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Morecambe
&
Wise
Graham McCann

Copyright

Fourth Estate

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.haprercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Fourth Estate Limited

This edition published in 1999

Copyright © Graham McCann 1998

The right of Graham McCann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Source ISBN: 9781857029116

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780008187552

Version: 2016-05-05

Dedication

To John Ammonds

Great comedy, great wit, makes the ceiling fly off, and suddenly liberates us again as we were when we were much younger and saw no reason not to believe that we could fly, or become someone else, or bound on a trampoline and not come down.

PENELOPE GILLIAT

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: MUSIC-HALL

I Northern Songs and Dances

II Morecambe before Wise

III Wise before Morecambe

IV Double Act, Single Vision

PART TWO: TELEVISION

V A Box in the Corner

VI Running Wild

VII A Brand New Bright Tomorrow?

VIII Two of a Kind

PART THREE: MOVIES

IX American Visions

X The Intelligence Men

XI That Riviera Touch

XII The Magnificent Two

PART FOUR: A NATIONAL INSTITUTION

XIII The Show of the Week

XIV Mass Entertainment

XV Get Out of That

XVI Loose Ends

EPILOGUE

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

List of Performances: Radio, Television, Movies and Records

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Television has shaped us – you can blame it for ‘abbreviated attention span’ and a failure to believe in realities; or you can notice how it promotes a low-level passive surrealism in expectations, and an uncatalogued memory bank for our minds. We may be more like crazed movie editors trying to splice our lives together because of TV. There is a resistance it has bred, as well as a chaos: you can’t have one without the other. And in the end, there is no point in being gloomy or cheerful about it. It’s there, here, without moratorium or chance of reversal.

DAVID THOMSON

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

W. H. AUDEN

It happened one night. It happened, to be precise, at 8.55 p.m. on the night of 25 December 1977, when an estimated 28,835,000 people¹ – more than half of the total population of the United Kingdom – tuned their television sets to BBC1 and spent the next hour and ten minutes in the company of a rather tall man called Eric and a rather short man called Ernie.

It was an extraordinary night for British television in general and for the BBC in particular: 28,835,000 viewers for a single show. It was – at least as far as that catholic and capacious category known, somewhat apologetically, as ‘light entertainment’ was concerned – as close as British television had ever come, in some forty-one years of trying,² to being a genuine mass medium. None of the usual rigid divisions and omissions were apparent in the broad audience of that remarkable night: no stark class bias, no pronounced gender imbalance, no obvious age asymmetry, no generalised demographic obliquities.³ The show had found its way into dense council estates, lofty tower blocks, smart suburban squares and leafily discreet country retreats – it was even watched with uncommon avidity at Windsor Castle, where assembled members of the Royal Family delayed their Christmas dinner until they had seen the show through to its proper conclusion.⁴

It was also, of course, an extraordinary night for the two stars of that show: Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise – by far the most illustrious, and the best-loved, double-act that Britain has ever produced. Exceptionally professional yet endearingly personable, they were wonderful together as partners, as friends, as almost a distinct entity: not ‘Morecambe and Wise’ but ‘Morecambewise’ – one never could see the join. There was Eric and there was Ernie: one of them an idiot, the other a bigger idiot, each of them half a star, together a whole star, forever hopeful of that ‘brand new, bright tomorrow’ that they sang about at the end of each show. True, Eric would often slap Ernie smartly on the cheeks, but that was just a welling-up of applause that had been brought to a head: they clearly thought the world of each other, and the world thought a great deal of them, too.

Their show succeeded in attracting such a massive following on that memorable night because it had, over the course of the previous nine years or so, established, and then enhanced, an enviable reputation for consistency, inventiveness, unparalleled professional polish and, last but by no means least, a strong and sincere respect for its audience. The Morecambe & Wise Show stood for something greater, something far more precious, than mere first-rate but evanescent entertainment; it had come to stand – just as persuasively and as proudly as any earnest documentary or any epic drama – for excellence in broadcasting, the result not just of two gifted performers (great talent, alas, does not of itself guarantee great television) but also of a richly proficient and supremely committed production team. Together they combined to realise the basic ideal of public service broadcasting: that admirable old Reithian ambition to make excellence accessible, ‘to carry into the greatest possible number of homes everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour, and achievement’.⁵

The show, culminating in the record-breaking triumph of that 1977 special, represented an achievement in high-quality popular programme-making that is now fast assuming the aura of a fairy tale – destined, one fears, to be passed on with bemused fascination from one doubtful generation to its even more disbelieving successor as the seemingly endless proliferation of new channels and novel forms of distraction continue to divide and disperse the old mass audience in the name of that remorseless (and self-fulfilling) quest for ‘quality demographics’ and ‘niche audiences’. The Morecambe & Wise Show appeared at a time before home video, before satellite dishes and cable technology, before the dawning of the digital revolution, a time when it was still considered desirable, as well as practicable, to make a television programme that might – just might – excite most of the people most of the time. Not every programme-maker and performer from this time was particularly well equipped or strongly inclined to pursue such a possibility, but Morecambe and Wise, working in close collaboration with the BBC, most certainly were.

The Morecambe & Wise Show had an identity: it was not just some show that just happened to be transmitted by the BBC⁶ – it was a bona fide BBC show, the kind of show that the BBC, when it has a mind to, can and does do best. Judicious, well crafted and characterful, The Morecambe & Wise Show made viewers feel pampered rather than patronised. Whether it was the sight of the set for the Singin’ in the Rain routine that mirrored the MGM original down to the last detail (except, of course, for the rain), or the full orchestra that sat patiently in silence while ‘Mr Preview’ tried in vain to extend the introduction to Grieg’s Piano Concerto by ‘about a yard’, or the exquisite timing of Eric’s laconic reaction to the fleeting sound of a passing police car’s siren (‘He’s not going to sell much ice-cream going at that speed’), one always knew that every single element had been tried and triple-tested before being allowed on to the screen. This was a show, in short, that worked hard to please its public; this was a show that cared.

Neither Morecambe nor Wise ever looked down on, or up at, anyone (except, of course, each other); both of them looked straight back at their audience on level terms. No celebrated guest was ever allowed to challenge this comic democracy: within the confines of the show, the rich and the famous went unrecognised and frequently unpaid (a running gag in that 1977 Christmas special had Elton John wander awkwardly and anonymously along the begrimed and labyrinthine corridors of Television Centre in search of the right studio – ELTON: ‘I’ve been all over the place.’ ERIC: ‘In that suit?’); venerable actors with grand theatrical reputations were greeted routinely by Eric’s sotto voce alert to Ernie: ‘Don’t look now. A drunk’s just come on. To your right. A drunk. I’ll get rid of him’; a stray patrician mien was mocked (as, indeed, was any word like ‘mien’) by a pointedly plebian comeuppance (the very posh Penelope Keith was obliged to cut short her near-regal entrance, hitch up her dress, clamber down from an unfinished staircase and hobble angrily off the stage); the starchy sobriety of the professionally serious was spirited swiftly away by elaborately pixillated concoctions (an unlikely troupe of newsreaders, sports presenters and critics, all dressed up in crisp white sailor suits, were pictured performing some joyously improbable somersaults, handsprings and cartwheels while singing ‘There’s Nothing Like a Dame’ from South Pacific); and two resolutely down-to-earth working-class comedians from the North of England gleefully reaffirmed the remarkably deep, warm and sure relationship that existed between themselves and the British public.

‘It was’, reminisced Ernie Wise, ‘a sort of great big office party for the whole country, a bit of fun people could understand.’⁷ From the first few seconds of their opening comic routine to the final few notes and motions of their closing song and dance, Morecambe and Wise did their very best to draw people together rather than drive them apart. Instead of pandering submissively to the smug exclusivity of the cognoscenti (they were flattered when a well-regarded critic praised the sly ‘oeillade’ that accompanied Eric’s sarcastic asides, but they still mocked him mercilessly for the literary conceit⁸), and instead of settling – as so many of their supposed successors would do with such unseemly haste – for the easy security of a ‘cult following’ (‘Can we say “cult”?’ Eric would have inquired anxiously of someone lurking in the wings), Morecambe and Wise always aimed to entertain the whole nation.

It happened one night, but it had taken years to realise. The seventies were the great years of Morecambe and Wise, the ‘golden years’ when they came to be regarded as national treasures – admired in the quality press as ‘the most accomplished performing artists at present active in this country’,⁹ applauded in the tabloids as ‘the people’s choice’,¹⁰ and asked by the Queen Mother to teach her their trusty ‘paper bag trick’¹¹ – but this exalted status had only been won after some thirty years of hard work in front of hard audiences, making mistakes, trying out new tricks, mastering old ones, refining their technique, sharpening their wits and, slowly but surely, evolving a style that was entirely their own. By the start of the seventies, therefore, Morecambe and Wise were more than ready for their close-up, and, when it came, they made sure that they made the most of it.

When viewers watched that final show at the end of 1977, they witnessed a rare and rich compendium of the very best in popular culture: the happy summation of a joint career that had traversed all of the key developments associated with the rise of mass entertainment in Britain, encompassing the faint but still discernible traces of Victorian music-hall, the crowded animation of Edwardian Variety, the wordy populism of the wireless, the spectacular impact of the movies and, finally, the more intimate pervasiveness of television. When it was all over, it was sorely missed.

Eric Morecambe died in 1984 and Ernie Wise in 1999,¹² and on each of these sad occasions it felt to many as if they had lost an old and precious friend rather than merely a vividly endearing entertainer. The shows, however, remain, and the shows continue to matter. In November 1996, at the ceremony that marked the sixtieth anniversary of BBC TV, it was announced to no one’s great surprise that viewers had voted Morecambe and Wise the all-time Best Light Entertainment Performers, and The Morecambe & Wise Show the all-time Best Light Entertainment Series, and, in September 1998, the readers of the Radio Times voted the programme the all-time Best Comedy Show. Excellence never dates: even now, so many years after that last great night, millions of viewers still settle down to watch the old repeats, and to be entertained all over again by a rather tall man called Eric and a rather short man called Ernie. They were simply irreplaceable.

MUSIC-HALL

We are two people with one background between us.

ERNIE WISE

CHAPTER I
Northern Songs and Dances

We’ve always considered ourselves sophisticated Northerners.

ERIC MORECAMBE

Music-hall … was professional, and our early ambition was always to become professional.

ERNIE WISE

Morecambe and Wise¹ were made in the North of England. Their North of England, as far as their television conversations were concerned, was squeezed into a surreal and nameless little town that somehow managed to straddle the Pennines, a timeless place where clog dancing and cloth caps were forever to be found in fashion, and where all events of any real significance took place at one or other of five peculiar locations: the very modest working-class home of the Morecambe family, the rather grander working-class home of the Wise family, the somewhat insalubrious Milverton Street School, the long, dense and exotic Tarryassan Street or the compact but endlessly fascinating strip of land over which Ada Bailey would hang out her knickers to dry. Their North of England, in reality, was the materially impoverished but culturally rich North of England of the twenties and thirties, an area that stretched more freely over Lancashire, Yorkshire and a small but significant portion of Northumberland.

Eric Morecambe was a Lancastrian. One only had to hear his memorable voice utter a phrase like, ‘I’ll tell you for why …’, or invite a distinguished politician to ‘sit down and take the weight off your manifestoes’, or respond to a sudden show of affection from a male friend by shouting, ‘Geddoff! Smash your face in!’, or greet the inexplicable with an exclamation that slipped out from under a sigh, ‘Hhahh-there’s no answer to that!’, to appreciate the effectiveness of that warmly authoritative Lancastrian accent. It was J. B. Priestley who, during his English Journey of the early thirties, remarked on the fact that the ‘rather flat but broad-vowelled speech’ of the Lancastrian had come to be regarded as ‘almost the official accent of music-hall humour’² – and that, coming from a Yorkshireman, was quite an admission.

It is certainly hard not to be struck by the fact that so many of the most memorable and original performers associated with a comic tradition running from the earliest days of music-hall through Variety and the BBC’s old North of England Home Service to the era of television have come from this solitary county: Billy Bennett, Harry Weldon, Robb Wilton, Fred Yule, Arthur Askey, Tommy Handley and Ken Dodd (all from Liverpool); George Formby Senior (from Ashton-under-Lyne); George Formby Junior, Frank Randle and Ted Ray (all from Wigan); Hylda Baker (Farnworth); Ted Lune (Bolton); Tubby Turner (Preston); Wilkie Bard and Les Dawson (Manchester); Al Read (Salford); and Gracie Fields, Tommy Fields and ‘Lancashire’s Ambassador of Mirth’, Norman Evans (Rochdale). What all of these otherwise disparate performers had in common was an accent that proved itself, as Priestley put it, ‘admirable for comic effect, being able to suggest either shrewdness or simplicity, or, what is more likely than not, a humorous mixture of both’,³ lending itself both to ironical under-statement (such as the exceptionally serviceable ‘Fancy!’ – used to register surprise at anything from run-of-the-mill gossip to declarations of war) and ingeniously sly put-downs (such as, ‘’Ave you ’ad your tea? We’ve ’ad ours!’ or, ‘I’d offer you a slice of pie, love, but there’s none cut into’).⁴ Priestley, attempting to define the distinctive character of the sound, listed ‘shrewdness, homely simplicity, irony, fierce independence, an impish delight in mocking whatever is thought to be affected and pretentious. That is Lancashire’.⁵ It was also, of course, unmistakably Eric Morecambe.

Ernie Wise, on the other hand, was a Yorkshireman. He was more than happy on stage and screen to play up to all of the old stereotypical character traits associated with the flat-capped tyke: arrogance (‘Welcome to the show,’ he would say to the audience. ‘What a pleasure it must be for you to be seeing me once again!’), conceit (the much-mocked wig), bluntness (when roused he would not hesitate to itemise all of his partner’s inadequacies) and stinginess (he would always be ashen-faced whenever a guest was brave enough to inquire about the possibility of a fee). There was also, of course, the Yorkshire accent – ‘quieter, less sociable and less given to pleasure’, according to the Bradford-born Priestley, ‘more self-sufficient and more conceited, I think, than the people at the other and softer side of the Pennines’⁶ – capable itself of conveying varying degrees of warmth, vulnerability and wit (witness the delivery of such gifted and popular comics as Albert Modley, Dave Morris, Harry Worth or Sandy Powell⁷), but ideally suited to the special technical skills of the straight-man.

Placed side by side, like their respective counties, Morecambe and Wise were able to play out their own private War of the Roses. Eric was hot, Ernie was cold. Eric was supple, Ernie was stiff. Eric was droll, Ernie was dour. Eric was playful with language, Ernie was respectful of it. Eric had the quick wit, Ernie the slow burn (ERNIE: ‘How do you spell incompetent?’ ERIC: ‘E-R-N-I-E.’ ERNIE: ‘E-R- … Doh!’). Eric knew all about the double entendre, Ernie still had much to learn about the single entendre (ERNIE: ‘I’ve always said there are no people like show people.’ ERIC: ‘Ask any prison warden.’). Eric liked to dress down (string vest, oversized khaki shorts, black suspenders, black socks and black shoes), Ernie loved to dress up (ill-advised ‘fashionable’ garments, odd ‘writerly’ outfits or white tie and tails). Eric was happy to appear less intelligent and cultured than he really was (‘I saw a play on TV last night: there was this woman – you could see her bum!’), Ernie yearned to appear less stupid and gauche than he really was (‘I’ve got 23 A levels, you know – 17 in Mathematics, and another 2, making 23’). While Eric had his feet planted firmly on the ground, Ernie’s head would sometimes float high up into the clouds (ERNIE: ‘You’re ruining everything! You’re making us look like a cheap music-hall act!’ ERIC: ‘But we are a cheap music-hall act!’).

Morecambe and Wise never were, strictly speaking, a music-hall act (the music-hall, as a distinct form of entertainment, had given way to the more structured commercial appeal of Variety long before either of them was born⁸), nor were they, except in the very early days, ‘cheap’, but the allusion, in spite of this, made sense. Both Morecambe and Wise grew up in poor communities rich in music-hall traditions: ‘We’re working-class comics,’ said Wise. ‘We didn’t go to college.’⁹ They went, instead, to the halls, where they studied every facet of Northern humour. ‘There used to be a big difference between North and South in humour,’ observed Wise, ‘and there used to be a definite dividing line between “Oop fert cup” and all that.’¹⁰

Many of the old theatres were still standing and most of them were still in use – such as the huge Winter Gardens in Morecambe and the small but very popular City Varieties in Leeds – although some had been transformed into cinemas by the twenties and thirties. These halls, situated as they often were in the poorer areas of the industrial towns, could seem to young people with dreams of better futures like strange, exotic and magical places of escape and adventure. The look of them alone was extraordinary – such as the Moorish Palace Theatre in Hull, with its glass-roofed conservatory, sumptuous crush-room and Indian-style entrance festooned with palms and ferns; or the shoe-box-small Argyle in Birkenhead, a self-consciously nostalgic construction with long narrow galleries and a uniquely warm and intimate atmosphere; or the medium-sized Bradford Alhambra, designed in the English Renaissance style and accommodating an exceptionally wide stage for all kinds of odd and ambitious productions.

Once inside these unworldly places the curious encountered novel sights and sounds of even deeper resonance: acrobats, unicyclists, tight-rope walkers, jugglers, paper-tearers, illusionists, dancers and singers. There were novelty acts such as the man who dressed up in a red wig and the uniform of the Ruritanian Navy, balanced himself on the top rung of a swaying ladder and then sang a song about his mother, or the contortionist who would leap out from within a little box and throw himself into fearsome postures, or Herr Gross and his Educated Baboons and John Higgins, ‘The Human Kangaroo’. Centre-stage, up and down the bill, were the comics – some brash and flashy, some shy and reserved, some piebald and pinguid – full of jokes about the mother-in-law, the lodger, the wife, the neighbours, the coal-mines and the cotton mills, showing off their red wigs and redder noses, check trousers and big boots, never stopping, never serious, never giving up. A splendid time was guaranteed for all.

‘It’s a fantastic thing,’ said Ernie Wise, reflecting on the success of his partnership with Eric Morecambe, ‘because all we have done is adapt music-hall on to the television and make it acceptable.’¹¹ It was, as an explanation, a simplification of a complex process, but it was, none the less, a revealing observation. Much of what came to be associated with Morecambe and Wise, in terms of gestures, phrases, attitudes and even routines, had its roots firmly in the music-hall experiences of their youth. The sand dance performed by Morecambe and Wise and Glenda Jackson in their celebrated ‘Cleopatra’ sketch was a homage to the great eccentric dancers Wilson, Keppel and Betty. The cod-vent act, performed by Eric Morecambe with dummies of varying shapes and sizes, owed much to Sandy Powell’s earlier version (POWELL: ‘How are you?’ DUMMY: ‘Aying gerry yell chrankchyew!’ POWELL: ‘He says he’s very well.’). Eric’s impromptu monologues (‘They were married at Hoo-Flung-Wotnot/But they had no children sweet/He was fifty and fat/She was fatter than that/So n’ere the twain will meet – boom boom!’) were borrowed from Billy Bennett. The regular bits of comic business involving the plush golden ‘tabs’ – tableaux curtains – such as Eric’s ‘mad throttler’ mime, had been inherited from innumerable half-forgotten old comics who once worked the halls. The direct address to the audience – ‘What do you think of the show so far?’ – harked back to a bygone era of a more intimate brand of popular entertainment.

The world of Morecambe and Wise – even after the former had decamped to Harpenden and the latter to Peterborough – remained the comic world of the traditional Northern humorist. This world was peopled by sad-faced, snail-paced, put-upon pedants like Robb Wilton’s fire chief (‘Oh, yes, oh aye, it’s a pretty big fire … should be, by now … oh, and I say, Arnold – Arnold – take the dog with you, it’ll be a run for him. He hasn’t been out lately … Oh, good gracious me, what’s the matter with the engine?’¹²), tactless busybodies like Norman Evans’ Auntie Doleful (‘You what? You’re feeling a lot better? Ah, well, you never know – I mean, there was Mrs White – it were nobbut last Thursday, you know – she was doin’ nicely, just like you are, you know – and all of a sudden she started off with spasms round the heart – she went off like a flash of lightning on Friday. They’re burying her today.’¹³), inveterate gossips like Evans’ Fanny Fairbottom (‘That woman at number seven? Is she? Gerraway! Well, I’m not surprised. Not really. She’s asked for it … I knew what she was as soon as I saw her … And that coalman. I wouldn’t put it past him, either … Not since he shouted “Whoa” to his horse from her bedroom window …’¹⁴) and spiky geriatrics like Frank Randle’s permanently louche octogenarian (‘I’m as full of vim as a butcher’s dog – I’m as lively as a cricket. Why I’ll take anybody on of me age and weight, dead or alive.’¹⁵).

This was a world where harsh reality intruded rudely into the most rhapsodic of disquisitions, forever dragging idle dreamers like Les Dawson’s Walter Mittyish ex-Hoover salesman back down to earth:

Last evening, I was sitting at the bottom of my garden, smoking a reflective cheroot, when I chanced to look up at the night sky. As I gazed, I marvelled at the myriad of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver cast carelessly on to black velvet. In awe, I watched the waxen moon ride like an amber chariot across the zenith of the heavens, towards the ebony void of infinite space, wherein the tethered bulks of Jupiter and Mars hung forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I stared in wonderment, I thought to myself... I must put a roof on this outside lavatory.¹⁶

This was a world in which marriage was regarded as two becoming one with forty years to determine which one it was. Al Read’s many vivid scenes featuring the desperately active wife and the deviously slothful husband captured the struggle memorably:

The Northern music-hall favoured the comedy of recognition, inclusive rather than exclusive in its attitude. ‘The traditional northern comic gets great sympathy,’ remarked James Casey (a writer and producer of radio comedy for the BBC’s North Region). ‘The southern comics didn’t get sympathy – they were smart, they would basically tell you how they topped somebody … The northern comedian [in contrast] would tell you how he was made a fool of.’¹⁸

At the centre of this world stood – a little unsurely at times – the great comic from Stockton-on-Tees, Jimmy James, a lugubrious and vaguely melancholic figure with gimlet eyes and protruding, cushiony lips. He usually found himself sandwiched between two prize idiots – Hutton Conyers on one side, Bretton Woods on the other. ‘Are you puttin’ it around that I’m barmy?’ one of them would ask him. ‘Why?’ James would reply. ‘Did you want to keep it a secret?’ Playfully indulgent, he would listen politely to his companions as they talked their way deeper into the depths of illogicality, rambling on about keeping man-eating lions in shoe-boxes and receiving sentimental gifts from South African trips. Sometimes he would interpose the odd supportive observation (‘Oh, well … they’re nice people, the Nyasas. I’ll bet they gave you something.’), or register a mild sense of surprise (‘Pardon?’), while pursuing a policy of divide and rule by encouraging the idiot on one side to think that the real idiot was on the other side (‘Dial 999 – somebody must be looking for him! … Go and get two coffees – I’ll try and keep him talking.’¹⁹).