I loved modelling with Naomi, but can’t wait to come home

Nov 3 2008 by Vicky Anderson, Liverpool Daily Post

Vicky Anderson chats to Cilla Black about panto, pins and parading down the catwalk

FORTY-FIVE years in showbiz, a 65th birthday and her home town celebrating being Capital of Culture – it’s been a monumental year for Cilla Black.

Despite self-deprecating references to her “ripe old age” and even the acknowledgement she is, technically, a pensioner, there’s a vitality in the voice on the other end of the phone that, although croaky with bronchitis, gives no hint to her advancing years.

Cilla’s definitely still got it – as proved in September when she stole the show at Naomi Campbell’s charity fashion show.

Taking to the stage in an Yves Saint Laurent ensemble of top hat and tails, she revealed the shapely legs – “lallies”, as she says the supermodel calls them – of a woman more than half her age.

“It’s always for charity I get the kit off,” she laughs, recalling her turn at the Fashion for Relief show followed another revealing performance at the Royal Variety Performance in 2007.

“I was terrified to turn Naomi Campbell down, but she turned out to be an absolute sweetheart, phoning all the time, asking if I was ok.

“Naomi was very persuasive and kept saying ‘your lallies are great’ and I’d say ‘I’m an old woman, there’s no way I’m wearing that!”

On the night, Cilla says, Naomi saw the YSL get-up and decided on the hop to change the running order and have Cilla end the show.

“I nearly passed out!

“For the first time in my life, I was frightened. I was trying to walk like the models and kept tripping over.

“But, once the spotlight hit me, I went into Cilla mode and gave the performance of my life. I loved it.”

This year has seen a steady return to the spotlight for the woman who was once the highest- paid female on television.

She quit Blind Date during a live special five years ago, and decided to spend some time out of showbusiness.

“It was time. Bobby had died 18 months before, and I’m an honourable person and I had to work my contract, but it was very, very hard.

“I’d look at the chair in my dressing room he used to sit in and him not being there.

“I thought Blind Date had run its course anyway, but even then, two minutes before the show, I knew if I didn’t say it in the first 10 minutes I wasn’t going to say it. I heard the theme tune and I thought ‘I’m going to do it’.

“Then, at the ripe old age of 60, I planned to do all the things I couldn’t do before because I’d been working.

“This year, I thought I was ready to start doing a bit more, and blow me, I was approached to do panto. I thought it was perfect.”

Cilla was approached to play the Fairy Godmother in the Empire’s £1m panto, and says she is thrilled to bits to be among the “all-Scouse cast” including Les Dennis, Jennifer Ellison, Hollyoaks’ Nick Pickard, Ted Robbins and old pal Pete Price.

“I was actually flattered in the summer when I was asked, I really was. It’s all part of the City of Culture and to be involved in closing the Year of Culture really moved me.

“It will be my grandson Max’s first panto, so I’m so thrilled, really excited.”

No stranger to the panto stage, Cilla last appeared in Aladdin at the Empire in 1986.

“It was par for the course, but the media seem to think it is a graveyard,” she says.

“But Americans especially – Michael Glaser is here, Mickey Rooney has done it, Stephanie Powers – they don’t have panto in America.

“For most children, it is their first trip to the theatre, and what better way to introduce them?”

A Sky One pilot for a new dating show is in the pipeline for Cilla, and old albums are being re-issued by EMI to mark her 45 years in the music industry.

“At 65, I think it’s quite exceptional,” she says about the work offers that have come her way.

“People say about ageism on TV – but I say I want to see beautiful men and women on TV, not hags like myself. But you’ve got to have talent and not just be a 22-year-old with a pretty face.

“I can’t knock that, as I was the youngest person to be given a show by the BBC – I was that 22-year-old.

“I’m very flattered at my stage in life – just to be alive!”

Another business venture has been her investment in a psychic telephone line.

“It’s a thing I believe in and if a cynic doesn’t believe in it, I’m not a preacher,” she says rationally. “It works for me and was a tremendous help to me when I lost Bobby. I would have gone anywhere – I just couldn’t understand how quickly he was snatched away from me.”

So for now, it’s all “werk, werk, werk,” she laughs, in reassuringly Scouse tones.

She, like any successful Liverpudlian ex-pat, has been prone to criticism in the past about the amount of time and attention she is perceived to give her home city.

But Cilla is defiant that, back in the Sixties, there was no other way to forge a music career apart from moving away – with not even a recording studio to be had outside of the capital.

“It just wasn’t like that, I had to move to London and it was a big wrench for me.

“You’re talking to the person who really blew it in America because I was really homesick.”

She recalls a time she had been playing American dates with The Beatles, who returned to England before she had finished a residency in a US hotel. Lonely and bored, a phone call from home to say her beloved grandmother had died was the final straw and she returned to the UK.

The young Cilla was also up against it because of her accent.

“I tried to talk posh because I was really, really thick Liverpool and I was fed up with journalists saying ‘pardon’ and having to repeat myself. They couldn’t understand a word I was saying

“George Harrison said to me “yer got-ta speak slo-wly Cilla”,” she says, adopting the guitarist’s laid-back drawl.

“So I turned into a female George Harrison for a bit!”

vickyanderson