Cannon and Ball received the award for Showbusiness Personalities of the Year at the 1982 Variety Club awards. The 31st annual awards ceremony was held on Tuesday 1st February 1982 at the Hilton Hotel, London, and hosted by Terry Wogan. Highlights were shown on the BBC that evening.
Alongside Cannon and Ball, other award winners included Albert Finney (Film Actor of the year), Diana Rigg (Film Actress of the year), Noel Edmunds (BBC TV Personality of the year), Russ Abbot (ITV TV Personality of the year) and Shakin’ Stevens (Recording artist of the year).
Terry Wogan: The award for show business personality or in this case personalities of the year. They were mates on the factory floor, became a performing partnership, failed abjectly in Opportunity Knocks, went on to break theatre records everywhere. They star in a television series. They’ve only just completed a sell-out season at London’s Dominion Theatre. They’ve also moved into films. And now is a sneak previewed soon to be seen and enjoyed Boys in Blue.
(Clip from The Boys in Blue played)
The show business personalities of the year, Cannon and Ball.
Tommy: Thank you very much. Lord Delfont. Chief Barker, Minister, we would like to just say that it does give us a great honour to accept this award here today. I think that this is one of the most pleasant awards that we could ever agree that you could ever accept to (To Bobby) Shut up. For God’s sake, we both can’t do it at the same time. Can we? Just keep quiet. Right.
Bobby: Sorry.
Tommy: Just keep quiet. I don’t mind who does it as long as you keep your mouth shut.
(To audience) Ladies and Gentlemen it does give us, well, great honour to accept this award, but there’s a lot of people behind the success of Bobby and myself and they’re too numerous to mention, so all we can say is thank you to everybody concerned. Thank you The Variety Club of Great Britain for the award, it’s beautiful. Thank you. And what have you got to say?
Bobby: Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen. Once again, I thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
