Cilla Black’s Christmas classic version of “all night long”!

I found this clip a couple of years ago. It’s absolutely fantastic…

Jesus Wept… gone but never forgotten…

I’m embarrassed for her.

Only the Brits could make such a huge star out of someone so untalented

She really is the gift that keeps on giving, our Cilla.

I swear her mother jumped by beaver with orange teeth.

And viewers didn’t slap her viciously when meeting her in person?

That's what happens when you move from BBC to ITV, dallin'.

No wonder Dionne hated her.

Cilla was just a kid when all of that went down, to be fair. Bacharach was the one who let two singers record "Anyone Who Had a Heart", pitting them against each other. He's the prick, IMO. Brian Epstein had a hand in this, too.

I prefer the Pointer Sisters

R4 Seriously!

It looks like an outtake from a St Jude Hospital appeal Evwywun is soooo adoorabwle. Both the singing and dancing are execrable. Didn't Cilla have a guide vocal from Dionne to mimic?

She was a Cavern Club favourite and rode the wave with The Beatles with Epstein as her agent. Her more...erm....localised talent was laid bare for all to see after Epstein died, and she got a pity contract with the BBC. She went full cheese once the contract BBC contract was over. She had kids, then got a contract with the more lowbrow, working class ITV that pretty much lasted for the rest of her life.

There was also a tempt to break America with Atlantic City gigs while Epstein was still alive, but it flopped and she came back home.

Miserable scouser cunt. I hope Satan is fucking her hole with a red hot poker

Cilla Black - Anyone Who Had A Heart (Live)

CUNT

Yep, she was awful to the "little people" when the cameras were off and was a notorious cokehead. She had terrible friends later in life too. Mean old media queens like Paul O'Grady. The rumour is she died falling through a glass table while high as a kite.

Her only US "hit."

[quote]The rumour is she died falling through a glass table while high as a kite.

I hope it wasn't while visiting Danny Thomas.

unwatchable and embarrassingly bad

The ending made it a classic - she dancingly open the door and then kick all the kids out of her house!

Her legacy is a camp joke, and there's 50 years of cringe worthy archival footage that is constantly unearthed by the kids on Tiktok and such.

Ill conceived, and a time capsule of the rotten part of the 1980s.

Didn’t she have a talk show too?

[Quote]The ending made it a classic - she dancingly open the door and then kick all the kids out of her house!

For the few who could make it till the end

That awful vid gives me lorra lorra laughs.

Cilla Black is a distant memory to me from The British Invasion phenomena.

I detested that ugly, obnoxious and loud slag.

This may be the fakest looking thing I’ve ever seen. WHY was she so popular in England?! What a joke!

Awww...look at Our Cilla from Scottie Road!

Actually she was on the Ed Sullivan Show a number of times. I sort of lump her together with Sandie Shaw another no-talent they attempted to foist on us. Not everyone could be Petula Clark.

Our Cilla had never seen so many minorities gathered in one place before!

I am not sure if R14 and R19 are the same person, but you both need to fuck off away from here and do some proper research before spouting such crap.

She filled up TV schedules with this shit for years. I never understood why, because she was dreadful. Maybe the really talented performers were too expensive.

Eat shit, r35. Cilla was awful to people, and those who worship at her altar are past it ITV-loving trash.

And I say this as someone who LOVES what a fucking camp joke she is.

R37 everyone knows that Cilla Black was a huge cunt, but there is no need to make up crap about her.

She did not have a TV contract until the end of her life. Her contract with LWT ran from 84 to 93, she had two hugely successful shows, Surprise Surprise and Blind Date which ran for those years, and she was the highest paid female performer on British TV. After that she had no contract, she worked on a couple of pilots which went nowhere and died in 2015.

As awful as she was Cilla was the biggest selling British female recording artist of the 60’s in the UK.

She was not a notorious coke head, that is just made up crap. There is enough to dislike about the dreadful woman without having to make up lies.

Over-sentimental denial. She's a regional favourite who got lucky with Epstein, nothing mor, and dined out in it for the rest of her life. It's not our fault you took her too seriously. She was not a talent. She was your neighbour who had somewhat of a voice and knew the Beatles.

It looked like there was fake snow on the ground and she sent the weirdly contorting kids outside without any coats on. Did nobody realize how bizarre this looked at the time?

[quote] Mean old media queens like Paul O'Grady.

Sad to hear that he was a mean bitch. I love Lily Savage.

That's the point. A lot of this happened because Colla and many others were punching above their weight. This is what 70's Cher would look like to us if Cher wasn't talented.

R40 do some fucking research for gods sake, yes she was awful but she had huge success in music and TV from the early 60’s until the early 90’s.

You obviously have the internet, there is no excuse for you being so ignorant.

Now go find a thread were you actually understand the subject being discussed.

Oh luv, I do. I just don't overidealise her and get that her fame is a fluke that she used to lord over the very people who loved her. She got ITV-level budgets for several decades, leaving a camp-tastic library that will be mined for decades to come, down to the very last tribute special. She is literally Sontag's definition of earnest kitsch that demonstrates that life is artifice. She's a treasure whom I love, but not a golden one, and not in a way that deludes me into thinking me she was gracious off-camera. It's not my problem that both you and she take yourselves entirely too seriously.

She had one hit in America. In 1964. Calm down, R44.

She was also a close friend of that self-loathing, Thatcher-loving gay Christopher Biggins.

[quote] Biggins has expressed his admiration for former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He wrote in his autobiography that he cried on the day she resigned, saying: "I'm not the most political of people. But I believe in self-reliance and getting on with the job in hand. Margaret had seemed to personify all that. And she had star quality, which of course I loved."[20] In 2014, he said: "I loved John Major, he was charismatic and charming. I’ve always been a Conservative, though I would have voted for John Smith. I hope we have a new Conservative leader making his way to the top now. We need a new man."[21]

[quote] During a 2012 interview on ITV's Loose Women, Biggins said that he believed same-sex marriage should not be legalised, stating that marriage "is for heterosexual couples".[22] When same-sex marriage was introduced in England and Wales in 2014, Biggins attended the "I Do To Equal Marriage" event celebrating it.[23]

This brought back great memories of 1983 and body popping on the dance floor for me. It’s true, in retrospect, we appeared arthritic and palsied, but we were mere mortals approximating Michael Jackson.

R42 Paul O'Grady was lovely, I met him once and there's also many stories of him being decent and down-to-earth. He took the piss out of Cilla for her pretensions

I've heard plenty of stories about them being a pair of nasties when together and the cameras were off, especially with waitstaff and airline staff.

The kids will have come from one of the London stage schools. I used to get the train from Marylebone, and the Sylvia Young stage school was nearby. After a long day at work the last thing you want is a gang of precocious little bastards practicing their high kicks and tap routines on the platform.

R51 they must’ve been cutting classes then, because the dancing was atrocious.

That little boy in the green pants was dancing like he was an epileptic fit.

Cilla was a lorra lorra laughs on my Saturday nights as a little gayboy watching Blind Date.

I recorded her singing Surprise, Surprise at the end of that show and would dance around to it, and recreate her 'Jesus pose' at the end where she held her arms out like she was crucified..

I saw her for the first time while studying abroad in the UK when I caught an episode of Surprise, Surprise, and I mesmerized that someone who looked like her could have a show. I nearly fell over in my chair laughing at the high camp when she got up and sang. I had no idea who she was and how her career started, but it was camptastic love at first sight.

Oh, whatever happened to Our Bob Carolgees?

R20, you’re forgetting this musical masterpiece, which is huge with the kids. Cilla has timeless appeal.

Sheridan Smith did an amazing job as Cilla in a 3-part drama about her rise to fame.

Here she is singing Anyone Who Had A Heart like Our Cilla never did!

It was one of the last good things Sheridan Smith did before she went to seed. She really fucked herself up and lost what could have been a much better career.

What a horrible singer she was.

I’m a gold star gay and even I’ve got a boner.

R61. Surprise! Surprise!

As much as I loved You're My World she couldn't carry a tune very well more than half of the time. She seemed to have got it into her head that she was Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Petula Clark combined. She didn't seem like a very nice person either so her biggest contribution to music may very well have been in 2015 in Spain.

This is the only song I think she sang well, but it still has some screeching moments.