realize what a bloody good feed he was for your father. But it’s the comedian who gets the laugh and the feed can get overlooked.’
I’m not sure the public understand the purpose of the feed, or straight man, if you prefer. I’m not sure the media do either. Maybe Ernie had the right idea in just accepting it. At least he got half the fame and half the money—even half the awards. It must have irritated at some moments, though. Probably around 3 a.m., when you find yourself wide awake sensing something is niggling you, but not quite sure what!
Their scriptwriter during Morecambe and Wise’s halcyon days at the BBC, Eddie Braben, said in an interview that ‘even today I don’t think we realize just how important Ernie was. I wrote a line once that has often been used since, and Eric said it was so right. He said it was absolutely spot on. They were doing a stand-up and Ernie had to go off quickly for a prop and Eric said, “Don’t be long; when you’re not here I feel a cold draught all down one side.”
‘Eric didn’t like standing on his own. He didn’t like performing on his own. He was OK for a couple of minutes then he’d start to feel uncomfortable.’
Goodbye Theatreland, Hello TV
‘Between you and me, I don’t really mean all those insults I hurl at Des O’Connor. I think he’s one of the greatest singers in the country. He just struggles when he sings in the town, that’s all. Have you heard his latest record, Songs for Deaf Lovers? There’s a government health warning on every cover.’
The forties and fifties had been Eric’s bread-and-butter years before the jam arrived in the sixties in the shape of television. Most achievement in the earlier decades was through radio shows and theatre work, as mentioned in the previous chapter, but TV had lurked there, albeit in the form of appearances on other people’s shows, or through their own first BBC series in 1954, Running Wild, which seemed to have people running scared!
Below is a wonderful article from that year, published in the weekly magazine TV Mirror, about Eric and Ernie’s this failed series before it had aired for the first time. What interests me beyond the fact that Running Wild nearly finished their careers is that the writer of the piece—like the public at large—didn’t really know much about them and had to use physical descriptions to help him. Very different from twenty years later, when they were arguably the most famous faces in Britain.
The Lads Who’ve Got Nothing To Lose
An Article published in TV Mirror
Morecambe and Wise, the young comedians from the north, have gained a big reputation on radio. Tonight they begin a new comedy series on TV.
Ever since it was announced that a new fortnightly comedy series starring Morecambe and Wise was starting, the two bright lads from the North have been receiving good advice from their colleagues and friends.
‘You keep off TV—it’ll do you no good,’ was the general burden of their advice.
But Eric Bartholomew, who comes from Morecambe (hence the name), and Ernie Wiseman, who claims Leeds as his native town, think differently. After no fewer than forty-five appearances in Variety Fanfare, and their own weekly variety series You’re Only Young Once, they have no doubts about the power of sound radio to help an artist on his way.
And whatever the dismal Johnnies may say about the dangers of a TV series that gets panned by the critics—well, Morecambe and Wise just aren’t worrying.
‘The way we look at it is this,’ said Morecambe (he is the tall one with glasses), ‘TV has come to stay and we’ve been given our big opportunity. We’d be daft if we didn’t take it with both hands. You see, we’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose.’
‘It isn’t as though we were at the end of our careers,’ added Wise (the small one with the fair hair). ‘You’re only young once, that’s quite true. But we’re young now, both of us. I’m 28 and Eric is 27. And I’d say we’ve got a few years to go yet.’
A radio series too
‘If the public don’t like us on Wednesday, that’s just too bad. But it won’t mean we’re finished. Why, we’ve hardly started yet!’
‘And there’s another radio series starting in May to keep the wolf from the door,’ said Morecambe.
‘Not that we’re going to flop,’ put in Wise, touching wood and stroking the nearest black cat. ‘We’ve had our TV flop already, years ago, in—what was the show called, Eric?’
‘Shh!’ said Morecambe, quickly. ‘You know we never talk about that one. Still, there was one good thing about it. Our producer on that occasion was good old Bryan Sears’—here they fell to their knees and touched their foreheads to the ground—‘and it’s Bryan who’s going to put us across in this new series.’
I tried to find out something about the new show.
The two boys looked at each other, scratched their hair and seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Well, it’s a comedy show—we know that much. And it’s a revue—there’s no harm in telling you that. But as for what it’s going to be—look, why don’t you watch it and find out?’
‘That’s what we’re going to do,’ said Morecambe, changing the subject.
Forty-five ‘Fanfares’
Bryan seems a lucky name in the story of Morecambe and Wise. It was another well known Bryan—Michie this time—who first discovered the pair at a juvenile talent contest. That was in 1939, when Eric and Ernie were in their very early teens.
Two years later they were touring with Bryan Michie in his road show. In 1943 they went into Strike a New Note at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London—with that great comedian Sid Field.
That’s where they were when calling-up time came. Ernie went off with the Merchant Navy; Eric went down the mine, surely the only west-end comedian to become a Bevin Boy.
The war over, back they came to the halls, touring here, there and everywhere—and only just out of their teens! Then came a broadcast from Manchester in Variety Fanfare. And another. More followed. Finally they notched up that record of forty-five Fanfare appearances since the end of 1951.
‘But you’d better not put that in,’ advised Morecambe, ‘we’ve always depended on the fact that Ronnie Taylor, the producer, can’t count. If he reads that, he won’t book us again.’
When I could get them talking seriously I got some pretty definite opinions out of Morecambe about this new TV series. ‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘No one, with the possible exception of Arthur Askey, has yet managed to bring off a TV series with any real success.
‘Now don’t imagine that we’re comparing ourselves with Askey—we don’t wear the same size in combs. But we’re prepared to look on TV as a completely different medium. We’re ready to change our approach and our styles as much as is wanted.’
It is my opinion that they will be a big success.
The writer of the article probably came to doubt his own opinion thereafter.
In the fifties the trials and tribulations that would ultimately lead to a staggering television career were still some years off. In fact so uncertain was the future of what would become Britain’s most popular double act, and work of any performing kind so scarce around 1950, that, it has come to light, Ernie wrote to Eric to end the partnership. I have known about this incident since the seventies, when my father, with a reflective chuckle at the fact that it never happened and they had gone on to immense success, one day chose to tell me all about it. What I had not realized was that Ernie’s letter still existed. I had never seen it until my mother showed it to me while I was working on this book. So fascinated am I by the letter that I persuaded her to allow me to publish it. What strikes me most is the great dignity Ernie retains. Beautifully written with integrity, it expresses warm wishes and the desire to continue their great friendship outside the partnership.
This is the letter in its entirety:
My father’s response, he told me, was to write straight back basically saying he’d never heard such rubbish in his life and that Ernie should have a few days’ rest to get over it and then they should get back to finding some work
—which essentially is what happened.
For me the world of theatre conjures up many images, some of which no doubt can be traced back to the conversations I had with my father throughout my childhood and the hours I spent in those times hanging around theatres and dressing rooms. Eric genuinely loved that era—even the struggle that went with it. ‘I would do everything the same only quicker!’ he once told me, and it is a line that amused not only me but my own children when I repeated it to them. Though he said it half in jest, I find myself wondering how he could have done any of it quicker—he moved like greased lightning as it was. Harry Secombe said Eric had a quicksilver brain and even nicknamed him ‘Quicksilver’. Incidentally, many years before that his mother used to call him ‘Jifflearse’, a name which is meaningless in the strictest sense yet suggests someone restless and always on the go. This was a total Sadie creation, a word that for her—and me, I should add—conjured an image of someone who can’t sit still for a moment, ‘jiffle’ being similar to ‘jiggle’, as in ‘jiggle about’, and ‘arse’, well…
Talking of theatres, Ernie recalled, ‘Some of the funniest things happen backstage in the theatre business. We were appearing at a tiny theatre in a very out-of-the-way town. The theatre was old, and the lighting equipment was even older. We asked the electrician backstage to throw the main switch of all the lights in the theatre as a pay-off line to a comedy sketch we were doing at the time. We wanted the whole theatre darkened for just one minute.
‘On the first night of the show, we checked with him that he knew exactly when to throw the switch and he nodded that he fully understood. But we were worried, for he was wearing huge rubber boots and thick rubber gloves.
‘When the time came for him to throw the switch there was a terrific blue flash and the little electrician was hurled almost from one side of the wings to the other.
‘We rushed to pick him up for fear he might have been electrocuted. “Are you all right?” we asked anxiously. “What happened?”
‘“Nothing,” replied the charred prostrate little man taking off one of his rubber gloves. “It happens every time I throw that switch!”’
And Eric recalled a time in 1960 when they were working the theatres.‘A cousin [of mine], a rather irresponsible lad with a natural ability to upset other people, asked us if we could get him holiday digs using our names to help him obtain some very pleasant accommodation.
‘Naturally we used some influence and fixed up a hotel in Torquay. After a week we had a letter from him saying he was fed up because he had been thrown out of the place.The proprietor had had enough of his practical jokes. He asked us to help him again.
‘We managed to fix him some accommodation in Exmouth. Everything was quiet for a few days then another letter arrived.The same thing had happened. He was out, and he wanted help.
‘We were tired by this time. But we thought we’d do our best for him just once more.We secured a room for him atWeymouth, and wrote back warning him we had tolerated his troubles long enough.
‘For a few weeks all was calm then we received a telephone call:“I’m thrown out again, and I’m mad!” he said.“You ought to get in touch with these proprietors. Tell them, how dare they do this to You!”’
Eric and Ernie would keep in touch with theatre work even after the ‘jam’ had arrived and they no longer really needed panto and summer season. Once they were regular fixtures on television, and this was evident around 1962, they continued the theatre seasons more out of habit than need. It was a habit which lasted right up to Eric’s heart attack in November 1968, which would signal the end of many things—including winter and summer seasons—but also the beginning of their television superstardom.
If they thought they were stars in the sixties, then the seventies would show them just how far they could still go.
Heroes and Villains
Eric: …Remember how we copied Abbott and Costello when we started? How we liked Laurel and Hardy, and Jewell and Warriss?
Ernie: We must be a mixture of all of them. Yet, pal, we’ve found our own style as entertainers.We lean on each other.
Eric: Is that what it is? I thought you were drunk…
Just as comics today explain how they have been influenced by Morecambe and Wise—and, believe me, I’ve come across many and only a few are in double acts—my father was just as influenced by his own heroes. I think his taste in comedy fell into two categories—the comedians who influenced him at the outset and those who influenced him when he was firmly established.
Although it is true that Abbot and Costello were both Eric and Ernie’s earliest influence, it was above all Laurel and Hardy who shaped their act. Certainly they were very important for my father: not only he did he tell me so, but you can see it in their work.What fascinates me is that he discovered Laurel and Hardy when still only in his teens, and was still just as big a fan in his fifties. However, as stand-up comedian and sit-com star Lee Mack says,‘If you don’t get Laurel and Hardy then you might as well say you don’t like comedy full stop.’
Stan Laurel, christened Arthur Stanley Jefferson, was born on 16 June 1890 in Ulverston, at that time in Lancashire but now in Cumbria, about ten miles as the crow flies from Morecambe, where Eric would come into the world thirty-six years later.
Oliver Hardy was born Norvell Hardy on 18 January 1892 in Harlem, Georgia.As a young man ‘Babe’, as he was also known, had been looking for a career in the military but a love for films made him open a movie theatre in Milledgeville in his home state.This led to his finding work as an actor in Jacksonville, Florida, the home of the Lubin Film Company. Hardy later moved to Hollywood, where he worked as an all-purpose comic at the Hal Roach Studios.
Laurel and Hardy’s partnership at Roach began in 1926—the year Eric Morecambe was born—and within a year of their first joint screen venture they were being announced as a new comedy team.
When he started out in comedy Laurel was much more of a fall-about comic than he would later become after teaming up with Hardy. It is fascinating to learn that Laurel’s earliest working relationship was with Charlie Chaplin, who has, since his death in 1977, been accused (if only in print and by independent observers) of plagiarism.The story goes that much of the concept of Chaplin’s huge universally acclaimed screen character the Tramp was actually Stan Laurel’s. Laurel, a very gentle man by all accounts, was fully aware of having had his brilliant idea ‘stolen’—and apparently it wasn’t the first or last time with Chaplin—yet Laurel never stopped thinking, and saying to anyone who would listen, that Chaplin was the greatest comedian there had ever been.
Curiously, and significantly, Chaplin never made a single reference to Stan Laurel in his autobiography, an almost impossible feat when one thinks of their shared history, which included the early years spent on tour together for Fred Karno before the First World War.
Eric rightly claimed that Laurel and Hardy were an inspiration to any double act as they took the ‘fat man, thin man’ and ‘idiot and bigger idiot’ concepts to new levels. But Chaplin he disliked passionately. Chaplin, he felt, benefited greatly from the fact that his films were silent and therefore solely dependent on visual content, or pantomime, and to work at their best they needed to be screened at a greater speed than real time, because on screen anyone seen moving faster than people move in reality is straightaway more humorous.
However, when I caught up with comedian and silent-comedy aficionado Paul Merton, he suggested a different explanation as to why Eric hadn’t fallen for Chaplin’s comic wizardry.‘Your dad’s first sight of Chaplin films would have been the Saturday morning pictures at his local theatre, I imagine,’ he said. ‘At that time—probably mid-thirties—they re-released some Keystone films with Chaplin that were shown at the wrong speed.They were shot at sixteen frames a second and shown at twenty-four, and with a crap musical score thrown on to them, so I don’t think people watching them at that time would have a very positive view of Charlie Chaplin.’ He added,‘I know Eric Sykes
in his autobiography complained of a similar disliking for Chaplin that matches your father’s observation. If you see Chaplin as he should be seen it is a very different experience.’
Lee Mack adds:‘As a lad I simply regarded Chaplin as the king of silent comedy. Growing up in an era when video first came in, we were able to appreciate such talents in our own homes.’
One thing with Chaplin is that, unlike Laurel and Hardy, he was unable to make the transfer from silent pictures to the talkies; at least as far as his Tramp was concerned. Eric once wrote,‘In my line of profession Laurel and Hardy feature very highly in my admiration. I never had much time for Charlie Chaplin, although I would not deny he was probably a genius. But to me he wasn’t as funny as Buster Keaton. But he must have been a better businessman, because he made and protected a lot more money than most at that time. Harold Lloyd was a marvellous actor-comic and one of the few who successfully made the transition from the silent movies into sound.That is quite an achievement when you consider people such as Jimmy James, Sid Field, Dave Morris and others of that ilk who found it very difficult to perform even on the radio.’
As the above quote makes clear, if Chaplin left Eric a bit cold, Keaton ignited his enthusiasm.At our family home during my childhood and youth, pictures of Buster Keaton lined the hallway and in my father’s office there was a sketch, imprinted on a mirror, of Keaton in classic morose pose beneath a boater at the peak of his movie career. This had been a Christmas present from his nephew, Clive, which he really cherished.
‘Eric rightly claimed that Laurel and Hardy were an inspiration to any double act.’
Paul Merton went on to make a connection between Eric and Keaton.‘Much of [Morecambe and Wise’s] way of performing would have come from the vast wealth of experience of stage work they’d had down the years,’ he said.‘And Eric was such a physical comic.They were appearing on a Royal Variety Show at the London Palladium, and Eric does this great leap from one staircase to another at the back of the set, and then is having to do pratfalls in the same routine.Very, very physical stuff and brilliant. He was a great faller; an adroit physical comic, and you can’t help but wonder if, in view of his love of some of the silent comedians, there was some inspiration from Buster Keaton there.’
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