STYLISH
circus maximus
round London, after someone said "do the big places". After all, London's just a lot of villages'.
By 1974 Gerry was famous - with a circus now bearing his name alone, and a deal with the BBC which launched the tea-time variety show Seaside Special. Filmed in the circus and featuring his acts, it was also a showcase for TV regulars like Ken Dodd, Rolf Harris and Cilla Black, plus a variety of DJs. 'Tony Blackburn, David Hamilton, the one with the beard - Dave Lee Travis - and the other one, Noel Edmonds!', says Cottle, slightly misty-eyed at the memory.
In a Britain with only three TV channels this was big-time publicity, so by the late 1970s he was running two shows and pitching as far afield as Bahrain and Oman. But touring Iran just before the revolution wasn't such a success. 'They had curfews at six and our shows started at eight'. The losses it incurred put Cottle out of business for a time, but the 1980s saw him bounce back and prosper again.
He started thinking about no-animal circuses, 'which struggled to start with, because I think we were a bit premature'. And at much the same time he embarked on an eight-week tour of Hong Kong 'and stayed for two years'.
Back home, an apparent change in public tastes away from the tophat-and-sequins of British shows saw Cottle promoting the Moscow State Circus. Today, his daughters run the Cottle Sisters' Circus, then there's the Rock and Roll Circus, which he describes as 'twelve to fifteen weeks in theatres with rock bands and freak acts'.
But while the fun clearly hasn't stopped, Cottle himself hasn't toured for 15 years.
He talks with passion about some of the endearingly old fashioned attractions he's brought to the Wookey Hole caves.
'We've got the mirror maze, with crazy distorted mirrors so you can't find you way out', he says gleefully. 'And a penny arcade with original machines. Nostalgia is good fun so long as you don't ram it down the public's throat'.
Cottle, though, reckons finding people with the traditional skills to support the sort of entertainments he provides, such as sign writers, has become harder. 'You still can't beat the flow and feathered lines of a brush', he says wistfully. And also thinking about keeping skills alive, there's his circus school, currently being set up for the modern equivalents of the adolescent Gerry Cottle to learn the ropes as performers. He's initially recruiting hopefuls from Somerset, and as you might expect, has big plans.
'We're going to get them to stand on each others' shoulders. We want twelve of them on one bike, and football with giant unicycles. There are so many things they can do. We're after fun with entertainment', he says, adding 'And it will be tough, but there will be plenty of opportunities'.
Gerry plans to have them performing in public by April. And although he now claims to have 'settled down a bit', he still clearly enjoys as much as ever the world he dreamed of joining as a boy. 'Sometimes', he says, 'making people happy is more important than what I get paid'.