Liverpool Lass

Six years after her death, Cilla Black’s voice is still instantly recognisable, with her distinctive Liverpudlian accent and no nonsense demeanour. A new BBC documentary pays homage to the working class girl of Irish descent who, after a record-breaking singing career, became the most successful female broadcaster Britain has ever produced.

She gave us a “lorra, lorra laughs”, introduced us to “our Graham” and never failed to “surprise, surprise”. It’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about the woman with whom we were all on first name terms.

‘Cilla’ was actually someone else’s mistake. Born Priscilla White in 1943, the publisher of the Mersey Beat Bill Harry, mistakenly called her Cilla Black in a feature. She liked the name and a legend was born.   

She was a grafter. After secretarial school, she took a job as a cloakroom attendant in the famed Cavern Club, determined to find her way into the entertainment business. There she made friends with the Beatles who championed her music career and remained lifelong friends.

The collaboration wasn’t always successful. John Lennon pitched her to Beatles manager Brian Epstein and the group played backing at her first audition. It was a disaster. “I'd chosen to do Summertime, but at the very last moment I wished I hadn't,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I adored this song…but I hadn't rehearsed it with the Beatles and it had just occurred to me that they would play it in the wrong key. It was too late for second thoughts, though. With one last wicked wink at me, John set the group off playing. I'd been right to worry. The music was not in my key and any adjustments that the boys were now trying to make were too late to save me. My voice sounded awful. Destroyed—and wanting to die—I struggled on to the end.”

Epstein refused to sign her but was later persuaded when he saw her in cabaret at a club. She became his first female client in 1963 at just 20. She had a string of UK hits, including Anyone who had a heart, her signature song. She was the best-selling British female recording artist in the UK during the 1960s, releasing a total of 15 studio albums and 37 singles. In 1968 she became the first female artist to have her own TV show on the BBC. Simply called Cilla (she was already a household name) it ran until 1976.

Cilla married Bobby Willis in 1969 and remained happily married until 1999 when Bobby died of lung cancer. They had four children – Robert, Ben, Jack and a baby girl called Ellen who, heartbreakingly, died shortly after birth. It was a terrible loss for Cilla. "I was inconsolable, riddled with guilt, enmeshed in depression from which I was convinced there was no return,” she said.

Family life took over as Cilla’s singing career began to wane in the late 70s. But she bounced back into the public eye in spectacular fashion when she appeared as a guest on the Wogan show in 1983. Everyone suddenly remembered how much she was loved and TV producers desperately began searching for a vehicle to get her back on the screen. The shows Surprise, Surprise (launched in 1984) and Blind Date (launched in 1985) were instant hits. Cilla was now the highest paid female performer on British television.

Despite being a multimillionaire, Cilla never lost her ability to relate to ordinary people. She was everyone’s favourite Aunty - loud, funny, occasionally embarrassing, always down to earth and never afraid to show her vulnerability. 

Her beloved Bobby took over as her manager after Brian Epstein’s death, and, when Bobby died, her son, also called Bobby, began managing her affairs. 

It was Bobby Junior who found his mother dead on her sun terrace at her holiday home in Estepona, Spain in 2015. She had suffered a traumatic head injury after a fall, attributed to the extreme heat of that year. Cilla was just 72.

Her own mother had suffered from osteoporosis and had become a shadow of her former self. “That was my mum’s darkest fear, that the same thing would happen to her,” said Bobby Junior. "So as much of a tragedy as her death was, I think that in some respects she would have chosen to go when she did because for her it was all about having a quality of life."

Despite her early passing, Cilla is still a regular on our TV screens. In 2014, Sheridan Smith played her in a three part dramatisation of her incredible rise to fame.

The new BBC documentary also charts her rise through interviews with friends including friends Christopher Biggins, Gloria Hunniford and Andrew Lloyd-Webber.