By the end of his life Keaton had advanced the art of film-making through his superb writing and direction, and he had developed unique camera innovations unsurpassed even today. He is universally acclaimed as a genius; certainly Eric Morecambe would have gone along with that. Groucho Marx was of the opinion that Chaplin was the funnier of the two, but that Keaton made greater films. And there, perhaps, is the truth, if truth is to be found in what is ultimately a subjective issue.
I find the stories of Keaton’s life as fascinating as his work.When he was only around three years of age he caught his right forefinger in a clothes wringer, losing the first joint, gashed his head near the eye with a brick that ricocheted after he threw it at a peach tree, and was sucked out of an upstairs window by a passing cyclone that carried him floating through the air and deposited him, fortunately unhurt, in the middle of a street a few blocks away. No wonder he became an expert at taking heavy falls in his stage act with his parents.
Harold Lloyd was one of Eric’s biggest heroes. I recall afternoons of reruns of Lloyd on TV, me and my father sitting on the sofa, him smoking his pipe and falling about laughing. For him the most appealing part of Lloyd’s comedy was his abundant energy and sincerity: he seemed to do so much without any affectation or obvious effort—which is similar to the illusion Eric and Ernie themselves created.The harder the rehearsals and the greater the general effort put into each Morecambe and Wise Show, the easier and less complicated the final result appeared.The obvious analogy is of the duck serenely moving across the water’s surface while beneath the surface it’s paddling like crazy. That’s how the illusion always worked for Morecambe and Wise, and how it clearly worked for Harold Lloyd.
By the mid-sixties Eric was in search of a new direction, away from the stereotypical, hapless funny man and towards a much sharper, wittier comedy character, and here the most important influences were two American performers: the evergreen Groucho Marx and Phil Silvers.
Julius Henry Marx (Groucho) is generally agreed to be the most popular and widely recognized of all the Marx Brothers owing to his outrageous on-screen insults and one-liners, which are as strong and as effective today as when first filmed. His screen character was always that of a wise-cracking, cigartoting, middle-aged man with wire glasses and a big black moustache. One of the reasons I know Eric adored him so much was because Groucho had such wonderfully eccentric notions. Eric’s favourite was that Groucho wanted, whenever on screen in a Marx Brothers movie, to wear a painted moustache.There was never any explanation as to why, but the effect was certainly distinctive.According to an interview with Groucho, the producers didn’t want him to have a painted moustache, but he just turned up with it anyway.
‘Everything comes harder,’ Groucho said about ageing during a serious interview with his biographer Charlotte Chandler in the seventies.‘You have to concentrate to do what you didn’t have to think about before.You can’t take things for granted.You can’t even take salt for granted.’ Groucho ended that particular interview by saying,‘I’m still alive.That’s about it.’
And this reminds me of my father just two weeks before his death.We were having lunch together in a London hotel restaurant and despite being just fifty-seven he was bemoaning the woes of ageing. ‘You know you’re getting older when it takes half an hour in the bathroom every morning to do what used to take five or ten minutes. And then you find you have all these wild nasal hairs and rogue eyebrows shooting off at tangents that never used to need sorting out: they just were never there before.’
It was Groucho at his zenith—the Groucho of the thirties Marx Brothers movies—that Eric turned to when looking to incorporate something else into his own comic persona.As well as being inspired by the man’s cheekiness and imposing screen presence, Eric, with the help of his and Ernie’s producer John Ammonds, took the skip-dance that Groucho created in one of his films and modified it into the outro of each of their shows after they had sung ‘Bring Me Sunshine’. It remains perhaps the most vivid signature of Morecambe and Wise even today. I would go so far as to say it has become a symbol of seventies British light entertainment—the era of flared suits, gaudy colours, and politically incorrect gags.This image of Eric skipping away has adorned at least four biographies of Morecambe and Wise and a book of short stories of mine, was the basis of the poster for the West End tribute play The Play What I Wrote, and has been emulated in television ads such as those made for Marks & Spencer a few years ago and one shown in 2008 for a bedding company. Comic Relief also used the image in 2009 for their charity. Giant posters abounded showing Lenny Henry in the skip-dance pose, while wearing an Eric and Ernie T-shirt depicting the comics with red noses. It even appears throughout this book. And, to top it all, Sue Barker and John McEnroe emulated it to the sound of Eric and Ernie singing ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ as the two tennis presenters skipped across the rainswept Centre Court atWimbledon. I can’t imagine what Eric and Ernie would have made of all the fuss.They’d have been thrilled on one hand, no doubt, and utterly perplexed on the other.
The final piece in the creation of the BBC model of Eric Morecambe owed much to another great American comedy hero, Phil Silvers, who was born on 11 May 1911.The comic actor’s best-known work, and the one which influenced Eric, was The Phil Silvers Show aka Bilko!, in which Silvers played Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko.The plots were always inventive, the supporting cast sharp, and the scenes dominated by Silvers and his snappy comedy repartee.What Eric mostly admired was the way he had created this character that could devastate with a single line, and yet be the most charming person on the planet if it allowed him to get his own way.There is no better example of this in The Morecambe and Wise Show than when Eric confronts a guest star, one moment displaying utter charm and respect, the next being outrageously rude.A good example was when Alec Guinness walks up to them:
Eric (confidentially to Ernie):Watch out! There’s a drunk come on.
Or when the renowned opera singer John Hanson bursts into song:
Eric: Get off! We don’t want that rubbish here.
And there were many more, all pure Phil Silvers in terms of delivery and technique.
‘Eric took the skip-dance that Groucho created in one of his films and modified it into the outro of each of their shows.’
One final hero I should mention in passing, and who had absolutely nothing to do with comedy, was the late, great jazz musician Duke Ellington. Eric recalled how he came close to meeting his idol.
‘I was working in a theatre in Liverpool doing pantomime and Duke Ellington was due shortly to appear there. It happened to be that he was going to use the same dressing-room that I was in. I left him a short note saying,“Please help yourself to drink,” and so forth. He wrote me a lovely reply, being the kind man that he was, saying, “Hi there, thanks for the room, Eric…” and so on, and signed it the Duke.And I lost the damn thing. And I didn’t get around to going to his show, which is something I should have done…’
Some of the Duke’s courteous behaviour clearly rubbed off on Eric, for it was something I noticed shining through him down the years. He would always find a smile or a quip for anyone interested in him.The actor Tony Slattery recalled sharing a ride in a lift with him during which my father told Slattery that you can measure the character of a person by how they treat someone who is seemingly of no value to them. Maybe that’s how he came to judge Duke Ellington so highly.
Eric always admired the past masters of comedy, accepted his peers of comedy, and distrusted the youth of comedy that was breaking through in the early Eighties.‘Contemporary comics concern me slightly,’ he said.‘I worry because I feel there is very little talent coming up, but maybe I’m saying that because I am an old pro now. I don’t know. Perhaps I envy the fact that the newcomers are young and they have it all to go…’
That’s very telling, because I know my father so enjoyed his life and, perhaps as a direct consequence, always seemed to see himself and Ernie as the new kids on the block, despite the pa
ssing years.The fact that it had taken some twenty years to make a decent career and reach many millions of people was perhaps the root cause of their appearing forever new, fresh, vibrant, and of the moment. And I find the strangest thing of all, which sort of confirms this theory, is that when I watch new DVDs compilations or repeats of their shows I discover there is a timeless immediacy about them. It is almost as though they have stepped out in front of the camera that week; not the forty-odd years ago that it really is. Much of that is due to their immense talent as performers—the voices of ageless comedy delivered through two middle-aged men bickering over mostly surreal issues. As comedian and writer Ben Elton once observed, they were ‘the greatest alternative comedians of all time’. Much of it is in the writing of Eddie Braben—the affectedness of Ernie and the puncturing wit (Groucho and Phil Silvers-style) of Eric towards both Ernie and the numerous guest stars. It’s the product of complete teamwork.
Sir Michael Parkinson—universally known as ‘Parky’—told me,‘What made it interesting for me with Eric, was the fact that yes, we came roughly from the same part of the world—the north of England—but that Eric came from a long line of great names of northern comedy who were my heroes.
‘I was very aware of the variety hall tradition: Sandy Powell, Norman Collier, Jewell and Warris, Jimmy Tarbuck, Les Dawson. I admired these comedians enormously as they and their predecessors were not so much part of my childhood as my birthright.When eventually I came to do the Parkinson shows, I wanted to meet as many of these heroes as I possibly could.
‘I managed to interview Sandy Powell, for God’s sake! I managed to persuade the producer to allow him to do his famous vent act—filmed for posterity. Without doing that type of thing it would have been lost for ever.
‘And then at the height of their fame I interviewed Eric and Ernie for the first time,’ he says with a wistful smile. ‘You don’t get stars like Morecambe and Wise now. It’s hard for people today to understand just how truly big they were. I mean they were superstars.They were colossal.And television’s changed, so we won’t see the like of them again.’
I remember their first appearance in 1972 very clearly. It was the show when my father famously retold the story of the night of his heart attack in November 1968 when he and Ernie had been working near Leeds. It was also the show in which the previous guest before them was Raquel Welch.
‘One of the smartest moves Raquel Welch ever made in her career was saying to me, “No, I’m not going to go on with them!”
‘I’d been talking to Raquel in the interview about her equipment arriving, and as soon as Eric and Ernie came on after her piece, Eric said, “My equipment never arrived!”
‘It was interesting to see how Eric and Ernie could do a spot like they did on my show, and manage to give each other individual space,’ says ‘Parky’.‘It would have been very easy for Eric to overwhelm Ernie, but Eric knew when to involve his partner, and Ernie knew when to sit back and let Eric go.That takes a very deep understanding, which presumably comes from years of treading the boards together.’
Healthy, Wealthy… and Wise
‘I first met up with Ernie Wise when we were thirteen-year-olds doing turns on Youth Takes a Bow. I remember what I thought of him then. The only word for it was “strange”. But now I know him so much better I’ve changed that. He’s “very strange”.’
The beginning of the ‘golden era’ for Morecambe and Wise was heralded by the words ‘Thursday 25th December 1969 BBC1, 8.15pm-9.15pm, Guests: Susan Hampshire, Frankie Vaughan, Nina,Ann Hamilton and Janet Webb’.Those were the details in Radio Times of their first-ever Christmas special, a seminal event which would change everything.
With the nation’s unified love and expectation of the wonderful Morecambe and Wise Christmas Shows came a fame they had dreamed about as kids but never fully believed would be theirs; and with it a wealth that likewise went way beyond the modest expectations of their youth.And that was all fine and dandy. So what were the drawbacks?
I think that from my father’s point of view the stress of not only having spent years attaining what they set out in search of, but of now having endlessly to work to consolidate it, did some harm to his physical health. From having been hopefuls without much pressure beyond the basic desire to survive in the business—and they’d always managed that OK—they were catapulted into being the top act on the comedy heap.As frightening and heady as it was remarkable, this new situation placed great pressure on them. Many times before I’ve said that my father was never fully able to deal with responsibility and stress, and this he himself readily confirmed over the years.
My mother deliberately geared our home life to making everything easy for her husband, and we all understood, and for the most part did our best to meet, the need to make allowances for genius. But in the working environment, following Morecambe and Wise’s sudden elevation from what Eric jokingly described as ‘a cheap music-hall act’, they were now in all seriousness dubbed ‘the nation’s favourites’.
From Ernie Wise’s standpoint the downside of this success was that his role as straight man—one which even today has a vaguely derogatory connotation—was being given far closer critical scrutiny.This was right and understandable in so much as Eric was receiving the same examination for his comedic talents. But the fact remains that the lot of the straight man, which is a topic that surfaces repeatedly in this book, was and is a particularly tough one; and while Eric was arguably over-glorified for his unquestionable comic gifts, Ernie was ludicrously devalued for his own gifts.And gifts they clearly were, for what is a double act without two performers? As comedy double act Mitchell and Webb point out, Eric and Ernie are inseparable because what makes the comedy work is the combination of the two personalities.
Negativity has hovered over Ernie’s career ever since those original media examinations and mud eventually sticks. So perhaps it is hardly surprising, if not very pleasant, that over the decades several people have said to me,‘We love your dad but hate Ernie.’ I’ve always found this reaction slightly shocking.‘Love’ and ‘hate’ are such strong, emotive words to use in this context.We’re talking
about a wonderful comedy duo, not two dictators. It basically shows a lack of appreciation of the straight men of the comedy world. It says that we love funny men but don’t understand why they need a partner. Comedian Paul Merton said,‘I believe the people who don’t understand how these things work denigrated Ernie Wise down the years. It is the two of them together that is superb: there has never been a better double act.And Ernie is more than a straight man, but, if we have to use that term, there was never a better straight man.’
Dominic Cavendish picked up on this in a piece in the Daily Telegraph in 2007. Writing about Ernie’s development under the influence of their BBC scriptwriter Eddie Braben, he said:‘Wise had always been short, dapper, reassuringly ordinary. Now, as brought home by the daft playlets that ended each episode, he had aspirations to be a playwright, giving Morecambe even more opportunities to bring him down to earth.‘And he went on to quote an observation
my father made about his partner’s transformation.‘What Eddie Braben did for Ernie,’ Eric said,‘was to make him into a person. Before, anybody could have played his part. Not now. Ernie is his own man.’
The late, truly great Tony Hancock, referring to Clapham and Dwyer, a touring variety double act of the first half of the twentieth century, said of Billy Dwyer:‘He bore out what I have always felt about these comedy partnerships; that the straight man is invariably much funnier than he is credited with being.’
It’s a commonplace to say that you can’t have one without the other, but what some people fail to notice about double acts is the emotional support that the two partners give each other, and particularly in the early years, when the failures are far more frequent than the successes. Ernie kept Eric grounded and was responsible for making him great. Certainly Eric was a very funny man since the day he entered showbiz—according to some o
f the interviewees in this book,
funny from the moment he was born—but without the stabilizing presence and unique abilities of Ernie at his side, he might have been a lost talent, a comic run adrift without the support he needed to be the comedian we came to love and even idolize. Ernie knew just when to pull Eric back and just when to let him go: Eric was the loose cannon, Ernie the grounded, calming influence.
‘Ernie gave Eric something to bounce off,’ commented Paul Merton. ‘If Ernie slipped up, Eric would be in like a shot: and if all else failed, he could slap him around the face and say, “You can’t see the join.” Brilliant stuff!’
But the greatest reality check of all is to understand that Eric himself said he could never have done any of it without Ernie. Notice, he didn’t say he could never have done it without a partner. For Eric it had to be Ernie.And in an interview nearly thirty years ago he said,‘There is no one better…he is the greatest
straight man in the country.’ Ernie was there to complement Eric.And he never sought to get one over him by trying to win the laughs himself or by complaining—publicly, at least, and that is where it mattered—that Eric was getting most of the plaudits.That must have taken a good deal of courage and common sense, because Ernie could be very, very funny when he was allowed to be, which by design was mostly when away from the cameras.And when you’re in a double act it is imperative that you find your partner funny.As author John Fisher says,‘The real key to [Morecambe and Wise’s] popularity is in the loyalty and camaraderie that binds the two, each obviously regarding the other as a genuinely funny man, a camaraderie never impaired in the audience’s view by Ernie’s show of pomposity or Eric’s barbed defiance.The point is that for all Eric’s protestations to the contrary—Morecambe and Wise—well, you really can’t see the join.’
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