September 2015 article - a tribute to Val and Cilla

 

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s, the names Val and Cilla were synonymous with Saturday evening family television. Both Val and Cilla had Irish heritage and, sadly, we have lost them both this summer.

Try telling the young people of today that Val Doonican, the relaxed crooner with the friendly Waterford brogue sitting in a rocking chair with a cuddly cardigan and a glint in his eye singing about Paddy McGinty’s Goat and O’Rafferty’s Motor Car was once a massive star of popular entertainment. Yet at its peak the Val Doonican Show attracted audiences of 19 million viewers every week. Compare this with X-Factor which attracts an average of around 9 million viewers per show with only two blockbusting X-Factor final shows ever having equalled Val’s normal weekly figure. Or consider for a moment that Doonican’s third album, the truly inspired Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently actually knocked the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper off the top of the charts in 1968 and without even a hint of LSD!

Michael Valentine Doonican, born in Waterford in 1927, was the youngest child of eight. His family were very musical and young Val played in the local school band from the age of six. Tired of working in factories in Waterford he teamed up with his pal Bruce Clarke to form a singing duo and during the 1950s he toured England with a group called The Four Ramblers. Doonican’s career in popular entertainment really kicked off in 1963 when he appeared on Sunday Night at the Palladium and the rest, as they say, is history.

But if Saturday evening in front of the television was incomplete without Mr Doonican, exactly the same can be said of Cilla Black who also hosted her own variety show between 1968 and 1976, albeit without the jumper and rocking chair but still with those smiling Irish eyes. Cilla, born in Liverpool in 1943 of Irish roots, became Britain’s biggest selling female pop artist of the Sixties.

Those of us who watched the excellent 2014 drama, Cilla, featuring Sheridan Smith were no doubt fascinated by the story of her rise to fame from the poverty stricken Scotland Road area of Liverpool, and her relationship with Bobby Willis. In the drama, Bobby, who was from a working-class Protestant background, rejects his father’s sectarian prejudices about mixed relationships to follow his love for the effervescent Priscilla, whose great-grandparents were Roman Catholics from Ireland.

After working as a part-time cloakroom attendant at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, where she became friends with the Beatles, Cilla began performing as Swinging Cilla and was signed by Brian Epstein in September 1963, his only female act. Her second single, Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach and Hal David reached number 1 in Britain in February 1964 and sold 800,000 UK copies. In the recent television drama there is a great scene where Cilla has to wait by a telephone box near her Scotland Road home to receive the news about the success of her single from Epstein. A real ‘rags-to-riches’ tale.

But sadly, television in the Sixties wasn’t all glitzy young ladies in mini-skirts and charming old crooners in rocking chairs, as the evening news began to bring us the terrible images of sectarian and political violence on the streets of Northern Ireland. Black and white television was still the norm in working class homes in 1969, even so, the scenes of escalating violence on the 9 o-clock News were shocking and brutal in their bloodiest extreme.

For Irish people in England during this period, there was a well-documented tendency to ‘put their heads down and keep their mouths shut’, particularly when outside of the closely knit Irish neighbourhoods of British cities or when employed in an open workplace. Public opinion was largely formed by the popular press and British newspapers made certain that only one side of the story was ever told.

Amazingly, Irish role models still flourished in Britain, especially in sport and light entertainment. How many of us can recall the whole family whooping joyfully at the television set during that sublime moment when sweet-as-sugar Irish school girl Dana won the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest with All Kinds of Everything? Or every school boy in the land, attempting to emulate the legendary Georgie Best as they dribbled their caser-ball along the playground? Women of every creed and culture, religiously tuning their radios to BBC Radio 2 for Terry Wogan’s breakfast show and their husbands showing equal allegiance to Alex ‘The Hurricane’ Higgins as he won the World Snooker Championship in 1972. Frank Carson, Dave Allen, The Dubliners, Johnny Giles, Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy …the list suddenly starts to fill up, I am certain that our readers can add many others.

So as we say a fond farewell and offer our prayer of thanks for Val and Cilla, let us also spare a thought for all of the great entertainers of Irish heritage who carried the torch of the diaspora during the 50s, 60s and 70s. For breaking down the barriers of pervasive prejudice and for letting those of us in the younger generations know, through those years of flickering and fuzzy black and white images, that being of Irish descent was something to celebrate not hide away.