‘Eric and Ernie had done it the hard way,’ points out Michael Parkinson, alluding to the oneness of their relationship.‘They came through the halls and basically served an apprenticeship which doesn’t exist now. I’m sure being stars on television was never easy, but it must have been better than stepping out to unforgiving audiences at the Glasgow Empire to the sound of your own footfalls! You have to be a very special type of person to survive and become stars like Morecambe and Wise did.
‘But think of it; twenty-five years after your Dad died and ten years after Ernie died, and we can sit here together and still laugh just by reminiscing.’
I was watching the latest Morecambe and Wise DVD put together by the BBC. It’s arguably the best of the lot in that it covers what is left of their first series in 1968, when Eric and Ernie were still in formulaic straight-man-funny-man mode and the scripts were, as ever, supplied by Sid Green and Dick Hills. In other words, it is the Morecambe and Wise of the ATV Lew Grade years but in their earliest BBC incarnation.While it’s of historic interest to see the little that still remains from this first series, what makes the DVD somewhat remarkable, and this is an accidental by-product of the compilation, is the contrast between the two definitive eras of the first series in 1968 and the second series in 1969. And it would be the second series which would
define how their double act would become loved and remembered, it seems, for ever.
The one reason for this is that by the time this second series had been screened, Eric had nearly died at the age of forty-two from his first heart attack. Hills and Green—perhaps in fear of his failing to recover from it—had abandoned ship for other projects, and now Eddie Braben was not only at the helm in terms of writing much of their material, but had redefined Eric and Ernie’s working relationship to make it more akin to Laurel and Hardy in content and style, as discussed earlier. Essentially, Eddie had developed in script form the Eric and Ernie he discovered when meeting them—warm, gentle, caring, and closer than brothers. And this he had to do because, he was the first to admit, he didn’t believe in the double act in its original format.‘No one can be that stupid!’ he said, going on to add,‘What we never saw [in the ATV series] was the genuine warmth that existed between them. I always felt that Ernie was too hard; too abrasive. He had this charming innocence, but you never saw that in the act. He was the typical feed.’
A day or two after watching the DVD I came across a Daily Telegraph article about this very product which correctly noted that this second series was ‘when “Bring Me Sunshine” becomes their signature tune’. But what I liked most about the piece was its summing-up:‘Watching this DVD is a reminder that, although they sometimes had duff lines, they never gave a duff performance. Though the age they embodied grew stale to the palate, they were fresh like no other double-act—before or since.‘That nails it for me. It is what I have always said and always believed: Eric and Ernie transcended the fashions, attitudes, politics, and so on of any period in which they worked. It is as though they were grabbed from a timeless place and put in front of a camera and allowed to chat and occasionally run riot. Each show almost resembles an exceptionally well-made home movie:‘This is Eric and Ernie in a studio garden having fun’ sort of thing.‘Here we see them dancing down the street like Gene Kelly.’
What each show doesn’t do is deliberately and frequently reflect upon life as it was lived at that time.This is of paramount importance to their continued success for, like Laurel and Hardy, while they clearly come from a specific timeframe, what they are seen doing within that timeframe is timeless. Their material contains so few pointers to the nature of the era that they cannot become victims of changing outlooks and tastes.
Under Braben’s influence both Eric and Ernie became distinct characters. Ernie more so, perhaps, through his on-screen pretensions to be a playwright, but Eric too was sharper than in previous decades. Eddie had seen to that, washing away the gormless funny man of yesteryear as if he had never existed.
Dominic Cavendish, again in the Telegraph, describes Eric as ‘that maniclimbed, maverick-minded man-child, [who] could turn, say, some throwaway chatter about his hand (“My hand, if you realise, my hand has been everywhere with me”) into a pitch-perfect comic soliloquy, punctuated as ever by nudges of those black-rimmed specs.’
Eric’s Groucho-cum-Phil Silvers repartee with their guest stars is another key to their great success. Of their guest stars, Ernie once said, ‘No one has ever been difficult to work with during rehearsal, or objected to the sketches
we’ve asked them to play in.‘And Eric added, ‘We’re always amazed at how professional all our guests are. None of them is ever late for rehearsals.Well, all except one—Glenda Jackson. She went to our old rehearsal place…No one had told her we’d moved!’
Eric recalled Dad’s Army star Arthur Lowe appearing on one of their shows (along with most of the Dad’s Army cast, if I recall correctly):‘Arthur Lowe is another whose professionalism impressed us.You could give him fifteen pages of script and the next morning he would turn up word-perfect.’
Arguably their most famous guest star in their most famous show (which included Shirley Bassey and the ‘boot’ incident) was André Previn conducting Grieg’s Piano Concerto with Eric as pianist. Eric said,‘André arrived on Monday morning for rehearsals and said he was sorry but would have to miss rehearsals the following day because he wanted to visit his sick mother.We nearly collapsed when he said she lived in Los Angeles…When we started rehearsals he was word-perfect.We thought he’d been learning his lines on the long flights. But he hadn’t. He learned the script by torchlight in the back of a taxi coming from the airport!’
Michael Parkinson told me,‘The Morecambe and Wise Andre Previn sketch will last as long as human beings have a sense of humour. It’s a genuinely classic piece of comedy.’
But, amid all the spectacle of guest stars and lavish sets, Morecambe and Wise worked so well on TV because of the relationship between two middleaged men—a surreal relationship of remembered schooldays sleights, crushes on the opposite sex, and contretemps with teachers.
‘Eric and Ernie transcended the fashions, attitudes, politics, and so on of any period in which they worked.’
Eric and Ernie’s careers progressed steadily along their chosen path but there were two notable diversions. One was their journey into film-making, the other a few appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York. Both occurred during the sixties, which in itself is illuminating as they pre-date two other colossal events in their lives—Eric’s first and near-fatal heart attack and their move from ATV to the BBC, where their star rose meteorically.The heart attack meant a temporary (though it was to prove permanent, at least as a double act) break from making big-screen films, and their arrival at the BBC to make The Morecambe and Wise Show brought about the new comedy team of Morecambe and Wise…and Braben.And, with the great John Ammonds in charge of production, the team was complete.
Eddie Braben, a Liverpudlian scriptwriter who had written for many, including the likes of Ken Dodd, was, as already mentioned, the first member of any creative team involving Morecambe and Wise to transform their professional personas.The days of Eric as the classic gormless funny man of the variety halls, and Ernie as the classic aggressive, know-it-all straight man, were all at once over.There was to be no gentle drift into the new comedy format—Eric and Ernie’s first outing under Braben at the BBC introduced them as the polished and complete article. Braben created in Ernie Wise a man of some affectation who believed he wrote better plays than wot Shakespeare did! Eric he changed little, said Braben himself: it was more about taking out the simpleton and general fallibilities of his implausible stage persona. Eric, with his love of Groucho Marx and Phil Silvers, was in any case already redefining his own screen persona, becoming a sharper, shrewder funny man.This meant a slight shift away from his heroes Laurel and Hardy—though not in the mechanics of how his and Ernie’s act worked—and into a faster-paced, ad-libbed style
of humour where everything was delivered with energy and there was less emphasis on the traditional double-act staple of the idiot and the bigger idiot.What we now had, thanks to Braben, was one character who was worldly and superior but naive and pretentious (Ernie) and another who was devious and easily capable of pulling the wool over his partner’s eyes while simultaneously protecting him from outside forces (Eric).What made this relationship an improvement on the standard double act of the time—including Eric and Ernie’s partnership on ATV—was that both Eric and Ernie were free to have genuine personas: no longer were they tied to the strict format of stooge and funny man, which had
been on display for over a century in music halls and then variety venues.Also this was the era in which Morecambe and Wise brought choreographer-producer Ernest Maxin into the mix to give their shows the Hollywood touch.
‘No longer were they tied to the strict format of stooge and funny man, which had been on display for over a century in music halls and then variety venues.’
‘If Ern had his way, and this is just my opinion,’ wrote Eddie Braben in his memoir The Book What I Wrote, ‘I think he would have been very happy if the shows had all been one long Hollywood-style musical with perhaps a couple of comedy routines in between.’
For his part Ernie Wise had always felt a hunger for Morecambe and Wise to be an established American act.And that might have happened.
New York!
New York!
‘When I arrived I took a cab to my hotel, the Waldorf Astoria. Although American hotels are very good, the room I’m in isn’t!’
Half a decade before their hugely successful television collaboration with Braben, Eric and Ernie, at that time still in their original format, believed they were on the road to fame in America—about to metamorphose into a Hope and Crosby or Martin and Lewis. And this might well have happened despite Eric’s lack of enthusiasm for the idea.
In a rather timely way, as I write this chapter my sister Gail has just received an email from a Morecambe and Wise fan in the United States, which, if it proves anything, shows that at least one person recalls their visits there.
Producer Ed Sullivan had seen their act at the London Palladium and, like the British audiences, took to them at once.An invitation to New York to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show followed and they accepted, as they did repeatedly over the next three or four years, the arrangement only ceasing for a while after Eric’s heart attack in 1968.When he had recovered, the door was open once again, but by then he had had enough of many stressful things in his life. Sullivan, who greatly appreciated British comedians, before extending the honour to Eric and Ernie, had invited the talented Norman Wisdom on to his show.
In revisiting Eric’s diaries, some parts of which have been published previously, I browsed through the section which covers the years they spent working in New York on The Ed Sullivan Show. They make great reading, if only because they give a colourful sense of time and place and small but incisive glimpses into Eric and Ernie’s working relationship and where Eric’s sensibilities lay, as well as his general state of health and mind. His references to air travel, hotels, and the general way of life paint a past, if not forgotten, era, as he delivers a glimpse of a more innocent, optimistic decade. These particular entries I include in full as that is how they were intended to be read.You can tell from some of the comments and observations and the general tone that the diary was written for a wider readership than just the author himself at a later date.The extracts record a time in Morecambe and Wise’s career that has until now been vague, to say the least, but now at last we have some details of what went on during the visits to New York and how Eric came to feel about it all.
These entries, which my father recorded after Morecambe and Wise’s arrival at the BBC, cover the final three appearances the double act made on a New York stage.
The first group of entries follow the order in which they appear in the diary, but they are entirely undated. Since the entries that come after these are headed ‘November 1967’, it is fair to assume that the previous trip was in the winter of 1966-7. References to the weather certainly suggest as much. Occasionally I have added comments between the entries to clarify or elaborate on what Eric is talking about.
35,000 feet up, so the pilot said. I’m not going to argue with him.At this moment I’m in a Boeing 707 1st Class, flying over the Atlantic to New York. Ernie and I are going to do a show for Ed Sullivan.This is now the tenth show we have done for Sullivan in America…Although I’m not keen on flying I must say I enjoy the trip. Mind you, I do get very good treatment. I’m met at Heathrow by Pan Am reps, and whisked off to a little VIP room. Also, I’m met at Kennedy by more Pan Am reps, and taken through very quickly. On Pan Am you are well looked after. You get a good meal, all you can drink and a film.You have to pay £1 extra for the film, but it helps to pass the seven hours.
When I arrived I took a cab to my hotel, the Waldorf Astoria.Although American hotels are very good, the room I’m in isn’t!
I met Ernie atTed Elkort’s office at 4.30pm on 35 West 53rd. I stayed at the office until 7.30 so I could go out with Ted for a meal. But I was so tired I felt ill, so we just had a drink together, and I went back to the hotel. I was in bed at 9.30pm. It’s just started snowing outside. It’s very cold.
Waldorf—New York Got up this morning 9.30am. Still snowing and very cold. It’s 15 degrees below freezing!
I walked downstairs from the twenty-first floor, and took a walk around the block.Then I returned for breakfast.This afternoon, Ern and I went to the Sullivan office to have a word with Tim, the producer. He was quite happy with the bit we’re planning to do.
It’s late afternoon—‘Cocktail Hour’—which I’m all for! Had a couple of drinks at the Essex House, where Ernie is staying, then back to the hotel. Watched some TV, which if you compare to British TV…well, to me they know nothing.Ate, then went to bed early.
While on this occasion the producer was happy with the piece Eric and Ernie had chosen to perform on the show, it was not always the case. In his autobiography Ernie talks of changes which had to be made to suit the sensibilities of the American public. I’ve always found this odd, considering it’s the most violent ‘civilized’ country on the planet.‘Ed Sullivan was charm itself…‘ wrote Ernie.’I would rate his performing skills rather lower than his entrepreneurial know-how…Much of the material had to be adjusted to suit what we were told was the “Bible Belt” audience.The remotest reference, no matter how oblique, to anything which might just possibly be construed as “immoral” was cut…We had a ventriloquist routine with a standard evening-suited dummy sitting on Eric’s lap. I came up to him and said, “I never knew you were interested in it?”
‘To which Eric replied,“I’m not any more. I’m too old.That’s why I took this up!”
‘Too risqué.The joke was cut…Anyway, our act went through numerous changes but, in my opinion, if not Eric’s, it still worked—just.’
Waldorf—New York, next day
Today is a hard day.Two or three run-throughs at the theatre on Broadway, now called ‘The Ed Sullivan Theatre’. A quick lunch then a music run in the afternoon. Saw the names ‘Morecambe and Wise’ on the front of the theatre. First time on Broadway. Mind you, it won’t be there for long—we do the show tomorrow, so it will by taken down by tomorrow night.
Got back to the hotel, and phone is flashing message. It’s Fred Harris, an Englishman who lives in New York and works for the Grade-Delfont office.Also works for himself.Anyway, I said,‘Come round and have a drink, Fred,’ which he did. We stayed drinking in the Waldorf as it was too cold to go out.
We slowly got pissed, then had a bowl of soup downstairs in the café.This would be 12.30. I then said ‘Goodnight.’ He didn’t speak, managed to get into a cab and went home. I went to my furnace of a room and fell asleep instantly. Didn’t even switch on the TV!
Next day
It’s thick snow outside; it’s thick hammers inside my head!
It’s ‘show time’ morning. Got to get down to the Sullivan Theatre for 9.15. Now try and be funny at that time in the morning! But it’s got to be done.
We rehearse and hang about the theatre all day. Fred comes round before the show. Then the show is over. ‘They’ say it’s gone well. I’m not happy about it, and nor is the ‘Boy Wonder’*. But ‘they’ are, so much so Ed asked us out to
dinner with him that night.We go to Danny’s Hideaway on Lexington, and have a very informal and most enjoyable evening. Bed around 12.
Next day
Well, I’m going back home tonight. Back to 35,000 feet again, and this time I shan’t be sorry. It’s twenty-nine degrees below freezing, and that to me is cold!…I’ve checked out of the hotel and taken all my cases to the Essex House.Taxi at 7.15, airport 8,VIP room 8.30. 9.15, not drunk but happy. Great. In the VIP room I met [the ballet dancer] Alicia Markova’s sister. We had quite a long chat, both her and her sister are big fans, which never fails to amaze me. She’s on the plane leaving before mine…
The whole of the country [UK] was covered in a tremendous fall of snow…ours was the first plane in that morning. Very thrilling. Really all this took place on Tuesday morning, but I’m writing on New York time!
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