Cilla Black has become a strange creature during her 50 years in showbiz. When her husband Bobby was in hospital she found to her dismay that she didn’t now how to take the dogs for a walk. That was some time ago, for Bobby Willis died of liver cancer in 1999. ‘They lived their lives almost like Siamese twins,’ writes Douglas Thompson in Cilla, Queen of the Swinging Sixties (Metro, £7.99, Spectator Bookshop, £7.59).
He is an old hand in Cillagraphy, having published Cilla Black: Bobby’s Girl in 1998 and Cilla: the Biography in 2002. He is not the author of this year’s Cilla: the Adventures of a Welsh Mountain Pony, which will disappoint fans since it makes no reference to the long-term hostess of Blind Date (1985–2003). Even Thompson admits that critics knocked the ‘prurience’ of Blind Date ‘with much justification’, but the dominant mood of the biography, when not that of melancholy, is resentment.
That might seem odd in someone from a poor home in Liverpool (now of Denham, Bucks) who decided to spend half a million on a pink diamond ring and £160,000 on a Ferrari at the same time. But why wouldn’t Harold Wilson invite her to 10 Downing Street? (‘My father was very, very upset.’) Then in 1970, on a flight to the south of France, she was downgraded from first class: ‘I’ve never been downgraded in my life.’ No wonder she had to confide her troubles to Frankie Howerd, ‘the father I went to when not even my husband could help’. But husband Bobby at least got Frankie’s old tweed coat when he died, ‘and it still smells of Frankie’.
Joey Essex, ‘male grooming icon’, beats Cilla’s incapacity for simple tasks by never having learnt to tell the time or to blow his nose.
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