The Val Doonican Show Then and Now 2026 | The Man Who Knocked The Beatles Off Number One 😱

At Christmas 1967 a man in a cardigan knocked The Beatles off the top of the British album chart, and the 19 million people who watched The Val Doonican Show had almost no idea what that gentleness had cost him. Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently went to number one on 31 December 1967 and stayed there three weeks, displacing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. A Waterford factory boy in a rocking chair had outsold the biggest band in the world. This is the whole story of The Val Doonican Show then and now, the Saturday night institution that ran from 1965 to 1986, and of the life behind it. We follow Michael Valentine Doonican from Passage Road in Waterford, where his father's death in 1941 ended his schooling at fourteen and sent him into an orange box factory, through seventeen years in The Four Ramblers, the night Anthony Newley told him to go solo, the eight minutes at the London Palladium that made him a star at thirty-seven, and the one million pound contract that took him to ITV in 1970. You will also meet the people around him. Lynnette Rae, the impressionist he married in 1962, two years before fame arrived, and stayed with for fifty-three years. The young Dave Allen, handed a weekly slot that launched him. Bernard Cribbins and Sheila Steafel on the later run, and producer Yvonne Littlewood behind all of it. Where are they now, who is still alive after 61 years, and how did the safest man on British television spend his last years? Val Doonican died on 1 July 2015, aged 88, and where he chose to be buried says everything about him. Tell us in the comments whether the show was on in your house on Saturday nights, and subscribe for more of these lives told properly, from the first job to the last day.