldn’t come. We had Michael Jackson booked, and then he got into all sorts of problems and couldn’t come. I remember when Barbra Streisand was coming, we had ‘BS’ up on the board in the office, and I thought: ‘Yes, that could mean a lot of things…’ But I had been driving them mad, wanting to get her on. I’d studied everything about Barbra Streisand – she could have been my subject on Mastermind. I was told she was a bit of a control freak, though, wanting to change the lighting and heaven knows what – but she was lovely on the day. Things went wrong right at the beginning of that show, too. I had things on a screen to remind me what we were going to be talking about – just notes to act as reminders. But she walked on, the audience stood up, and I looked up at the screen and it had broken down. So, we just ad libbed for about an hour, and some wonderful things came out of that that. I remember saying to her: ‘I hear you’re a bit of a control freak…’ I could hear the audience gasp as I said it. So I asked her about a film of hers – The Mirror Has Two Faces. ‘Yes, I did direct it…’ she said. ‘Yes, I did produce it… Yes I did write some of the songs…’ ‘And you insisted I see the film before the interview?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And in the cinema, it was you with the torch showing me to my seat, wasn’t it..?’ She thought that was hilarious. These are the sorts of memories that stay with you.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?
The ‘Audience with…’. I kept turning it down and turning it down, then my wife said ‘Why don’t you just do it? You’ve been rehearsing for it for 40 years…’ I said ‘It’s all right for you, I’ve got to walk out in front of 500 celebrities and entertain them, after all the insults about my singing that have been flying around. There are people who think I’m rubbish who have never seen me, because they like Eric and Ernie so much!’ But it was a great feeling walking out in front of them – and, not rehearsed or prompted by a floor manager, they all stood and gave me a standing ovation. That’s something you remember all your life. The other important thing is just to be yourself. Don’t worry about the personality you try to assume – the public can see who’s phoney and who’s real. They’re not fools

LOOKING BACK OVER YOUR CAREER THERE’S CERTAINLY A VAST AMOUNT OF MATERIAL TO DRAW ON – YOU’VE BEEN SO BUSY…
The important thing is to move with the times and to try different things. I did this autobiography called Bananas Can’t Fly in 2002, and I was asked quite recently whether I would write a second volume. I said: ‘I don’t know what I could write about just the last ten years…’ But when I thought about it, I realised that in the last ten years I had got married, had a son – I’d never had a son before – I’d been given the CBE, written a book of poems, done musicals at the Palladium for Andrew Lloyd Webber… So yeah, I thought, I think I’ve got enough here to write a book! You can’t just say: ‘I’ve done it all,’ because you’ve never done it all. There’s always something there to challenge you.

SO, WERE YOU A GOOD SHOE SALESMAN?
I was rotten. But I could tell you what a last is. I was in Northampton, you see, which is famous for shoemaking, and that’s why the local football team is called the Cobblers. I remember I was interviewing Julio Iglesias, and nobody had told me he couldn’t really speak English – it was like interviewing Manuel from Fawlty Towers. So I was trying to think of something I could ask him and said: ‘Soccer! Do you like soccer?’ ‘Si, soccer! Si!’ ‘You played for Real Madrid? I played for Northampton. Cobblers.’ And he said ‘Cobblers? What is “cobblers”?’ So I said ‘That’s what you say to an English crowd if you want to ingratiate yourself to them…’ And he went on stage at the Albert Hall on the Saturday night and said ‘Cobblers to all of you!’ It sounds like a joke, but it actually happened… And you can play a part in someone’s life. A woman wrote to me the other day from Portsmouth and said: ‘I haven’t been out for three years, and I must say I was glad I went out. I haven’t laughed so much since my husband died.’ She didn’t mean what she said, of course – it was just the way it came out. But if you can have an impact on someone’s life, to lift them up and help them on their way, it’s better than any job in the world.

An Evening with Des O’Connor
Saturday, 31 October at 7.30pm, Key Theatre, Peterborough
To book, call: 01733 207239
www.vivacity-peterborough.com