Cilla Black: 'I thought, "If the plane crashes - great"'

Cilla Black – singer, presenter, OBE and firm fixture in the nation’s heart – is talking about life in the Sixties. It was an era, she says, laughing, that may well have “swung” more for others than it did for her. In those heady days of free love and “funny tobacco”, Cilla lost her virginity to Bobby Willis, the one and only love of her life – and never even pretended to inhale.

“One evening I was at Brian Epstein’s flat,” she recalls, talking about her manager who also shaped the career of her mates, The Beatles. “The Moody Blues were there and they started handing round this thing on a pin. It’s called a spliff, isn’t it?” she says, disapprovingly, and in an accent that’s still undiluted Scouse.

“At the time, I was a good Catholic girl and I didn’t even smoke. I thought, 'How unhygienic is that – everyone taking a puff? When it came to me, I couldn’t wait to hand it on. But one of the Moody Blues looked across and said, 'Hang on everyone… there’s a stranger in our midst.’

“I didn’t know how to react, but Bobby did. He said, 'Come on, girl, get your coat. We’re going!’ ”. She laughs. “We weren’t exactly what you’d call rock ’n’ roll, were we?”

Still, the duo’s story is fascinating – so much so that it forms the basis of Cilla, a three-part ITV biopic, which we’re here in a London hotel to talk about. No spliffs in sight today. Cilla’s poison is champagne, dispensed with great largesse. “Cheers,” she twinkles happily.

Perhaps because she lived so piously in her youth, at 71 she now states her intention to grow old “as disgracefully as possible”. She refuses, for instance, to wear the hearing aid that everyone tells her to. Why? “Because I hate it,” she beams.

It would also ruin the effect of today’s stylish get-up – black dress, tailored white jacket, high heels. It was the look she always favoured on screen, too, when she was supplying us with a “lorra lorra” laughs in Saturday and Sunday night shows such as Blind Date and Surprise, Surprise.

During that time she was reputedly the highest-paid female presenter in the history of British television, although it’s the career that preceded it, as a singer, that she’s keen to discuss.

“One of the things that I love about the drama is that younger people who’ve only ever known me from my TV work will be able to see that I was a pop singer first. Really, it feels as though I had two entirely separate careers.”

The drama, set in the Sixties, deals with that first incarnation, with Sheridan Smith as Cilla, while Aneurin Barnard plays Bobby. When we first meet the duo, it’s the height of the Merseybeat era. Bobby is a baker with the gift of the gab and Cilla (born Priscilla White) is a typist who moonlights as a hat-check girl at the Cavern Club, but dreams of being a singer.

Swiftly snapped up by Epstein, she is soon sharing the bill with The Beatles, and like them signs to Parlophone, where George Martin produces her chart-topping hits Anyone Who Had a Heart, You’re My World and Alfie.

“I owe a lot to Brian and George, of course. But I could never have achieved any of it – or the TV career that followed – without Bobby. At the beginning, he used to drive me around Liverpool to all the clubs in his Crawford’s Biscuits van, and later in my career he was the one who did all the bargaining for me. If I was the highest-paid presenter on TV, it was all down to Bobby because I never really knew or cared about the money side of things. He was my mentor and my best mate. I did everything that he told me because I trusted him completely, and he was always right.

“The drama is as much about him as it is about me, maybe even more so. And if he were still alive, he’d be chuffed. Wherever he is now, he’ll be looking down and saying, 'I finally made it! I’m a star after all.’ ”

Yet their relationship could be as combative as it was constant. “Bobby was a great singer and songwriter in his own right, and on one occasion, when he was visiting one of the record companies on my behalf, they only offered him a contract,” she laughs, still outraged by the effrontery.

“I had to issue an ultimatum because it was a case of the ego has landed and there wasn’t room for two of them in our relationship. I wanted to be the one that sang and was famous, and I knew that Bobby wouldn’t be any good on stage and would have hated it. His job was to tell me what to do, not to do it for himself. So I put my foot down. I’m convinced now that if he’d said yes to that contract, we’d have split up. I don’t think our relationship could have stood it.”

The drama is also, at times, an unflinching portrayal of Cilla’s iron determination to succeed at the expense of everything else in her life. “I wouldn’t have been happy with a whitewash.

“There was hardly anything I wanted to change,” she says, “but I did want Jeff [Pope, the writer] to be really careful about Brian Epstein. Of course, with hindsight, he was gay. But at the time we didn’t have that word and I wouldn’t have known what it meant if we did. I didn’t know Brian was a homosexual – in fact, I fancied him. But then, I fancied George Martin, too. Not that I ever did anything about it. I was always faithful to Bobby.”

When Bobby died in 1999 from lung cancer, aged 57, it emerged that in their 30-year marriage, the couple had spent only four nights apart – one for the birth of each of their children, Robert, Ben, Jack and Ellen, a premature daughter who died at two days old.

“I wanted to call her after my favourite Aunt Nelly, but when Bobby registered her birth he named her Helen. I was so upset that he drove straight back to the register office in Coventry and had it altered. It mattered to me – so it mattered to Bobby. He was that kind of man.”

After his death, she sank into despair. “I was only 56, and without Bobby I felt so alone. Before I used to be terrified of flying, but his death cured me. For a while afterwards, I couldn’t wait to get on a plane. I thought, 'If the plane crashes, great.’ I wanted something to take me now.”

In the early days, she hoped she might find love again. “But it didn’t happen, and over time I’ve become quite happy in my own company. I’m alone, but not lonely, and no one could really take Bobby’s place.”

Meeting Sheridan Smith and Aneurin Barnard for dinner at Le Caprice before filming started, she says, was an emotional moment. “I took one look at Aneurin and said, 'Hello, Bobby!’ because he looked so like him. As for Sheridan, I immediately started calling her 'Little Cilla’, she seemed the perfect choice to play me.

“But God only knows how she managed to belt those numbers out while wearing the teeth,” she adds, referring to the prosthetics used to capture her trademark dentistry. “It’s amazing.”

Cilla’s friends have always been there for her. When Ellen died, Jimmy Tarbuck was the first to phone. “I wanted to just stay at home and hide. But he insisted on taking me out, showing me that life goes on.”

And after Bobby’s death, it was to her friend Cliff Richard’s vineyard in Portugal that she retreated. “I was on the phone to Cliff just yesterday, in fact,” she says, her face clouding over. Not that she’ll be drawn on the recent police raid of his home or the allegations surrounding a sex-abuse claim. “I’ll be putting out a statement about that,” she says, and two days later she does, expressing her shock and championing his innocence. “I am positive the allegations are without foundation.”

Earlier in the year, she boldly stated that she hoped to die before the age of 75, but is singing a different tune now. “At the time I was thinking of my poor mum who died at that age, crippled with osteoporosis. Her head was permanently bent on to her shoulder and she could do nothing for herself. I was really saying I couldn’t face ending up like that. But it’s four years away now, and I feel good.”

She stays young by spending time with her adored grandchildren – Max, 10, and Lana, seven – and keeps in shape with an exercise bike in her living room in Buckinghamshire. “I get on it and watch Coronation Street at the same time. So it’s a double whammy – pain and pleasure rolled into one.”

She claims that she couldn’t be lured back to television – she last presented a show in 2009. “Aren’t I entitled to a break? I worked so hard all my life.”

She will, though, take part in this year’s Comic Relief Bake Off – indeed, her next-door neighbour is Mary Berry herself. “I’ve been round there for lunch, but it hasn’t rubbed off on me. My idea of baking is buying a ready-make cake mix and throwing in an egg. Mary won’t be impressed.”

Still, she’s already eyeing the competition. “Joanna Lumley’s taking part, so none of us stands a chance. She’s a woman who turned her bra into a pair of slippers on a desert island, for God’s sake.”

Every year for the past decade, she has been approached by Strictly Come Dancing, too. “But I’ve always turned them down. No 'oldie’ has ever won that competition and they’re not about to now. I don’t like entering things I don’t stand a chance of winning.”

She’s not keen on watching “oldies” on the box either. “I’d much rather see Justin Bieber’s face than… oh, don’t make me mention names! And the young presenters now – the talented ones, anyway – are fantastic. I’m flattered that Holly Willoughby and Davina McCall said they modelled themselves on me. What a compliment.”

It’s a compliment, too, she says, that Jeff Pope decided to make a biopic about her because “normally that only happens when you’re dead”.

Cilla read the scripts at her holiday home in Barbados and then spoke to Pope on the phone. “I said, 'Jeff, congratulations on a fabulous script!’ And he said, 'Well, Cilla, you’ve had a fabulous life.’”

'Cilla’ is on ITV1 from September 15