Debbie McGee: 10 years after Paul’s death, I find magic upsetting to watch

Amy PackerFri, July 10, 2026 at 8:11 AM UTC

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Entertainer Debbie McGee, widow of magician Paul Daniels, photographed at her home near Twyford, Berkshire for The Telegraph - Clara Molden

Dressed in a cornflower-blue silk shirt, her platinum-blonde hair perfectly coiffed, Debbie McGee is, unexpectedly, wearing spectacles when we meet. “Look at us in our glasses!” exclaims the 67-year-old, stashing away her own pair as speedily as her late husband, the magician Paul Daniels, might have made a white rabbit disappear. They are, after all, hardly on brand for someone who has built her whole career around being a “glamorous assistant”.

At 5ft 1in, with a dazzling smile and a ballerina’s poise (honed during her teenage years at the Royal Ballet School), McGee has barely changed since the days when she would don a sparkly leotard and wink gamely at the audience while Daniels – 20 years her senior, in a toupee and tuxedo – skewered her with swords or sawed her in half for the nation’s viewing pleasure.

For 15 years, from 1979 to 1994, The Paul Daniels Magic Show was a stalwart of Saturday-night prime time. Attracting up to 17 million viewers every weekend, Daniels (whose catchphrase was: “You’ll like this... not a lot, but you’ll like it”) and McGee – his comedic foil – became one of the best-known double acts in light entertainment.

While their off-screen age-gap relationship grabbed headlines after they blindsided the nation by announcing they had married in April 1988 – with spoof chat show host Mrs Merton once famously asking McGee: “What first, Debbie, attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” – their marriage long outlasted the cynicism. “Paul was very, very loving,” recalls McGee. “Our marriage was very much a team effort. I hate making beds, so Paul made the bed and put the rubbish out. When you’re famous, everyone assumes you have people to do everything for you, but we weren’t like that.

McGee and Paul Daniels on their wedding day in April 1988

“Paul was incredibly knowledgeable. His father brought him up to learn something new every day. While I was getting myself ready – doing my hair and putting my makeup on – we would discuss the news, or politics, or something he’d discovered about fly fishing.

“We both came from working-class backgrounds, so we had our feet on the ground. At the weekend, Paul always wanted to go to B&Q, usually buying stuff to create a model for a new trick. Then we’d pack a picnic and take our boat up the river.”

But in February 2016, Daniels was diagnosed with a grade 4 glioblastoma brain tumour, the most common type of brain cancer in adults. He died just six weeks later, aged 77. “I nursed him at home, and he passed away peacefully with me holding his hand, and without any pain. That’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” says McGee, starting to well up.

McGee was the only one to notice the early changes in Daniels. In November 2015, he had started ducking out of social engagements and going to bed early, becoming “less bubbly and more lethargic”, and complained that he was struggling to learn his panto lines.

After a dizzy spell on New Year’s Eve 2015, McGee booked an appointment at their local surgery, where a locum GP ordered blood tests. “The results showed pernicious anaemia, so Paul was prescribed B12 injections and vitamin D for low iron. We were told he’d be right as rain within six weeks.” Instead, over the next fortnight, Daniels became unusually tired and confused, losing his balance on several occasions. “Our GP knew that something was wrong and booked Paul an appointment with a neurologist.”

Though he had always been the one in charge when it came to their careers, at this point Daniels asked McGee to take the reins.

“When the neurosurgeon asked: ‘Do you want to know what’s wrong?’ he replied, ‘No, tell Deb,’ and left the room,” recalls McGee, who remained behind to view the CT scans – which revealed an ominous shadow covering half of Daniels’s brain – and hear that her husband of 28 years had less than two months to live. “I can’t even describe that moment. There had been nothing in my head thinking he was going to die, nothing at all.”

Daniels and McGee in 2008, eight years before the magician was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumour - Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Daniels’s decision to remain in the dark meant that McGee was left to break the news to his three adult sons from his first marriage. “It’s the hardest phone call you can ever make,” she says. “Martin, Paul’s middle son, was somewhere in Brazil, working as a magician on a cruise ship. I didn’t know if he’d be able to get back in time to see his father. Thankfully, they let him fly out the next day.”

There is no cure for glioblastoma, a fast-growing, highly aggressive brain tumour that invades healthy brain tissue and, even when removed by surgery, almost always returns. Around 3,200 people are diagnosed with glioblastoma every year in the UK, and while radiotherapy can shrink or kill cancer cells, only a third of patients live for more than a year after diagnosis. Just 4 per cent survive for five years or more.

Ultimately, after much research, McGee and her stepsons decided against treatment. “They couldn’t guarantee me that anything they did would make him any better – and there was a possibility he would have a stroke,” she says. “Paul’s father had had a stroke, so that was Paul’s biggest fear. I knew he wouldn’t want to be alive and not be 100 per cent, so I discussed it with his sons, and we decided that I’d bring him home and keep him as comfortable as possible.”

It might surprise many to learn that McGee’s recollections of those final weeks with Daniels, in their £3m mansion a few miles downriver from Henley-on-Thames, are almost entirely positive. “He got to see all his boys and his two grandchildren. The weather was really good, so we would walk down the garden to the water and he would have a Magnum every afternoon, because he loved ice cream. I have happy memories of that time.”

Keeping the knowledge that her husband was dying to herself wasn’t easy, but McGee’s 50 years in entertainment allowed her to ensure his life remained as normal as possible in those final weeks. “Of course, I had moments when I wasn’t with Paul where I cried my eyes out. But for the time he was at home – a month and five days – I was cheery. I put my makeup on and did my hair every day, and we shared loads of jokes. I just kept saying to myself, ‘Don’t look forward and don’t look back; concentrate on this minute.’

“I think having been in showbusiness – where you have to go on stage when you’ve just lost somebody, or something awful is going on – helped.”

McGee and Daniels in 1991. McGee says she treasured the final weeks of his life, caring for him at home until his death in 2016 - Ken Lennox/Mirrorpix/Getty Images

McGee only has one regret about Daniels’s final weeks. “The night before he was due to come home, Paul was moved to a different wing of the hospital. I went in to take him a change of clothes and eventually found him in this dark, dingy place. It’s a memory I have to block out. It tortured me.”

Only once, after a fall in the couple’s bathroom during his final weeks, when she found Daniels lying on the tiles in floods of tears, did he finally ask, “What on earth is wrong with me?” “I said, ‘Well, darling, do you really want to know?’ and he said yes, so I replied, ‘You’ve got a brain tumour.’ I don’t know whether he was ever able to absorb that information.”

The magic of first meeting

Born in South Bank, near Middlesbrough, in 1938, Paul Daniels always said he turned to magic as a way of making friends, honing his skills while doing National Service in Hong Kong. On his return, he worked in local government until he found fame after coming second on the 1970 TV talent show Opportunity Knocks.

Daniels and McGee were brought together, against the odds, by the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After growing up in Kingston upon Thames and graduating from the Royal Ballet School in the early 1970s, McGee headed out to dance for the Shah in Iran, having joined the Iranian National Ballet, which paid better than anything she was being offered in the UK.

Following the uprising that brought down the country’s Royal family and brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, McGee fled back to the UK. But with all the ballet companies full, she found herself hunting for work on the summer cabaret circuit. “I auditioned for a choreographer and director who were casting for loads of different shows,” she recalls. “So when they said, ‘You’re going to be with The Paul Daniels Show in Great Yarmouth,’ I had no idea who Paul was because I’d been living overseas. And I hated magic, having only seen very formal magicians on the Royal Gala [now known as the Royal Variety Performance].”

Pictured in 1985, Daniels and McGee met by chance after the Iranian Revolution forced the former ballet dancer back to Britain - Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Her fears were quickly assuaged by her first encounter with Daniels. “I’d arrived for work early, so I was sitting on a wall outside the rehearsal studio in Shepherd’s Bush. Paul was early too – we were both very punctual people – and he walked up holding the sort of tray cigarette girls used to carry, but his was full of tricks.”

At 5ft 5in and already receding at the temples, Daniels wasn’t classically handsome but, says McGee, “There was an immediate chemistry – we made each other laugh.”

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Was it love at first sight? “With Paul I felt it, but because he was pushing me away all the time, I thought it would never be. I’m not sure I thought, ‘This is the one,’ but now that I’m older, I think I did fall in love with him immediately.”

At the time, Daniels was 40 and McGee half his age, but they dated on and off for years after they first met. “Paul was very aware that I was 20 years younger than him, so though we worked together and he’d take me to the odd opening night or Magic Circle banquet, he would always say: ‘Go and find somebody your own age.’ He had girlfriends, I had boyfriends, and we were jealous of each other, but he would say: ‘You’re far too young for me.’”

In Great Yarmouth, their double act proved such a crowd-pleaser that when Daniels was offered his own prime-time slot by the BBC in 1979, McGee became his full-time glamorous assistant, with Daniels starting to refer to her as “the lovely Debbie McGee”.

Off stage, their occasional dalliances had turned into a full-blown relationship by the time McGee was 27, but the couple kept the romance hidden for another two years. Daniels proposed once McGee reached what he felt was the more respectable age of 29, and the first time the public heard they were together was when the pair announced they had married.

Despite being criticised in the press because of their age gap, McGee has no regrets. “We were just so drawn together,” she says. Long before Daniels became ill, the couple had talked frankly about what the future might hold. “Paul was 20 years older than me, so the likelihood was that he would go first,” McGee reveals. “He would always say: ‘I know that you’ll carry on, and you’ll be all right.’ I think he would be very proud that I kept going, and that I don’t sit crying at home. I have my moments, but I don’t allow his death to define me.”

McGee says the couple were ‘just so drawn together’, despite criticism of their 20-year age gap - Ken Lennox/Mirrorpix/Getty ImagesLife after death

Despite achieving her wish for Daniels to spend his final days at home, rather than in a hospice, his wife was left with ghosts to exorcise after he died. “One of the first things I did was redecorate our bedroom,” admits McGee, who still lives in their home in Wargrave, Berkshire. “Paul died in there, so to feel comfortable I needed to change it. I got new curtains, a quilt for the bed, even a new mattress, so it wasn’t always reminding me of his death.”

Rather than stepping back from her commitments to come to terms with her sudden loss, McGee doubled down on her workload. She was back on air with her Sunday morning show for Radio Berkshire just days after Daniels’s death, contacted Brain Tumour Research to express an interest in working with the charity, and soon became a recurring panellist on Loose Women. “Probably because I was younger, I knew I had to create a life for myself, though at first, I didn’t know which way to swim.

“Literally the day after Paul died, I started writing lists of things I could do, like after-dinner speaking, thinking about companies I could contact and learning more tricks that I could incorporate,” she adds. “I wasn’t stupid – I knew Paul was the magician, he was the one who knew all the clever stuff. I’d looked at people like Morecambe and Wise and Little and Large – when one person in a double act stopped working or died, the other one’s career rarely kept going.”

This initial busyness – and the fact that her sister Donna lived with her for the first year after Daniels’s death – meant McGee had something of a delayed response to being widowed. “About 18 months after Paul died was when it really hit me, after I stopped working as much,” she explains. “I was anxious about who would look after me if I lived to be old – things I’d never worried about in my life. So I contacted a friend who is a grief counsellor.”

“He told me that if you sit at home every day crying, your grief will stay big, but if you take baby steps to create a life around that grief, then you will cope. That’s what I’ve done. You have to find another purpose, and you have to accept you’re on your own.”

It was her stint on Strictly Come Dancing in the autumn of 2017 that McGee credits with allowing her to truly believe she could be happy again. She and her partner, Giovanni Pernice, wowed the judges with a tango to the Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling that received a perfect score of 40. The duo came second in the grand final, and McGee stood by Pernice when, in 2023, Sherlock star Amanda Abbington quit the show, accusing the professional dancer of physical aggression, verbal bullying and harassment – claims that were only partly upheld by an internal BBC investigation. When the complaint first emerged, McGee posted a photo of herself with Pernice on the show with the caption: “Happy memories. Giovanni and I had the best of times on Strictly.”

McGee with dance partner Giovanni Pernice on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017 - Guy Levy/PA

Those months on the show helped McGee believe she still had a place in the entertainment industry even without her husband by her side. “From the day of diagnosis, your life changes, and it’s devastating for the person who is ill, but it is devastating for all their friends and family,” she says. “But life does go on. I am really happy, despite this chunk of me – of Paul – that’s gone.”

The intervening years of grief haven’t been without their troubles. Shortly after Daniels died, his eldest son, Paul Daniels Jr, accused her of cheating him out of his £1.5m inheritance by closing The Paul Daniels Magic Party Shop in Wigan, which he ran, after it was left to her in her husband’s will. The rift has since healed, with the pair joining McGee and the rest of the family to scatter Daniels’s ashes on the fifth anniversary of his death.

Then, in 2019, McGee fought a secret battle with breast cancer after a routine mammogram revealed two small tumours in her left breast. They were, thankfully, easily removed and required no follow-up treatment.

Despite the decade that now separates her from Daniels’ death, there are still some things McGee finds too upsetting to face. “Magic is a trigger,” she admits. “I get invited to lots of magic conventions around the world, but going to see other magicians is really hard. I can talk about Paul until the cows come home, but I can’t bear to think of him walking on stage.”

McGee secretly underwent treatment for breast cancer in 2019 after a routine mammogram revealed two small tumours - Clara Molden

After a stellar run of 15 years, The Paul Daniels Magic Show finally ran out of steam, with the BBC cancelling it in 1994. But Daniels and McGee continued performing magic on stage and on cruise ships. Having achieved cult status, by the late Noughties the couple were constantly approached to appear on panel shows and reality TV, from The X Factor: Battle of the Stars to Celebrity Wife Swap, as well as becoming staples of the Christmas panto scene.

McGee has continued to work in television, becoming a familiar face on Countdown, and continues to appear on comedy panel shows alongside the likes of Jimmy Carr, Sam Campbell and the rapper and presenter Big Narstie, who has described McGee as his celebrity crush.

“It’s really flattering that they still want me on their shows,” she says. “Mostly I’m old enough to be their grandmother. When I was on Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back, we did a very funny piece where I had to drive around dressed as James May – it was hysterical.”

Yet McGee still has the odd occasion when she doesn’t want to get up in the morning. “If I have a really bad day and wake up really missing Paul, I’ll go and spend the day with Mum and we’ll go to the cinema. Or I’ll go and do something for someone else, and that, more than anything, really helps.”

This includes throwing her energy into charity work. Brain Tumour Research announced McGee as its new patron on Friday July 10th, with her first duty being to lead the charity’s flagship Walk of Hope fundraiser at Chatsworth in September. “There’s been no advance in treatment in the decade since Paul died – glioblastoma remains incurable,” she says. “In fact, there’s been no change in treatment since 2005, and I’m horrified. I just think there must be nobody in government who has known somebody who has had a brain tumour.

McGee, pictured with her close friend Vicki Michelle, has become a patron of Brain Tumour Research

“Other cancers get so much funding, but despite brain tumours being the biggest cancer killer in people under 40, they receive only 1 per cent of the available research funding. Until Paul died, I knew nothing about the stats, but they’re devastating. I want to help change that.”

The politicians who control the budgets had better watch out – behind the positive exterior, there’s a steely determination to McGee. “There isn’t anything I’ve done that I think Paul wouldn’t have expected me to do,” she says.

“An attitude of gratitude is a good thing. It’s very easy to say: ‘I’ve lost my husband, and I’m all alone.’ No. What I had for all those years, some people never get. We didn’t divorce because he didn’t love me any more – Paul loved me up until the day he died. How amazing is that? That’s a big part of what keeps me going.”

For more information go to Brain Tumour Research. Debbie McGee: A Magical Life (Mirror Books, £22) is out on October 8. Preorder on Amazon

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”