A few weeks ago I was invited to a reunion at The Central School of Speech and Drama (or Central School of Screech and Trauma as we used to call it) and I must say an old saying of my Grandmother’s sprang to mind, “I’d rather go and boil my head”. You see I went to drama school to ‘do plays’, something I wanted to do ever since I had my ‘theatrical appetite’ whetted by Richard Green of Northern Theatre (hmm, something tells me that last bit doesn’t look too good in print). But in the first two years of drama school all we seemed to do was lie on the floor with a book under our heads reciting John Dunne and when we weren’t doing that we were jumping around pretending to be the animals we’d been ‘observing’ that morning in Regents Park Zoo (yes, sadly, your tax really did go to support me jumping from desk to desk as a meerkat).

Anyway, the point of me telling you all this is because it got me thinking how I started as an actor and I remembered the reason I got my first few jobs was not because I’d studied the Alexander Technique or that I could scuttle across the room with a more than a passing resemblance to an African mongoose, it was because I was a magician. Minder, Pie in The Sky (Series V), A Touch of Frost; in all of these jobs I remember getting on much better with the director at the casting interview after I was asked what I did before I went to drama school. There can’t have been many actors who said, “I was a magician”. I feel very lucky to have been able to make my living from acting over the past ten years (and more recently by writing for television) but it is my association with magic that has provided me with so many great memories and even greater friendships. While planning a recent holiday to Las Vegas I decided to look at a few web sites to see what shows would be on offer. I noticed a special show at The Monte Carlo hotel that had a tremendous line up including Lance Burton (its resident star), The Great Thomsoni, Jeff McBride and Norm Nielsen.One minute led to a couple of hours (as surfing on the internet can) and I found myself on Norm’s web site marvelling at the wonderful original posters he has for sale. I saw a Sorcar poster I remembered admiring in a book years before and wondered if I should treat myself; the holiday would, after all, be during my birthday! I fired off an email to Norm Nielsen immediately asking if it was still for sale and suggesting I could maybe pick up the poster while I was in Vegas (name dropping our President as a mutual friend of course; thanks Eddie!).

The next day I received a very nice email from Norm giving his home number and telling me to give him a call when I got to Vegas. Fast forward a few weeks and I found myself sitting in my hotel room at The Aladdin Hotel (where Elvis was married!) and calling Norm Nielsen! It was, I thought, amazing that I am in a profession where I meet television ‘celebrities’ as a matter of course but there I was getting very excited about calling a magician I had grown up watching on The Paul Daniels Show. I remember as a teenager watching Norm’s act over and over again, I was familiar with the back palm but trying to work out how on earth those cards continued to appear from his empty interlocked fingers nearly wore out the tape. Not only did Norm and Lupe (his charming wife) invite me to their fabulous Las Vegas home to chat about magic and to view his astonishing collection of original posters (most of which are hung in a climatically controlled building adjacent to their house) but he insisted that they pick me up from my hotel and take me back again (they live some forty minutes away from the ‘Strip&rsquo. Where else but in the world of magic would you find such generosity between relative strangers? Acting has been very good to me and something I feel very privileged to call my job but magic will always be my first love. All together now, “aaaaahhhhhhhhh”.