Paul Sanders enjoyed a varied career in showbusiness, spanning 50 years and involving entertainments from music to variety, pantomime, theatre and circus, and even acquatic spectacles.
He worked for Henry Morgan’s Willesden recording studios in the 1960s, and was associated with the chart toppers Blue Mink and much later arranged the tours of the group the Hollies.
In the 1970s he was part of the BBC television team under Michael Hurll which produced the popular Seaside Special shows, a mixture of circus and variety, which brought him into a lasting friendship with the circus owner Gerry Cottle. Later he managed Billy Smart’s Circus when it toured and was revived in the 1990s. He also managed a tour of The Moscow State Circus for the European Entertainment Corporation.
As a producer, theatre agent, promoter and company manager, he also worked with the comedian Jim Davidson, arranged tours for children’s entertainments by Sooty and Sweep and Basil Brush, and was involved with stars such as Steven Mulhern, Danny La Rue and Darren Day at pantomimes in Croydon, Ipswich and Dunstable. He had also been tour manager for not only Jim Davidson but for the American singer Tony Bennett, and for a couple of years worked with Mal Ford on tours for groups such as Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath behind the Iron Curtain. As a director in Ford’s company, Mal Ford-Manex, he was involved in the show Ad-Panasum which was screened in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Cuba and Africa. He had also worked with the Rolling Stones on a series of concerts at Earls Court in London and managed George Baines’s famous Aqua Circus at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth.
In later years, he was again associated with Baines’s daughter, Jan, who has produced for years the annual water spectacle as part of the Hippodrome Circus in Great Yarmouth.
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He is survived by his wife, Wendy.
Paul Sanders, producer, agent and impresario, was born on November 7, 1942. He died of cancer on March 12, 2010, aged 67