Cilla Black funeral: ‘Ta-ra girl, see you on life’s highway’

“Ta-ra girl, I’ll see you on life’s highway,” comedian Paul O’Grady said, thanking Cilla Black for all the good times they shared as he said goodbye to the much-loved singer and TV presenter at her funeral.

Thousands of fans and mourners packed the streets outside St Mary’s Church in the Woolton suburb of Liverpool and celebrities including Tom Jones, Cliff Richard and Andrew Lloyd-Webber joined Black’s friends and family to remember a young woman who found fame in the halcyon days of British pop in the 1960s and went on to become one of the nation’s favourite TV presenters.

While the shock of her sudden death on August 1 at the age of 72 left many still raw, O’Grady had guests in tears of laughter as he regaled them with stories of the capers they got up to during their decades-long friendship.

“It is so right that she has come home today, because she was a true daughter of London, I mean Liverpool — sorry Cilla — and Scottie Rd was never far away,” he told the congregation.

“She was a great friend. She was full of fun. She was a wonderful woman. She was talented. She was so witty. She adored family. She loved her sons. She loved her grandchildren. She was so proud that she came from Scottie Rd.”

There were chuckles as he said: “I am just so grateful that she allowed me into her whirlwind of a life and we spend nearly two decades together hellraising — if you pardon the expression.”

O’Grady told of how he broke his nose in a jacuzzi while they holidayed in Barbados and she accompanied him to hospital, he with a bag of sprouts pressed to his face and she with a denim skirt on and nursing a cold, rushing back and forth to the toilet after taking a water tablet. “We looked like something out of Shameless,” he recalled.

Finishing his tribute to her, O’Grady said: “I loved her dearly. She was just such a great friend. I do not know what I am going to do really — the light went off a couple of weeks ago and it has not gone back on yet. I am just going to miss her so much.

“Cilla, I would just like to say, thanks for all the fun, thanks for all the laughs — ta-ra girl, I will see you on life’s highway.”

Comedian Jimmy Tarbuck called her “Liverpool’s Cinderella”, saying: “If you wrote that story, that’s Cilla Black’s life.”

“She was the first lady of showbusiness. To be born a lady is an accident; to die one is an achievement.”

Cliff Richard remembered Black as “our greatest TV presenter, possibly of all time”. He said: “I can’t think of Cilla in the past tense, it just seems outrageous. There are just some people that you always think will be there. You forget how much people loved her.”

Black’s coffin was carried from the church to the sound of The Beatles’ ‘The Long And Winding Road’. Her body was then driven away to be laid to rest at a private ceremony in Allerton Cemetery alongside her parents, a red scarf tied to one of the hearse’s wing mirrors.