As the rowdy crowd egged him on to take the stage and make them laugh, Paul Chuckle was desperately fighting back tears. The comic, one half of stand-up duo The Chuckle Brothers, was in the depths of the most crushing grief – that of a dad who had just buried his baby daughter.
Just hours earlier, Paul had been at three-month-old Nicola’s funeral, following her sudden death from a rare liver problem in 1975.
But show organisers cruelly refused to release the brothers from their contract, threatening to pay them nothing if they didn’t complete the fortnight, and the struggling siblings needed the money.
So, on what he calls “the worst day of my life”, Paul returned to his home town of Rotherham to say a final goodbye to Nicola, before