I dont know if this is available on BBC Iplayer but if it is its well worth a look. He was the kind of person you would have loved to have had as your grandad when you were a kid. And even battling cancer and multiple strokes his only worry was that his son wouldnt let him perform anymore.
Last night, we met the Great Omani, an escapologist, whose everyday name was Ron Cunningham. We saw him first doing a perilous balancing act on a cliff. Then, tied up, he set himself on fire and - yes - escaped.
In the present day, the Great Omani was 92 and being followed around by a South Korean television crew. I particularly liked the lead female journalist: she was very strict about what she wanted him to say, and getting Omani's pub landlord to introduce him with sufficient bravura, but she was horrified when it came to the money shot. She wanted him to do his dangerous stunts - walking on shattered glass - and then looked terrified when he did. Her startled, guttural wail (“Naooohhhhhh”) was more alarming than the stunt.
“I'm still the oldest stuntman,” Ron averred, and he wanted to perform a last stunt. But this seemed unlikely: he was confined to bed and wearing dark glasses after a stroke. If the Great Omani wasn't colourful enough, there was also his son David, who made a slitting of the throat motion behind his father's back. For years, David had been his dad's stunt organiser and carer.
The vintage film showed him, with the same look of weariness and irritation, trussing him up or setting him alight in a field. “I love showbusiness and he's against it,” Omani said. There was love and something like loathing simmering here; they were like Steptoe and Son. Daniel Vernon, who filmed, directed and produced the film, also oversaw a previous Wonderland which featured another father (a widowed farmer) and son curiously yolked together; both relationships coloured and scored by sadness and warmth.
The Great Omani recovered a little and went to the pub to be roped up and set on fire again. It went wrong, and instead of escaping Omani was charred, though not unbowed. “It got a bit out of control,” Ron said. “It was just a bit on the slow side, but all in all I think that went pretty well.” The Great Omani's father was a wine importer and, as he stubbed out a cigar on his tongue, he revealed he had been “a backwards child” who had always wanted to make his mark. He would have been a “useless waster” had he not become “the world's oldest stuntman”.
David stayed in the kitchen watching television, while his dying father lay in bed. “If I could do one last stunt, David...” Ron said wistfully.
“You can't even hold a glass, Dad,” David replied, who confessed he had “had enough”.
Ron's health rallied again, so he set fire to his cap outside the pub to a crowd of cheering fans. A gorgeous puppy called Jack arrived who lay on Ron's bed and bit his arm and chewed the phone cord as he called the newspapers to make sure their obituarists were primed. Little scrappy Jack jumped on the undertaker lady who Ron winningly flirted with. Ron said he found it a “big mystery” that after an active life he should be confined to bed, unable to move.
Ron died, and the funeral was big, with a police escort; Great Omani obituaries ran all over the world. We saw Ron in his coffin. “God rest you, daddo,” David said, free at last but also somehow lost. Ron had written an epitaph: “They put Omani in his box/They're using nails instead of locks/But at his funeral don't despair/The chances are he won't be there.”
