Cliff Richard 'plied Cilla Black and Paul O'Grady with booze' on 'uneasy' vineyard trip

Sir Cliff met Black on Top of the Pops during the Sixties, when she had released “two wonderful number ones” – Anyone Who Had a Heart and You’re My World. 

They bumped into one another multiple times over the years at various functions and later she “became a great friend” to him, when they both lived in Barbados. 

Black bought an apartment there, months before her husband Bobby Willis died of lung and liver cancer at a London hospital in 1999, and soon after the two bonded.

Sir Cliff claimed to have become her “chauffeur” because they were regularly invited to the same parties and he grew to “love Cilla’s company”.

He “was in awe” of her music and was impressed that she was able to make the jump to TV, where she became one of the nation’s most beloved figures.

Black’s shows included Blind Date and Surprise Surprise, where her synonymous catch phrase a “lorra lorra laughs” became well known.

When Sir Cliff quizzed her about her matchmaking abilities, she confessed to having spied on the hopeful daters as they rehearsed their answers for the show.

She died from a stroke at the age of 72, which her autopsy report concluded had followed a fall at her Spanish holiday home, in Estepona, in 2015.

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“Did you know he’s got a vineyard? So he just plies you with booze.”

O’Grady was known to have enjoyed the wilder side of life with Black in the past and that they partied in spots less-than-befitting of celebrities.

He said: “Cliff, I used to go into quite dicey nightclubs with her in New York. I’d say, ‘Cilla give us the Tom’ meaning the jewellery.

“Then all the jewellery would come off and I’d have like a million pounds worth of jewellery in my pocket.”

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