It's been a funny life

AMID fields a few miles out of York, just to the north of the middle of nowhere, a sign is screwed to a gatepost. "I live here," it states. "I can make the gate in five seconds. Can you?"

Pictured alongside is a rottweiler.

Fortunately the dog in question is nowhere to be seen at the converted farmhouse.

Instead a much warmer welcome awaits from its owner, Tommy Cannon, tanned, stocky and smiling, and apologising for his clothes. "The days are gone when I dress up for a journalist," he says, explaining he is in the middle of decorating.

The hair is greyer and thinner, but otherwise he seems unchanged from his heyday when Cannon & Ball were one of the biggest draws on television.

Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball's TV domination belongs to a different age. Other than an appearance in a documentary charting the decline of Saturday night telly, and a guest appearance in a sketch show called Revolver, they cannot get close to the box.

So the duo are plotting a different route back to the small screen: they are filming their own DVD and hoping to bag a distribution deal.

Tommy speaks with no bitterness about their disappearance from the schedules. But he laments the quality of modern television, when there are hundreds of channels and nothing on.

"It's hard to relate to anything these days that's on television. They have now got the X-Factor or something. It seems to me it's a show for the panel more than anything else.

"I saw a guy on there who couldn't sing at all. They were just ridiculing him.

"You think to yourself, when television's doing that it's dumbing down. If you talk to most people, they don't want it.

"I'm not saying to people 'don't do alternative; don't do reality'. But we need some variety.

"There's still some good variety around. Bob and I have a joke in our show: the reason you don't see us on TV is we can't cook."

However, Tommy senses a cultural shift. The BBC has been making noises about fewer reality shows and more dramas and comedies.

Although he is a fan of new comic voices such as Peter Kay and Lee Evans, he believes some of the emerging talents are a risk for the prime-time slot on a Saturday evening because of the bad language they rely on in their act.

"People think that swearing is new. It isn't. When we started out there were places called strip clubs you could go and it would be expected that the comic would swear."

But it isn't for family viewing.

In the summer a BBC executive suggested Cannon & Ball take to the Edinburgh Festival fringe, the annual bearpit where scores of stand-ups compete for audiences and reviews.

"We said, what's the point? We'll blow them off stage, and we haven't got anything to prove," Tommy said.

"We have done it all. We've made a movie, we were 13 years on television, we had our own Christmas specials.

"Our audience at the Grand in Blackpool will be from 12-year-olds right through to grans and grandads.

"All they seem to know at the Edinburgh fringe is the F-word, which is not in our vocabulary."

He is dismayed by the way this has coarsened modern life. "You go walk in the city centre of York and hear couples with young children using the F-word. That's worrying. I don't ever remember my mam using that sort of language in front of me."

But there was another reason for Cannon & Ball to turn down Edinburgh. "Comedy clubs hold 80 to 100 people. We entertain a thousand, 1,500 or 2,000."

Life, he believes, is coming full circle. "The alternatives have now become mainstream and we are now the alternatives."

Bobby and Tommy did live the showbiz wild life. Both have con-fessed to drinking and womanising while on the road in the Seventies and Eighties, and Tommy loved to gamble too. They also fell out in and refused to talk to one another when not on stage.

"We had our ups and downs, Bob and I. We had four years of - what can I say? - it weren't a case of not speaking, it was a case of we were very much going our own ways.

"When we had done the TV show, I would be at one side of the bar and Bobby would be at the other side of the bar. He'd go to wherever he had to go and I went to wherever I had to go.

"It looked like everything in the garden was rosy with the guest stars."

God played a large part in their becoming best friends again. In 1985, Bobby told Tommy he had found Jesus. Tommy at first thought it was "baloney" but followed him into the faith seven years later.

"It is a faith, not a religion. People seem to think because you have a faith you become a religious nut. It's faith. It helps me through life."

Today Tommy's life could hardly be further removed from the showbiz clich of restaurant openings and first night parties. His home, out Kelfield way, is spacious, tastefully decorated and "about as far away from showbusiness as I can possibly be," he says. "It's fantastic."

Fate brought him and his wife Hazel here many years ago. They wanted to move out of London and both favoured Bournemouth in Hazel's own county of Hampshire.

Then, at the end of a summer season at Scarborough's Futurist Theatre, Tommy took a phone call from someone suggesting they looked at a property in the sticks between York and Selby. He dismissed the idea; Hazel said a viewing would kill time.

"As soon as she saw the house, she said 'I want it'. I was absolutely gobsmacked."

After a lot of DIY to bring the house up to scratch - he's quite handy, this former welder from Oldham - they seem utterly content here.

They love the locals, who never give away their location to snoopers. And the place, with 12 acres of land, is a family haven for the couple and their children, Kelly, 13, Zoe, 11, and eight-year-old Luke.

Tommy's first marriage went awry under the pressure of a life on the road. He is still friends with his ex-wife and his two grown-up daughters.

But second time around he was determined to be a good husband and father. That stems partly from his own childhood: his father left home when he was seven, and the only child then had to adjust to a stepdad and his four children moving in.

His mum would send him to the top of the street to meet with his dad: "Sometimes he was there and sometimes he wasn't".

After every show Tommy drives back to be there for his kids the next morning - even when he is playing Torquay, or doing weeks in panto at Wolverhampton.

Although he is concerned that all three children are "entertainment mad" - "I know the pitfalls, I know the agonies" - Tommy, 66, is determined to keep on rocking with Bobby.

"I am never going to retire. Neither is Bobby. We see ourselves going on with zimmer frames.

"We think that's a very funny image."

40 years in the biz

- Thomas Derbyshire was born in Oldham in 1938. His first ambition was to play football at Wembley, which he achieved in 1988 in an all-star friendly match before the Liverpool v Wimbledon cup final

- Fellow welder Bobby persuaded him to take up the drums and accompany his singing in the pubs. When Bobby first heard Tommy's vocal talents he said: "Forget the drums, we'll both sing"

- They turned professional in 1964, but changed from being singers to comedians after being demoted down the bill at Batley Variety Club. Frankie Vaughan was the headliner, and the bosses didn't want more singers. Besides, comics were paid more

- After two years on the waiting list they got on to Opportunity Knocks in 1969 - and came last. Les Dawson won

- Tommy chose his new surname from rock'n'roll singer Freddie Cannon, then talked Bobby into becoming a Ball. They did the lucrative night club circuit in the Seventies until it was "switched off" - by disco

- A TV executive saw them go down a storm in Nottingham and booked them for Bruce Forsyth's Big Night Out. Then head of LWT Michael Grade saw them and decided to give them a series. The Cannon & Ball Show ran from 1980 to 1992. They made one film, Boys In Blue and had a record-breaking run at the London Palladium

- From the Nineties on they have toured with their live show

Updated: 11:02 Wednesday, September 15, 2004