It’s fair to say that there’s a lorra lorra love about for the late, great, queen of Blind Date, Cilla Black. Her son Robert Willis joined Ryan Tubridy to talk about his beloved mum and to tell Ryan about the new musical he’s producing about her life.
Definitely not overly concerned with being PC, Robert said his mum was one of those people who called it as it was: "She kind of said whatever came into her head at the time, which more often than not was very funny, rightly or wrongly!"
Music entrepreneur Brian Epstein, "the man who brought the Beatles to the world", gave Cilla her first big break and she wasn’t long in soaring up the pop charts, blazing a trail for female voices to follow.
"He sincerely loved her and believed in her. When someone believes in you, it lets you achieve something you couldn’t necessarily be able to do. They achieved some great things together."
After Brian’s untimely death in 1967, a TV contract for Cilla was found in his room.
"As a pop singer it was harder for women as well, and he saw that that could be a direction for her to go in," said Robert. Thankfully, she did. "She was the first and the youngest woman to have her own prime time TV show and (she) broke down a lot of doors for women in TV."
Following a promising start, Blind Date took off and the rest is TV history, as was Cilla’s resignation from the show which was delivered live on air, much to the surprise of, well, everybody!
"The right thing for her was to tell the public first, for her to do it on her terms and not have it leaked in a newspaper… In some respects, it was unprofessional, she didn’t play by the rules, but that was her, you know? It was on her terms, otherwise, it wasn’t worth doing."
Robert says his mum found the ageing process difficult to take.
"I think very much in her heart and in her head, she was incredibly young… She didn’t age well… Post my dad, her kind of thing that she enjoyed doing was being able to jump on a plane, go to a party, go to an opening, and she was finding that extremely hard… In her 60s, she was out clubbing til 3 in the morning all over the place and I was like 'Blimey, how can you do that!' As soon as she hit 70, it just caught up with her. She found it very hard to sort of accept."
While Robert is heartbroken to lose his mum whom he loved and worked with, he’s proud to be collaborating on Cilla The Musical which you can catch at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre February 6th-10th.
