The Spelling Machine

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I traced down an early childhood TV memory. It seems to be quite the year for it, because blow me down, somebody’s helped me track down another one. And today’s story involves a certain Paul Daniels.

Not his famous Halloween stunt from 1987, which I have precisely zero memory of, and almost certainly never saw. (That’s the kind of thing which makes you feel cheated of a really good TV memory. Luckily, I fully remember Ghostwatch, five years later.) No, my memory of Paul Daniels is rather more low-key.

Although, like many of my early TV memories, it involves an explosion.

*   *   *

It’s around 1990, and I’m about nine years old. Could be a couple of years earlier or later. Paul Daniels is doing a card trick on the telly, as he is wont to do. But this is a slightly unusual card trick. Some kind of strange machine is spitting out cards at Paul. What is he doing – guessing which cards will come out? I can’t quite remember.

But something wrong. The machine keeps spitting out cards faster and faster. Paul is concerned, and tries to stop it. But it’s to no avail. The machine explodes, leaving Paul with a cartoon-like blackened face. He looks straight to camera, with a look of resignation, and throws the remaining cards away. End of routine.

I’m intrigued… and mildly disturbed. Electric things going wrong are already a slight fascination with me. I remember nothing of the rest of the show, but this one moment is seared into my memory. And I never saw it again.

*   *   *

Well, until now.

This is one of those memories where I made a few half-hearted searches over the years, but never made any serious effort. (There is a lot of Paul Daniels on YouTube.) I occasionally mentioned it, but had kind of resigned myself to never seeing it again.

Until I idly mentioned all this on Twitter… and hello, Timothy Roger Talbot came up with the goods. Here it is, from the very opening of the episode:

There are clearly many things I didn’t remember, or remembered wrongly – I’d even forgotten about the fundamental conceit of a “spelling machine”. But it came flooding back as soon as I watched it; this is definitely the programme in question. I got a Proustian rush when the cards came flying manically out of the machine, and when Daniels blows the flames out; images I couldn’t quite dredge from my head until now, but were clearly buried deep within my skull.

As for the routine itself, I’m the world’s worst person at figuring out magic tricks. From my exceedingly untrained eye, presumably the following is happening:

• The cards Paul puts in the machine at the top are nothing to do with the rest of the trick, and are never seen again.
• The dial at the front is pure misdirection, and also does nothing.
• The pure power of suggestion gets the required words out of the audience member. The obvious rhyme for bow is “cow”, and the obvious rhyme for mouse is “house”.

It’s a fun piece of television, and certainly the kind of thing you don’t get much of on BBC One any more, unfortunately. Though let me extremely clear: the reason this particular routine stuck in my head is because it was something electrical which exploded, which I found faintly unnerving.

So, the final question: when exactly was this broadcast, and how old was I? The video says the show is from 1988, and luckily, BBC Genome made it very easy to track down the exact episode, as luckily it specifically mentions the spelling machine. Unfortunately, The Paul Daniels Show routinely got a repeat on BBC2 – which is, incidentally, where the video above comes from. So I either saw it on its original BBC1 showing on the 30th January 1988, or the BBC2 repeat on the 11th August 1988. Both these showings are earlier than I thought; I would have been aged 6 on the first showing, and 7 on the repeat. I’m slightly amazed that the memory still lingers.

I’m not going to end this post with “now that’s magic”, because I simply have too much respect for you.

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