‘There were times in that show I would turn to Sean and say,“Listen to that laughter because you’ll never hear it as thick again”.’
After the play finished, Hamish and Sean did not immediately part company to pursue independent challenges. Quite quickly they went into a new stage production which reunited the whole The Play What I Wrote team of Hamish McColl, Sean Foley, Toby Jones, Kenneth Branagh (as director), and David Pugh (as producer). This was to be the maligned and ill-fated Ducktastic!
The main reason it failed, in this humble writer’s opinion, is because the title is truly dire. For my money, any play named Ducktastic! sounds more like something the Krankies would come up with. Remember them? Fandabidozi! It must, therefore, have been an uphill battle from the opening onwards—and there wasn’t too much ‘onwards’!
But Hamish McColl has his own theories. ‘I think we set the bar too high with The Play What I Wrote. The next production just didn’t catch on,’ he explained. ‘It was an expensive show to stage, and they didn’t have the time to bridge that gap between an average start and developing it into something a bit special. So it was pulled.’
My mind drifts back to the opening night of The Play What I Wrote, before Roger was ill, before Hamish and Sean misfired with Ducktastic!, and before the lovely and talented Toby Jones began scaling the heights as the big star he deserved to become (he won stunning reviews for his depiction of Truman Capote): this was the opening night of The Play What I Wrote on Broadway and it was clearly very successful with the audience, if a little confusing for the family, friends, and fans of Morecambe and Wise. At one point the names of Morecambe and Wise are replaced with those of Laurel and Hardy. Inevitably it was only what it could ever be: a goodish play well performed with a famous guest star each night. Maybe that would have been enough for Broadway if there had been no 9/11 and no war on Iraq.
The first-night party was a very New York affair—lots of money lavished upon a vast number of guests in a huge first-floor room just off Times Square—and you sensed the party meant more to the American side of the production than their British counterparts. There were paparazzi-style columns of photographers and TV news crews, and unbearably bright lights and loud, chattering voices trying to be heard through fixed Botox grins. As David Pugh pointed out, he would rather have seen the thousands of dollars they splashed out on partying go towards publicity. But that isn’t the way American backers and producers do it on Broadway. They want their party and mean to have it.
A few familiar faces were in evidence—Mel Smith (with whom I’d done a breakfast television slot some years earlier), Michael Palin, and Eddie Izzard—all of whom I liked enormously and who talked to me at length with great understanding of Morecambe and Wise.
The absence of the spirit of Morecambe and Wise—or the entire soul of the piece, as Hamish McColl puts it—from the new production was painfully emphasized by the fact that not once did the huge media contingent in attendance try to speak with my mother or show any remote interest in the London production which had generated the play’s presence on Broadway in the first place. It would be interesting to know what film-maker Steven Spielberg made of the New York production. Allegedly he was a huge fan and devotee of the original London production and instrumental in creating the Broadway opportunity.
Kevin Kline, possibly best known to British audiences as the villain in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, made a good opening-night guest star and did further nights, as did other guests, such as Liam Neeson, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close.
The play was doing OK business until America invaded Iraq. What with the recent memory of 9/11 hanging over the country like the sword of Damocles and all Broadway productions suffering as a consequence, it was only a matter of time before audiences thinned and the first-night party was just a memory. On the fateful day of the invasion of Iraq, as the play went through its machinations, a man jumped up in the audience and shouted, ‘We’ve gone into Iraq!’, to which there was the kind of ‘Yee-hah!’ reaction that you tend to get when Americans are together in a relatively confined space. As Hamish said to me, ‘Talk about breaking the air of suspended disbelief! It took ten minutes to draw them back in.’
‘As the play went through its machinations, a man jumped up in the audience and shouted, “We’ve gone into Iraq!”’
David Pugh hung on in there for as long as possible as the show was up for an award, but, when it didn’t win, the cast and crew were soon recalled to the UK. The production was given immediate notice and, with a brief countdown to closure, they were six miles up in the sky and flying home.
It was an interesting rather than a commercially viable run—an exercise from which we perhaps all learned something, and I include myself here in my vague role as consultant to the project. And there had been time for one cheerful celebratory event before leaving New York: Kenneth Branagh married his girlfriend Lindsay. As Hamish McColl recalls, it was ‘definitely one of the high moments of the run…a great memory.’
One final personal memory: I remember taking my mother to look at the splendid Grand Central Station. I’d seen it used as a location in so many films, so to actually stand there and marvel at this iconic sight was a treat beyond all other treats. A lady travelling from the station, clearly uncertain of which platform she was searching for, marched briskly up to a cop—great using that word in its appropriate context—and said, ‘Oh, do excuse me, but could you tell me…?’
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ interrupted the cop, gently raising his hands and giving an apologetic shrug, ‘but I’m closed Sundays!’ Both of them laughed loudly at this, and it reminded me of years earlier when my father had just returned from one of those Ed Sullivan shows he wrote about in his diary. ‘I have to say the one thing that struck me is the native New Yorker’s sense of humour,’ he once told me. And now I got it first-hand.
The story of The Play What I Wrote didn’t end in New York. In April 2007 its nationwide tour of Britain—happily back in its original format—concluded. And that was with its third cast since The Right Size created and starred in the show.
I still get involved with the publicity for the play whenever it’s recast and up and running, occasionally visiting venues where it’s due to open to talk with the press about Eric and Ernie, and about the play, its history, its metamorphosis in New York, its changing casts, and, of course, its guest stars. Sometimes I did a Q&A session with David Pugh for the touring productions. We would sit on stage in front of an invited audience and David would tell the story of how it all came together and then turn to me and ask relevant questions about Eric and Ernie to which I would give lengthy answers. We worked up quite a little double act ourselves.
In the last production I got talking with Andrew Cryer, who took on the Eric Morecambe role, while Greg Haiste played Ernie and Anthony Hoggard played Arthur and the myriad roles originally played by the great Toby Jones. Andrew recalled how, as little more than a toddler, once a week he would stay at his gran’s house because his parents would go out. It must have been a weekend, because it always coincided with The Morecambe and Wise Show being on. He was usually allowed to watch it, but has memories of times when he wasn’t supposed to: he’d sneak onto the landing and watch it through the banisters. That he should go on to portray Eric in a play seems deserved as well as ironic.
Echoing the thoughts of Hamish McColl, my own hope is that one day The Right Size will team up again to appear in the play—perhaps a special West End run, as Hamish suggests, with some mouth-watering guest stars equal to the long list of previous ones. Or, alternatively, they’ll take it to somewhere else where Morecambe and Wise are recognized and hugely appreciated. I’m thinking specifically ofAustralia. My second wife, Jo, comes from New Zealand and has lots of family spread out across Australia, and visits we made when we were still married proved to me beyond doubt that admiration for Morecambe andWise still exists there. I found their books and DVDs on sale in many Aussie stores.
Mentioning that par
t of the world, if I have one recent regret—and I certainly have too few to remember, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra—it is not taking up the opportunity to join the actors and crew of Lord of the Rings filming on location in New Zealand. Jo and I had planned to visit the members of her family in Australia, and a quick, seven-hour hop over to NZ would have left us watching Peter Jackson directing Orcs andAragorn and Gandalf and Saruman and Frodo and Sam and…well, you get the idea. And to make it worse, Peter, I later learned, is a big Morecambe andWise fan. The offer to go there had come from Andy Serkis (Gollum), whom I’d met a few times, because for some serendipitous reason we’d ended up being interviewed on the same radio programmes with indecent frequency.
The big link between The Play What I Wrote and the Lord of the Rings movies is Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf. Throughout the playThe Right Size made constant remarks about him, encouraging the audience to believe that he was the permanent guest star in waiting and would soon be making his big entrance. But then Sean Foley—in Eric mode—kept explaining the actor’s absence by saying, ‘Can’t get him out of the pub’ and suchlike. When the play won an award McKellen fooled everyone by staggering on the stage behind Sean and Hamish and pretending to be drunk. Keeping up the act, he then tapped them on their shoulders mid-flow—to their huge and genuine surprise—and presented them with their award before reeling off the stage. It was another one of those nights that brought the house down.
Ken Branagh says, ‘It’s interesting to try and work out the mystery of what makes people laugh. I have great admiration for those comics who can stand in front of 3,000 people and make them fall about laughing—like Billy Connolly and Lee Mack. It’s truly jaw-droppingly impressive.
‘With Eric and Ernie and other double acts, there is the protection that comes of having a partner that guards against the loneliness out there, but there’s still the basic concern of “are they going to like us tonight”? Yes, it goes with the territory but it’s that which actors admire most in comedians.’
As I finished lunch with Ken Branagh, he made me smile when he told me of a play he had recently been doing—a dark, Russian tragicomedy called Ivanov. ‘And for no good reason,’ says Ken, ‘we all start doing impressions of Eric Morecambe as we walk up and down the corridors before going on. It was a way for the cast to get themselves going; almost like a vocal exercise.’
It would seem Ken Branagh can’t escape Eric Morecambe!
The Early Days A Very Good Place to Start
‘I was born in 1926 and when I was eight months old we moved to Christie Avenue into a new council house with three bedrooms and an outside loo. There was just me, my mother, Sadie, and my father, George…’
Has there ever been an iconic entertainer who during his life generated such profound and continuous affection as Eric Morecambe? Probably not. Well, maybe Stephen Fry comes close. Mr Fry’s ability to jolly along as one of us, as it were, while intellectually towering above us Gandalf-like in a world of Hobbits, is very endearing. Just as with Eric, you can’t help but like Stephen. Whatever such persons’ problems might be—and they’re human, so they have problems—there remains this lovable, vulnerable, yet simultaneously optimistic air about them. As TV presenter Nick Owen wrote of Eric in his autobiography: ‘He had the ability to make you laugh just by entering the room…’
Morecambe and Wise emerged from an era when a performer was slowly nurtured and judged purely on talent and not tabloid-style TV programmes bolstered by self-interested tabloid newspapers. You didn’t grade Morecambe and Wise on an A-Z list—they were simply undisputed stars of the small screen, and hugely admired and loved stars at that.
The author Sidney Sheldon observed of his friend Groucho Marx, ‘Even when Groucho wanted to insult someone he couldn’t, because no one would take the insult seriously.’ That straightaway makes me think of my father and his forays into attempting to be serious—which he would have enjoyed more frequently had people been able to take him more seriously. But as well as being plain and simple Dad, he was plainly and simply hilarious almost all the time. Part of it was his nature and part was the burden he carried of not wishing to disappoint anyone. Being a living comic legend was certainly a two-edged sword.
Although I’m now in my fifties it all seems so incredibly recent and fresh in my mind. But that’s the Morecambe and Wise effect; that’s what living with such a master of comedy does to you—it preserved the moments as they occurred. And I know I’m not alone. People still come up to me in the street and say, ‘It must be nearly ten years since your dad died.’ And when I say, ‘No. It’s nearer a quarter of a century,’ a look of incredulity sweeps across their face.
‘Being a living comic legend was certainly a two-edged sword.’
The one thing that I knew so little about until very, very recently was my father’s own humble beginnings. Then, while recording a spot for a TV company filming in Lancashire, I was introduced to a few people who remembered him. One such person is Roger Obertelli, who, as a kid, along with his elder brother Kenneth, would play football with Eric in their street, Christie Avenue, Morecambe.
A fishing licence and ration book, both showing rare occasions on which Eric signed with his real birth name of John Eric Bartholomew.
Roger and his wife, now in their later years, remarkably have settled back in that same street.
He explained to me how all the kids in the street would be playing football in the late afternoon when suddenly Eric’s mother, Sadie, would appear and whisk him indoors. Ten minutes later a rather solemn Eric would re-emerge dressed in top hat and tails. With a plaintiff wave of the hand, he would saunter off down the street and across what were then open fields stretching into the distance on his way to the dance and music lessons that Sadie broke her back to fund. Roger says that they would all chuckle at Eric’s departing figure and can recall his frustration at having to leave their game of football. But you sense from Roger that now there is an air of ‘Well, he had the last laugh, didn’t he?’
Eric once outlined his own upbringing. His account could have been composed by or for the Lancashire tourist board, but it’s a genuine personal look at the seaside town’s life through the seasons by Eric as he recalled the early part of the previous century:
I was born in 1926 and when I was eight months old we moved to Christie Avenue into a new council house with three bedrooms and an outside loo. There was just me, my mother, Sadie, and my father, George…We were working class, but comfortable, even though Dad earned only £2 a week in my youth. He worked for the council…Mother supplemented our income, particularly when I began dancing lessons. She used to scrub floors and work as an usherette at the pier theatre. I had four special friends, all of us football fanatics; we supported Preston North End and Morecambe FC. We went to all Morecambe’s games for the simple reason that we got in to see them for nothing by the somewhat devious method of bending the railings that surrounded the ground…One of our favourite haunts was a sweet shop loftily named Halfway House. It was run by one of the biggest men I have ever seen. I can’t remember his name, but he was at least six feet six inches tall…
Apart from the normal run of goodies at Halfway House, there was a kind of board covered in paper and on it were dozens of black spots. You paid Mr ‘Bigman’ a halfpenny and he gave you a pencil which you forced into a black spot. If there was a number underneath, you won a prize. But there weren’t many numbers.
At home my favourite foods were shrimps, black puddings and tripe—the latter delicacies having been a staple diet for comedians’ material for years! I also loved mushrooms, which my father and I would pick from the fields around our home. But one delicacy—the taste remains with me still—was ‘cocoa dip’. Every morning my mother would mix a quantity of cocoa powder and sugar in a bag. The idea was to have the bag open in my coat pocket and keep dipping a wet finger into the mixture…It was like nectar!
When the summer came Morecambe became a different place. It was like being brought up to
date; finding out what was going on in the world. You never saw many cars in those days, yet August brought a veritable motorcade of Austin Sevens and Morris Eights driven by the ‘well-to-do’, paying their three pounds a week, full board at the town’s desirable residences…
On the sands entertainment was provided by the Nigger Minstrels, then undeterred by the racial overtones of their title.
As the darkness came at summer’s end, there were the illuminations. Happy Mount Park was a fairyland and as the holidaymakers took their final glimpse of annual escape, I would warm with the thought of good things to come: Autumn and Bonfire night, winter with slides on the footpath and scarcely any rain. Spring with the town reawakening, the annual Carnival that had a West End polish to it and the grand influx of the immigrants from the mill towns, the Scots and the Midlanders. Summer again with its boat trips, bathing beauty contests and the ever-present Nigger Minstrels…
Obviously I knew my father intimately, and I sense the above was purposely drawn up in a Charles-Dickens-meets-Perry-Como way as he rendered his thoughts into print. My father could be very lacklustre when talking about his childhood days in Morecambe, but writing about them seems to have focused his mind. Certainly Eric returned often enough to the north, particularly to spend time with his parents, which my sister and I enjoyed enormously too. But it never really felt like Morecambe was his home—that this was the place that had not just given rise to its greatest son, but had lent its name to him as a vehicle for his success. I also sensed that the longer he spent away from the county of his birth—which, excepting the occasional holidays, was most of the time as our family was based in the south—the more uncertain he felt about it whenever he returned. It was a little like he wasn’t sure how to behave, because there were so many friends and family who knew Eric Morecambe before comedy did.
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