Cilla Black spoke engagingly and sometimes emotionally at an RTS Legends lunch at the House of Lords, where she was interviewed by Jeff Pope, who wrote and produced ITV's recent hit biopic, Cilla
“TV found me, I didn’t find TV,” Cilla Black, once reputedly the small screen’s highest paid star, told an RTS Legends event where she was presented with the inaugural RTS Legends Award.
The Liverpudlian star spoke engagingly and sometimes emotionally at the lunch where she was interviewed by Jeff Pope, who wrote and produced ITV’s recent hit biopic, Cilla.
Recalling her early days as an aspiring singer on the Liverpool club circuit, Black said she was motivated by her parents to become a singer. “‘There has to be something better than this,’ they told me… I didn’t know I was poor until I was 14.”
Black was a regular at Liverpool clubs the Iron Door, the Jacaranda, the Blue Angel and, famously, The Cavern, where The Beatles played lunchtime and evening sessions.
Unlike The Beatles, Cilla appeared for free, the Fab Four often encouraging her to perform. “I was at the Iron Door with The Beatles and George [Harrison] said: ‘Give Cilla a go.’ John Lennon said: ‘Come on Cyril, she can knock yer ’ead off,’ and I did.”
The turning point in her career came when Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein signed her in 1963. It was Epstein who later guided her to what would be successful TV career.
Black’s second record, Anyone Who Had a Heart, topped the charts and she went on to have a string of hits, but Epstein knew the music business was fickle. He realised that TV offered the best prospect of long-term financial success.
Epstein wasn’t wrong. The singer’s first BBC series, Cilla, ran for eight series from 1968 to 1976. LWT’s Blind Date was a fixture of Saturday night TV for 18 years.
Black spoke movingly of Epstein’s troubled life and her relationship with her husband Bobby Willis, who had helped her professionally before Epstein arrived in her life. Following Epstein’s death in 1967 Willis became her manager.
In the early Liverpool days, Willis had ambitions to be a songwriter. But, from the beginning of their relationship, she made it clear that she was the one destined for fame.
“I was a cow [to Bobby],” Black said. “It’s me, Bobby, you’re supposed to look after me. I’m the star – more or less.”
She added: “Bobby was a great director. There could be a million people telling me how great I was, but I only ever listened to Bobby. He sometimes told me I could have done it better… At the end of day, I only ever listened to him.”
Despite her massive UK success, Cilla failed to emulate The Beatles and break into America.
Epstein had secured her an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, then US TV’s biggest entertainment show. Sullivan introduced the British star “as that great Welsh singer from Wales in England.”
It was not an auspicious start to making it big in the US. But she admitted she never felt comfortable in the Big Apple. “I was a wuss,” Black remembered. “I’d be in New York and I’d always get homesick.
“I had the fancy frocks, but I wanted to go home. The Beatles were in New York for their Shea Stadium gig. They went home and left me alone in New York.”
When Willis died in 1999, Cilla told the RTS that it was doing Blind Date that helped get her through the grief. “It’s the 90 minutes you forget about everything – like football… When I did Blind Date I could forget about everything else going on in my life.”
The RTS Legends lunch with Cilla Black was held at the House of Lords on 5 December. It was hosted by Baroness Benjamin and produced by Paul Jackson. A full report will be published in the January edition of Television.
Report by Steve Clarke