Cliff Richard & Olivia Newton-John – I’m Leaving It All Up To You

She Was There to Promote Her New Single — He Joked He Was Twice Donny Osmond’s Age — and Then They Performed the Donny and Marie Hit Together Anyway

In September 1974, Olivia Newton-John flew to the United Kingdom to promote a record that would change the shape of her career. “I Honestly Love You” had been released in the United States and was climbing toward the number one spot it would eventually occupy for two weeks. In the UK, where Newton-John had established herself through exactly the kind of BBC television exposure that Cliff Richard’s variety series provided, she was booked as a guest on the final series of It’s Cliff Richard — the Saturday night BBC1 show that had been running since 1970 and that had, over the course of its four series, introduced her to a British audience that would remain among her most loyal throughout her career. The episode aired on 28 September 1974. She performed “I Honestly Love You” solo. Then, before changing into a grey trouser suit for a second number together, she and Richard performed something nobody had asked them to record but that suited both of them rather well.

“I’m Leaving It All Up to You” had been at number two on the UK Singles Chart that very month — in the version recorded by Donny and Marie Osmond, whose debut single as a duo it was. The song had a history stretching back further than either Osmond: written and first recorded in 1957 by Don Harris and Dewey Terry — the California duo who performed as Don and Dewey — it had become a number one hit in the United States in November 1963 in the version by Dale and Grace, the Louisiana swamp pop duo who recorded what was essentially an unrehearsed practice take and somehow produced one of the year’s definitive records. That was the week of the Kennedy assassination. A decade later, the Osmonds had reclaimed it as a breezy, harmonically clean vehicle for sibling charm, and it had duly gone back up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Duet Nobody Planned and Both Played Perfectly

Richard’s decision to perform it with Newton-John was transparent in the best possible way. He was, as he noted on the programme, approximately twice Donny Osmond’s age. Newton-John acknowledged she was nearly twice Marie Osmond’s. The gap between the glossy American teenage duo and the two polished British Commonwealth pop veterans doing an impression of them — Richard doing what observers described as a spot-on recreation of Donny’s voice and smile — was precisely the source of the joke, and it landed. The 1974 series of It’s Cliff Richard was the last, produced by Michael Hurll for BBC1, with Alyn Ainsworth conducting the house orchestra. It ran for six episodes on Saturday nights. Pearly Gates and the Nolan Sisters were among the regulars. The format was broader and more relaxed than the earlier series, with episodes running close to an hour. This episode, the sixth, was the series finale.

The relationship between Richard and Newton-John that made the duet work had been built across several years of exactly this kind of television. She had received her first major British television exposure on his BBC shows in the early 1970s, and the professional warmth between them — visible in this performance — was the product of genuine mutual regard rather than contractual proximity. In 1972, she had toured Japan with him; the resulting live album documented a working relationship between two performers who had found a real creative shorthand. By September 1974, with Newton-John about to embark on the period of international superstardom that “I Honestly Love You” announced and that Grease would cement four years later, the It’s Cliff Richard appearance was a chapter closing as much as it was a promotional visit. The BBC variety format that had given them both their television footing was winding down. This performance — relaxed, funny, genuinely musical — is an unusually human document of what it looked like.