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.

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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

ERIC | Let’s face it: he’s half a star, isn’t he?
ERNIE | Yes: I’m half a star.

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:

WIFE
Are you going to cut that grass or are you waiting till it comes in the hall?

HUSBAND
Er, what d’you mean, love?

WIFE
That garden’s a disgrace! You don’t seem to have any interest in it at all. First time the neighbours see you with a pair of shears in your hand they’ll swear you’re out for bother! And shift your feet – I’ve asked you to fill that coal bucket twice and you’ve cracked on you’ve not heard me! What we weren’t going to have in that garden – hanging baskets, a lily pond and goodness knows what! And what have we got? An air-raid shelter full of water and a tin hat with a daisy in it!

HUSBAND
Now, what time have I –

WIFE
Finds time next door! He’s made some beautiful shapes out of his privets – love birds and all sorts. I wouldn’t care, but he always does our hedge up to the gate. The only time I got you to do his, you went and cut the tail off his peacock!

HUSBAND
Well, I gave it ’im back!¹⁷

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).

These triangular conversations would be revived on television in the seventies whenever a special guest would wander on to the stage to join Morecambe and Wise, with the guest on one side, Ernie on the other, and Eric, always running things, in the middle:

ERIC | (looking up at Vanessa Redgrave) Good lord! Are you on a box or (glancing down at Ernie) is he standing in a hole?
ERNIE | Eric – Miss Redgrave …
ERIC | (kissing her hand) Vanilla, how are you?
REDGRAVE | Vanessa.
ERIC | Oh? (kisses hand again) Tastes like vanilla. We had your dad on one of our shows, you know.
REDGRAVE | He’s never forgotten it.
ERNIE | They never do.
ERIC | Very talented man, your dad. The way he played those spoons up and down his legs! Fantastic! Dessert spoons as well – they can be painful if you miss …

‘Whenever you hear me using any of your dad’s material,’ Eric Morecambe told Jimmy James’s son, ‘there are two reasons. One is because it’s a kind of tribute, and the other is because it’s very funny. But mostly’, he added, ‘it’s because it’s very funny.’²⁰ All of the other old routines were drawn on for very much the same reason: they still seemed very funny.

‘Look at that,’ Robb Wilton is reputed to have said, watching from the wings as an acrobatic troupe clambered up on to each other’s shoulders, balanced themselves on chairs that were in turn balanced on tall poles and then spun themselves around at a dizzying speed. ‘All that’, muttered Wilton, shaking his head incredulously, ‘just because the buggers are too lazy to learn a comic song.’²¹ The same sly irreverence, the same effortless timing, the same sharp response to someone else’s airs and graces, could be found, all those years later, in Eric Morecambe’s remorseless teasing of Ernie Wise’s pretensions to being part of something altogether grander than a mere cheap music-hall act.

Early on in their shared career, when their prospects seemed bleak, Ernie Wise was heard to complain: ‘We’re Northern … You can’t win if you’re Northern.’²² He could not, as far as the future of Morecambe and Wise was concerned, have been more wrong.

CHAPTER II
Morecambe before Wise

I’m an enigma, a one-off.

ERIC MORECAMBE

Eric Morecambe was fond of informing people that he had taken his name from the place of his birth: Eric. His real name, in fact, was John Eric Bartholomew, and the actual place of his birth was the small North Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe.¹

He came, as he often said, from an ordinary working-class family.² His father, George Bartholomew, had worked as a labourer for the Morecambe and Heysham Corporation since leaving school at the age of fourteen. His mother, Sarah (‘Sadie’) Elizabeth Bartholomew (née Robinson), had worked as a cotton weaver and later as a waitress, but she was often obliged to take on a variety of part-time jobs in order to supplement a very modest family income.

They had, in terms of background, much in common with each other. Both came from large families: George had seven brothers and three sisters, Sadie three sisters and two brothers. George had grown up in Morecambe, Sadie in nearby Lancaster. Both had known considerable hardship, and both – each in their own distinctive ways – harboured hopes of a less onerous future.

As personalities, however, they were stark opposites. George, a tall, thin man with a long, narrow face, slightly protruding ears, sharp, attentive eyes and a hairstyle topped off by a Stan Laurel tuft, was by all accounts an even-tempered, warm, happy-go-lucky character who always gave the impression of being more concerned with enjoying what he had than with yearning for what he continued to lack. Sadie, a short, somewhat thick-set woman with dark curly hair, faintly quizzical grey eyes, full cheeks, a sharp wit and, if anything, an even sharper tongue, was a naturally intelligent, imaginative, doughty woman who, had she been born in more propitious times and more fortunate circumstances, might well have pursued an interesting and rewarding career of her own.

They had met at a dance at the Winter Gardens in Morecambe, but their respective reactions to the occasion said much, in retrospect, about their subsequent relationship: whereas George had been sufficiently impressed by Sadie to consider the possibility of an open-ended series of dates, Sadie had decided, there and then, that George Bartholomew was the man she would marry. Sadie got her way. A relatively short time after, on 26 February 1921, they were married in nearby Accrington. Their first and only child, John Eric, was born – somewhat unexpectedly – at 12.30 p.m. on 14 May 1926 (‘If my father hadn’t been so shy I would have been two years older.’³) in the front living-room of a neighbour’s house at 42 Buxton Street, Morecambe.⁴ The Bartholomew family’s own house, at 48 Buxton Street, would be the house that Eric would come to think of as his first home, but he and his parents could not have stayed there for more than a few short months, because the building was by then in a state of terminal disrepair.

His first vivid memory, he would always say, was of the ceiling having fallen in: ‘I remember being lifted on to the kitchen table by my mother and having my coat pulled on and my scarf tied round my neck, and being taken out of the house.’⁵ He would have been no more than ten months old at the time.⁶ The unwelcome and unexpected period of disruption turned out, however, to have been something of a blessing in disguise, because the local Corporation relocated the family into a relatively new and reassuringly sturdy council house – ‘with three bedrooms and an outside loo’⁷ – at 43 Christie Avenue. A measure of stability and security for the Bartholomews had, at last, been achieved.

The next few years were, Eric would admit, ‘hazy’⁸ in his memory, but his mother likened her infant son to ‘a little doll with a head of blond curls’.⁹ He was, it seems, a rather precocious baby, beginning to walk at around nine or ten months old, and learning to speak soon after that. Sadie would always insist, sometimes over the top of her adult son’s meek objections, that he was a born performer:

We had a gramophone and he knew every record we possessed. It’s clear in my memory … He would come in and say, ‘What do you want playing?’ ‘Play me so and so,’ I’d say. He would go through the records, and though he couldn’t read, he would find the very one I had named, put it on, and start dancing to it.

Whenever we took him out to relatives, all he wanted to do was perform ... ‘I want to do my party piece. I want to sing and dance.’

‘Wait a minute, love,’ he would be told.

I remember one particular night when the pianist told him to wait, and he said, ‘All right, I’ll wait under the table.’ He must have been about three. From time to time he would announce, ‘I’m here, and I’m still waiting.’¹⁰

Eric could, Sadie recalled, be ‘quite a handful.’¹¹ Both she and her husband had to remember never to leave their front door ajar; they knew that little Eric, had he ever glimpsed a chink of light through the narrowest of gaps, would have pushed the door wide open and wandered off down the street in search of adventure. Whenever Sadie needed to take him shopping with her she found that the only thing she could do to keep him still while she prepared for the trip was to tie him by his scarf to the door-knob and let him sit outside on the step. Even this, however, was sometimes not enough to hold him: on one occasion he managed to convince a passerby that he had tied himself – as part of some obscure prank – too tightly to the door, and needed the assistance of a kind-hearted individual to help him get free. An anxious Sadie tracked him down, eventually, to a damp and dirty building site some distance away at the bottom of Lancaster Road. She found him entertaining the workers by reciting nursery rhymes and performing such songs as ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’, and encouraging them to reward him by tossing coins into his strategically positioned tam-o’-shanter:

When I got there his little white suit was spattered with mud, his shoes and socks were caked where he had squelched through a really sticky patch, and his face was filthy. He saw me and announced to his audience, ‘I’d better go now, there’s me Mam.’

One of the builders said, ‘That little lad’s a wonderful entertainer.’

‘I’ll entertain him when I get him home,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Eric, ‘that means I will have to have my bottom slapped, won’t I, Mum?’

‘You’ve never spoken a truer word.’

‘Well, folks,’ said Eric to his audience, ‘I’ll have to be going. Goodbye everybody. See you tomorrow.’¹²

It was, in spite of the usual kind of deprivations and occasional crises experienced by all working-class families of the period, a happy childhood. ‘I have wonderful memories of both my mother and father,’ Eric would later remark, ‘absolutely fantastic memories, and I think of them a lot and with great happiness.’¹³ The gentle, easy-going George, his family always said, would start whistling contentedly to himself ‘from the moment his feet touched the ground each morning’.¹⁴ He took great pleasure in spending time with his son watching football matches (often at the modest little ground of Morecambe FC; sometimes, as an occasional treat, thirty miles away at Deepdale, the altogether more impressive stadium of Preston North End). George would also take Eric fishing, or picking mushrooms in the fields around their home, and sometimes for long and rambling walks around the town reminiscing about his own childhood days and telling elaborate, funny stories that frequently concealed unexpected twists in their tail. Sadie, Eric remembered, had less time to spare – understandably – for casual outings, but whenever her work brought her into contact with any aspect of the entertainment world she would make a point of bringing him along for a tantalising glimpse behind the scenes. When an opportunity did present itself for a family excursion of some kind or another it was always made the most of. A photograph dating from 1932, for example, pictures what appears to be the end of a very enjoyable afternoon out in the sun, with George, Sadie and Eric sitting down close together on the grass, their makeshift tent standing behind them, all smiling broadly and each with a ukulele in their hands.

Although Eric was an only child he did not want for the companionship of friends of his own age. He was well liked by most of the other children in the area. He joined in all the chaotic games of football with the other boys in the park at the back of Christie Avenue, and accompanied several of his friends on their regular visits to Halfway House – the local sweet shop. On most weekends, he queued with his cousin ‘Sonny’ Threlfall outside the Palladium cinema – known affectionately as ‘The Ranch’ – to see the latest movies (Westerns were his favourite) and, during relatively uneventful moments, fire peashooters at bald-headed men in the rows below.

Morecambe – like most English seaside resorts – was a place of stark, seasonal contrasts: cold, dull and quiet in the winter months; warm, bright and noisy in the summer months. Eric, looking back on his childhood, would describe his memories of his home town as ‘serene and ageless. They emerge vivid and sharp. Happy and bright, not dull and ugly.’¹⁵ One of the clearest images was of seeing his parents share the ‘supreme joy’ of sitting together and ‘watching the Turneresque sunset over Morecambe Bay’.¹⁶

The town, in those days, was often referred to formally as part of a broader area – ‘Morecambe and Heysham’. Morecambe, as Eric would take pleasure in pointing out, ‘was a double act long before I met Ernie’.¹⁷ Spring, as far as Eric was concerned, was the season that marked the town’s sudden re-awakening, and summer the enchanting time when the town ‘became a different place’.¹⁸ As the temperature began to rise and the sun started to shine, the town moved rapidly from being a rather insular and unobtrusive Lancashire town to become a lively centre for recreation, a welcoming place that boasted all kinds of entertainment.

Morecambe – the ‘Naples of the North’, a ‘smaller Blackpool’¹⁹ – was at this time in the process of creeping gentrification. The process culminated in the early thirties with the establishment of the art deco Midland Hotel, an ambitiously lavish new high-style building on the seaward side of the promenade that soon attracted the likes of David Niven, Mrs Wallis Simpson and Noël Coward. In the summer, as the holiday season began and strangers flocked to the town from all directions, it was, said Eric, ‘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 £3 a week, full board at the town’s desirable residences.’²⁰

On the sands, littered with sleepy bodies slouched deep in deckchairs and mazy formations of energetic boys and girls, the regular daily entertainment was provided by ‘the Nigger Minstrels’ – ‘then undeterred’, Eric would later note, ‘by the racial overtones of their titles’.²¹ They would sometimes hold talent contests, and Eric, whenever possible, would enter them – winning on at least three occasions (after his last success, he recalled, ‘They found out I was a local boy and stopped me from entering.’²²). Summer also brought with it the prospect of a chance sighting of a visiting celebrity, and Eric was particularly excited one year to see ‘the magnificent’ portly British movie star Sydney Howard²³ – fresh from appearing in Shipyard Sally (1939) alongside Gracie Fields – strolling sedately along the pier. The season always ended with the relatively modest but rather beautiful illuminations, a final few visits to the ‘fairyland’ of Happy Mount Park and the first chill winds that accompanied the holidaymakers’ ‘final glimpse of annual escape’.²⁴

‘I was proud’, Eric would say, ‘to know that people came to my town for a holiday. It always seemed a pity that they couldn’t stop the whole year round [because] in those golden growing up years, there was a sort of magic about Morecambe. It had a lot to offer and I took it.’²⁵ The one place in town, however, where it seems that he usually took rather less than was being offered him was the classroom: ‘I wasn’t just hopeless in class,’ he said. ‘I was terrible.’²⁶ This was, typically, something of an exaggeration – he was far from being a slow-witted young boy, and there is some evidence to suggest that he showed a reasonable aptitude for certain subjects,²⁷ but, nevertheless, school was never a place that would ever be able to command his full attention.

He attended two schools in Morecambe: Lancaster Road Junior and then, with markedly less frequency and enthusiasm, Euston Road Senior. He was, to begin with, happy enough to set off there each morning – particularly because Sadie allowed him to take with him a bag of his favourite confection – ‘cocoa dip’, a mixture of cocoa powder and sugar: ‘The idea was to have the bag open in my coat pocket and keep dipping a wet finger into the mixture ... at regular intervals on the way to school. It was like nectar.’²⁸

In time, however, a combination of boredom and, increasingly, absenteeism ensured that the standard of his work declined alarmingly: ‘I spent most of my time’, he later confessed, ‘in the school lavatory smoking anything I could ignite.’²⁹ Sadie, who had hoped that her son would do well enough to go to a grammar school, was too attentive a mother to have remained unaware of the problem for very long, but, when the school reports started to underline just how poorly he was faring, she felt shocked and angry.

One report in particular, which arrived at the Bartholomew house early in April 1936, announced curtly that the nine-year-old Eric was forty-fifth out of forty-nine pupils (although, judging from his marks, it is not at all clear how he managed to come ahead of the other four). A teacher’s scribbled addendum – ‘He was absent most of the exams’ – pointed out an obvious contributory factor.³⁰ Sadie (it appears that George left such responsibilities to her) wrote back to the school immediately, declaring on the back of the same sheet: ‘I am disgusted with this report, and I would be obliged if you would make him do more homework,’ adding, menacingly as far as Eric was concerned, ‘I would see he did it here.’³¹ She, typically, was determined that her son should arrest his dizzying decline as speedily as possible and then – she hoped – start to improve. After visiting his school and talking to several of his teachers, however, Sadie was, eventually, forced to accept the fact that he was never going to achieve the academic success she had dreamed of. ‘Mrs Bartholomew,’ said the headmaster, ‘I’ve been teaching boys for thirty years. Take my advice. It would be a complete waste of time [to expect any improvement].’ She had offered to pay for further tuition but was told, ‘It would be money down the drain.’³²

This rejection only seemed to spur Sadie on in her search for a suitable career for Eric. It surprised no one who knew her that she reacted to the undeniably deep disappointment of this setback in such a remarkably spirited and positive manner. Her most passionate wish was for her son to grow up to five a better and more rewarding life than either she or her husband had known, and, even if that wish did not seem likely to be realised through academic achievement, she was not prepared to abandon it. Eric’s widow, Joan – who would in later years come to know Sadie extremely well – stressed how committed she was to her son’s betterment:

She really was a good woman. She was hard, yes, in some ways, but she had to be a hard woman in that kind of harsh environment. She wasn’t the sort of pushy ‘stage mother’ that some people have portrayed her as being. She didn’t keep pushing Eric because she wanted fame and fortune through her child. She was much too fair and too intelligent for that to be her motive. Everything she did, she did for Eric’s sake. Just after Eric was born, George had had a terrible accident playing football, he’d broken his leg, and they’d wanted to amputate it, the breaks were so severe. He’d refused, and luckily his leg was OK, but it was something like two years before he was able to work again – and all through that time Sadie went out to work while George stayed at home with Eric, and she really had to work to keep them all going. That was the great strength these people had, and Sadie was not just strong but also, in so many ways, so shrewd and far-seeing.³³

‘It’s up to me’, Sadie said to her son, ‘to see that you are never tied to a whistle like your dad.’³⁴ Her problem now was to find an alternative means to achieve that dream.

The solution, when she thought about it, seemed obvious if also fraught with serious risks and the threat of future hazards. If Eric was too distracted to succeed at school, she reasoned, then she would have to make the source of his distraction into his principal vocation. He was not only a natural performer, she felt, but he also had, like many of his contemporaries, a growing fascination for the world of entertainment. Entertaining people, thrilling them, making them laugh and applaud, seemed a marvellous job, whether it involved racing up and down the wings of a football pitch or standing on the stage of a music-hall. Eric, while unsure of how suited he really was to such a world, would certainly have known that, for a working-class youth, it represented a possible escape from a future of endless toil in humble circumstances.

He would, he said, ‘have liked to have been a professional footballer. Purely and simply because it meant £5 a week. That was a lot of money. My father was getting 30 bob. Five pounds a week for playing a game of football I thought was easy. But I was never ever big or strong enough.’³⁵ Such physical limitations would not, however, preclude a career on the stage, or, indeed, the screen, as other youthful British-born performers from working-class backgrounds – such as Charlie Chaplin (from South London) and Stan Laurel (from Ulverston, just the other side of Morecambe Bay) – had already demonstrated. This was also, of course, a period when the precocious child star – such as Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and the London-born boy with the very familiar surname, Freddie Bartholomew – was firmly in fashion. This was, as Joan Morecambe put it, ‘all dream stuff’,³⁶ and Sadie allowed herself, just a little, to dream.

Eric had become an avid movie-goer, showing particular enthusiasm for – besides the ubiquitous Westerns – comedians such as Will Hay, Laurel and Hardy (it was the era of Our Relations, Way Out West and Block-Heads), Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton (both of whom were long past their best but whose classic shows were still in circulation) and – hugely popular at the time – Abbott and Costello (in such box-office successes as Who Done It? and Pardon My Sarong). His admiration for Variety performers such as Arthur Askey grew through listening to him regularly on the wireless (the BBC started broadcasting Band Waggon in 1938); and he could hardly have failed to have been impressed by the extraordinary national celebrity of George Formby Junior.

Formby – guided by his formidable wife, Beryl – had gone from the difficult early days of playing the Northern music-halls in the shadow of his then famous father to first stage and then screen stardom. He held the enviable position of top British box-office attraction from 1937 to 1943 with the help of such movies as I See Ice and Trouble Brewing and such popular songs as ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ and ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’. Eric was by no means an unequivocal fan, even in those days, of everything Formby was famous for – the songs, he thought, were wonderful, but ‘as a comic he was about as funny as a cry for help’³⁷ – but he did, none the less, come to think of him as something of a personal hero. It is not difficult to imagine why.

Formby, with his flattened vowels and thickened twang, the general air of under-nourishment about him and that spectacularly unfortunate face that seemed forever pressed tight against the outside of a fìsh-and-chip shop window, must have appeared triumphantly, perhaps even deliriously, ‘ordinary’. A popular anecdote from that time – probably apocryphal but quite believable none the less – had a young boy point to a poster outside a theatre and ask his father, ‘Dad, is that George Formby?’ His father is said to have nodded and replied, ‘Yes, and if you keep playing with yourself you’ll end up looking like that!’³⁸ Although he was not, in reality, from the conventional working-class background that his image suggested, he was, like Eric, a Lancastrian, and, with his humorous songs that poked unpretentious fun at the back-street lives, humdrum experiences and minor embarrassments of his public, he was a professional performer who never seemed to let down those who identified with him. At a time when more than two million people found themselves face to face with what George Orwell called ‘the frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work’,³⁹ and thousands more than that were contemplating a probable future of bleak immobility and deadly deprivation, George Formby, however implausibly, seemed an inspirational figure.

Sadie was convinced that Eric, if only he applied himself to the task, had the ability to become, like Formby, a professional performer. She made every effort to encourage him to explore his latent talents. It would not, she appreciated, be easy: she had a name for him – ‘Jifflearse’⁴⁰ – that had been inspired by the strange, nervy restlessness that characterised so much of his behaviour, and it would be heard often, and at high decibels, during the months that followed. She did succeed in persuading him to learn how to play the piano, the clarinet, the guitar, the trumpet, the euphonium, the accordion and the mandolin. ‘But’, she would complain, ‘when he’d got it, he dropped it.’⁴¹ At the same time, she also decided – on what seems to have been not much more than a whim – that he should go to dance lessons. One day, when Eric was ten years old, his cousin Peggy – a near-neighbour – called at the house: ‘Aunt Sadie,’ she is reputed to have said, ‘I’m going to dancing class on Saturday.’ ‘Where’s that?’ Sadie replied. ‘Miss Hunter’s, above the Plaza,’ Peggy said. ‘A shilling a lesson.’ ‘Do me a favour,’ asked Sadie, sensing a chance for a brief break from the antics of her increasingly boisterous son, ‘take Eric with you.’⁴²

Eric, it appears, was rather impressed when he discovered that his first dancing partner was to be a girl – slightly older than him – named Molly Bunting. Miss Hunter, it appears, was rather impressed as well when she discovered that her new pupil could dance. Eric remembered:

Miss Hunter, after I’d been there about six weeks, came and saw my mother and said, ‘I think this boy’s got something, Mrs Bartholomew, he’s got a rhythm, you know!’ and me mother said, ‘Oh!’ So Miss Hunter said, ‘Yes, I think he ought to have private lessons’ – private lessons with her in her front room in Rosebury Avenue, at half a crown a time! So me mother said, ‘Oh, yes, all right then, give him private lessons if you think he’s got talent.’⁴³

Sadie, in order to pay for those lessons, had to take on work – in addition to her existing job as an usherette at the Central Pier Theatre – as a daily help, cleaning at three or four houses every week, but she did so, more or less, without complaint, because she now felt a sense of vindication: Eric was, at long last, succeeding at something.

She found a plank of wood for him to tap-dance on at home, and made him a cut-down Fred Astaire-style outfit of top hat, white tie and tails for his lessons. She worked with him over time on a series of mini-routines that included borrowings from the likes of Flanagan and Allen and the latest Hollywood musicals.⁴⁴ She also had a calling-card made – ‘Master Eric Bartholomew. Vocal Comedy & Dancing’ – and started to find him opportunities to perform in front of an audience: low-key social events known locally as ‘pies and peas’ (because young amateur performers entertained elderly people – usually in a church hall – and, in return, were given a hot meal of meat pies and mushy peas). On at least a couple of occasions Eric also appeared at benefits at the Central Pier, where he would black-up and imitate G. H. Elliott, ‘The Chocolate-Coloured Coon’ – a very popular musical act of the time – singing ‘Lily of Leguna’.⁴⁵ Offers of further work started to arrive. When George and Sadie took Eric to the Silver Jubilee Club – a working men’s club – in nearby Torrisholme, the concert secretary asked George if Eric would perform for them at dinner time on the following Saturday. Eric recalled: ‘My dad said, “Oh, yes, he’ll do it.” So the feller said, “How much will he want?” My dad said, “He’ll do it for nothing.” He didn’t want anything for it! And me mother hit him.’⁴⁶ After Sadie’s swift intervention a fee of five shillings was agreed – the first sum of money Eric had ever earned for a performance. He arrived on time, put on his pumps (‘they wouldn’t let me put my taps on’), clambered up on to the billiard table that had been commandeered as a make-shift stage, and, there and then, did his act (‘There were balls flying everywhere!’).⁴⁷ So popular was the performance that Eric found himself booked again for the following week.

His parents applied for a special licence from the local Education Committee that enabled him to perform in the local clubs, and the bookings began to accumulate: ‘For a Saturday dinner time and Saturday evening we used to get, I think, fifteen shillings to a pound, which was quite an addition to the family budget.’⁴⁸ Sadie soon realised that the act would need more material to hold the attention of the often noisy and easily distracted audiences. She came across the sheet music for an old song made famous by Ella Shields – a male impersonator – entitled ‘I’m Not All There’ which, she felt, would be perfect – once shorn of its saucy connotations – for ‘Our Eric’: ‘I’m not all there, there’s something missing,/I’m not all there, so the folks declare./They call me looby,/Looby as a great big booby …’ Eric, who thought the song was ‘ghastly’,⁴⁹ was also unimpressed by the costume Sadie designed to accompany it: from the top down, he wore a flat black beret, a kiss curl, round turtleshell spectacles, black bootlace-tie over a white shirt, a very tight waiter’s jacket ‘with a great big pin where the button should be’, very short pin-stripe ‘business trousers’, suspenders (which he would use to such comic effect thirty years later), red socks and black shoes, and he held in his hand an enormous lollipop – ‘as big as a plate’ – with a child-size bite taken out of it.⁵⁰ From club to club, week after week, in front of audiences swelled by the combined presence of Sadie, George and all of George’s brothers, Eric would stand, dressed in this outfit, sporting a suitably gormless expression on his pasty-white face, and sing the song he grew to hate.

‘In those days’, he recalled somewhat ruefully, ‘it was a Northern trait that a comic had to be dressed “funny” – to tell everyone, “look, folks, I’m the comic!”’⁵¹ Although the ‘I’m Not All There’ routine worked extremely well, thus confirming Sadie’s shrewdness as his unofficial manager, he always resented having to perform it. The warm reception his act usually received may well have been welcome, but the succession of cramped and dingy clubs, each one smelling of stale ale and cigarette ash, harboured no hint of glamour for a young boy uneasy in his ‘gormless’ attire. ‘It was a thing I never really wanted to do,’ he would later protest. ‘I never really wanted to be a performer.’⁵² There was, it seems, no burning ambition, no sharp sense of urgency, no irresistible will to succeed, no discernible drive: ‘I had no bright ambitions. To me my future was clear. At fifteen I would get myself a paper round. At seventeen I would learn to read it. And at eighteen I would get a job on the Corporation like my dad.’⁵³

If it had not been for his mother’s forcefulness, it seems doubtful that Eric would ever have become a professional entertainer. In later years he would certainly appear eager to seize any opportunity to express the opinion that Sadie had been a hard taskmistress – sometimes too hard – and a few of the jokes he would make at her expense seemed to carry just a hint of bitterness beneath the surface playfulness:

ERIC | Ah, that’s me mother’s favourite song, that. If she was out there in the audience tonight there’d be tears in her eyes.
ERNIE | Why?
ERIC | She can’t stand me.

Deep down, however, there were genuine feelings of respect and, in time, gratitude. As much as he adored his father, Eric knew that ‘the reason no one ever had a bad thing to say about him is because he never put himself in a position where he had to rock the boat, where he had to be judged’,⁵⁴ whereas Sadie would sometimes be prepared to come into conflict with her son – and, for that matter, anyone else – if she believed that she had his best interests at heart.

‘The truth’, reflected Gary Morecambe, his son, ‘was that he would have achieved much less in his life without her constant support. Since this was perfectly well understood between them, the gibes were a ritualistic repartee of their relationship.’⁵⁵ Joan, Morecambe’s widow, agreed: ‘They’d always row. Always. Never in a vicious sense, not like that, but they would never see eye to eye, so you always used to know that they were going to clash over something or other. You’d know it was ticking away somewhere in between them, ready to explode at any minute.’⁵⁶

Eric may well have found performing a ‘chore’, and he may well have felt ‘a right Charlie’ in his comical costumes, but he knew that his ‘mother’s motives were the highest’. As he watched her cut out every reference to him in the local newspapers and paste them carefully into her album, he came to appreciate the fact that, for all their occasional disagreements, she clearly was devoted to him.⁵⁷ It is also unlikely, said Gary Morecambe, that Sadie, had she known just how uncomfortable performing was making her son feel, would have persisted with her plans: ‘She genuinely believed he adored performing, and was unaware of his real feelings … Had Eric displayed abject misery, then she would not have pushed at all.’⁵⁸

As it was, Sadie continued to push and to push. She entered her son in a swift succession of local talent competitions, and he did well enough to win several of them, attracting as a consequence his first reviews in the local press:

MORECAMBE BOY FIRST

A show within a show was staged at the Arcadian Theatre on Saturday night when the final of the talent-spotting competition took place.

The standard of local talent was surprisingly high and the audience enjoyed it immensely. It was only after considerable difficulty that Peter Bernard, one of the artistes in the Variety show, was able to select the three winners, who were chosen by the applause the audience gave them.

First prize was won by the Morecambe boy, Eric Bartholomew, whose singing of ‘I’m Not All There’ really got the crowd going.⁵⁹

One day early in 1939, after a number of minor successes, a relatively major opportunity presented itself. Sadie came across an advertisement for a talent contest to be held at the Kingsway Cinema down in Hoylake, near Birkenhead. ‘In those days’, Eric would recall, ‘to me, going to Hoylake was like going to Australia.’⁶⁰ This, however, was no ordinary contest: organised by a music weekly, Melody Maker, this was the Lancashire and Cheshire area heat of a national ‘search-for-talenť competition, and the prize for whoever came first was an audition before the important impresario Jack Hylton. Sadie travelled with Eric, and Melody Maker carried a report on the final in its next issue:

There were a hundred competitors in the area and the ten finalists appeared at the Kingsway Cinema, Hoylake, a week ago. Eric Bartholomew put over a brilliant comedy act which caused the audience to roar with laughter. In an interview, he said, ‘My ambition is to become a comedian. My hero is George Formby.’⁶¹

Eric was less than thrilled, to say the least, to discover that his prize amounted to nothing more than yet another audition. He found auditions nerve-wracking affairs at the best of times, and this one, in the presence of the well-known band leader and showman Jack Hylton, struck him as more of a punishment than a prize. Sadie, of course, was delighted. They were instructed to travel to Manchester, where Hylton’s latest touring show was next due to visit. This, Sadie reminded her apprehensive son, would be the opportunity that they had both been working so hard for. It would also be, unbeknownst to either of them, the first, fleeting, opportunity for Eric Bartholomew to set eyes upon the boy who would eventually become his partner, one Ernest Wiseman.

CHAPTER III
Wise before Morecambe

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the show.

ERNIE WISE

The past would never die for Ernie Wise. It would thrive in his mind throughout all the years of arduous struggle and subsequent success, and, even deep into advanced middle-age, his reference points would remain the same: ‘Hollywood’, for him, would always be the Hollywood of the ‘Golden Age’ of the thirties and forties, and ‘Yorkshire’ would always be the Yorkshire of cloth caps, coal, parkin and pies, and ‘celebrity’ would always be a relative state to be measured against the extraordinary renown of the luminous idols of youth.

The memories, far from fading, seemed to grow more vivid with each passing year, with every cherished moment, retrieved in the mind, appearing more detailed and less doubtful than before, gleaming sharply with the over-polished clarity of a rare and precious piece of crystal. The following, for example, is his adult recollection of a weekly routine from some forty or so years before:

Breakfast was usually bread and dripping, and that went for tea when, occasionally, there might also be a boiled egg. The big meal was dinner, at midday, for which my mother usually made a stew in a saucepan as large as a wash-basin with perhaps fifteen or sixteen large dumplings. We ate a lot of rice pudding – she would put a pint of milk into a pudding and bake it in the oven with a grating of nutmeg and a flavouring of vanilla. Does that make your mouth water? It does mine.

Sunday dinner was the meal of the week. It began with a huge, hot Yorkshire pudding which you ate with steaming gravy. Then came the meat, veg and potatoes, and finally probably a caramel custard.

Monday was washday. Mother rose at six and went to the outhouse where she lit a fire under her copper boiler and in it she boiled the clothes in soapy water. The wash would be done by eight o’clock. It was pegged out to dry, then ironed with a heavy flat iron that had to be heated from time to time on the range.¹

Whereas Eric Morecambe, looking back on his childhood, might have thought it sufficient to mention in passing that his mother cooked her stew in a large saucepan, Ernie Wise was always the more likely one of the two to pause and recall more precisely the dimensions of the container and the number of the dumplings; and whereas Morecambe, when reminiscing, tended to jump impatiently from one powerful idea to the next (which is, in a way, how a comic thinks), Wise tended to proceed methodically, showing a very disciplined attention to detail (which is, in a way, how a straight-man thinks).

There is something rather poignant about the way in which Wise recounted events with such jealous exactitude, sounding at times as if his readiness to savour every lost sound, smell, taste and touch was more for his own benefit than it was for that of his audience – a private, belated reward, perhaps, for a hard-working man who had missed more than he cared to admit of a childhood compressed and consumed by the demands of a life lived solely in showbusiness.

The fact of the matter was that Ernie Wise – or, to call him by his real name, Ernest Wiseman – was singled out for stardom long before anyone – outside of Sadie’s initially small but enthusiastic coterie – had even heard of a performer called Eric Bartholomew. Unlike his future partner, he had, from a very early age, worked deliberately and impatiently in pursuit of such recognition. ‘I’ve been ambitious all my life,’ he acknowledged. ‘I was a pusher from the beginning. It’s always been push, push, push.’² There was to be nothing remotely labyrinthine about his route to fame: it would stretch out before him straight and laser-sharp, unimpeded by childish distractions of any kind.

He was born in Leeds on 27 November 1925 at the local maternity hospital. His father, Harry, was a railway signal and lamp man. His mother, Connie, had worked originally as a box-loom weaver in Pudsey. Their marriage was – like that of the Bartholomews – an alliance of contrasting personalities. Harry – a thin, wiry, warmhearted and outgoing man – came from a very poor family. His father had died when he was just fourteen years of age, and his mother was blind. At the age of sixteen he had pretended to be older than he actually was in order to join the Army, and he went on to win the Military Medal during the 1914—18 war for saving his sergeant’s life. He was a generally optimistic, gregarious kind of character, hopelessly impractical when it came to financial matters but always prepared to lift the mood of any social gathering with an impromptu song and dance. Connie, in contrast, was a rather shy and somewhat religious young woman³ who came from a relatively ‘well-to-do’ working-class family, and, as far as the abstruse yet important intra-class distinctions of the time were concerned, was considered to be ‘a highly respectable young lady’.⁴

Harry Wiseman met Connie Wright on a tram, when Harry, as he was making his way to the front of the carriage, tripped over Connie’s umbrella. It was, according to Ernie, love at first sight. The relationship, as it blossomed, did not, however, unite their respective families. Although Harry’s family was, it seems, enthusiastic about the prospect of marriage, Connie’s, in contrast, was most certainly not. Her father was, according to Ernie, ‘a dour man … hard, of the sort only Yorkshire breeds’,⁵ and Harry was far removed from the kind of future son-in-law he had envisaged. It was bad enough, reasoned Connie’s father, that Harry came from such a ‘common’ family, but his carefree attitude to money, he concluded, made him a disastrous choice as a husband.

Connie was eventually handed an ultimatum: marry Harry Wiseman, said her formidable father, and she would be ostracised by her own family. ‘I’ll make sure no worthless husband of yours gets a penny of my money,’ he announced. ‘You’re my favourite daughter, but you’ll get nowt from me.’⁶ She chose to go ahead and marry Harry, and, sure enough, she was shunned by her family. All that she was allowed to leave home with were her clothes and the upright piano she had bought from out of her savings.

Harry and Connie, once they had married, moved into a single room in lodgings at 6 Atlanta Street, Bramley in Leeds – the place where Ernie would spend the first few months of his life. As soon as they could afford to they left to rent a modest one-up, one-down house in Warder Street – also in Leeds. This was followed shortly after by another house in Kingsley, near Hemsworth, and then, at last, they settled in the end-of-terrace house that Ernie would come to look back on as being his first real home: 12 Station Terrace, a small but relatively pleasant railway cottage in East Ardsley, midway between Wakefield and Leeds. Ernie was their first child; he was followed by a brother, Gordon, and two sisters, Ann and Constance (another brother, Arthur, died of peritonitis at the age of two).

‘We were a happy family,’ Ernie would recall. ‘We always had shoes.’⁷ It was never, however, the most secure of upbringings. Harry was earning barely enough to sustain the whole family, and, although he handed over the majority of his salary at the end of each week to Connie, he still managed to fritter away what little he had left on alcohol and tobacco. Connie – doubtless with her estranged father’s words ringing loudly in her ears – was often exasperated by her husband’s inability to save what little money he had, and, as Ernie would recall, the house reverberated with the sound of all the endless rows about financial matters.

Connie did her best to keep things on an even keel. She had seven mouths to feed on a basic income of £2 per week, and, as a consequence, she was noted for her thriftiness. ‘“Save a little, spend a little and remember that your bank book is your best friend” was’, said Ernie, ‘one of the constant refrains of my childhood,’ leaving him with a lifelong ‘horror of debt and a steely determination to pay my own way’.⁸ In spite of such sobering moral lessons, Harry still somehow managed to contrive on countless occasions to stun Connie with his capriciousness. On one such occasion he decided – without informing Connie – that he urgently needed a ‘home cinematograph’ he had seen advertised in the local newspaper. It arrived with one film, which, in the absence of a screen, he proceeded to project, over and over again, on to the pantry wall. He never quite got round to buying a proper screen, nor did he ever quite get round to purchasing any more films, either.

One reason why Connie was prepared to tolerate such behaviour was the fact that, deep down, she had always valued his unforced charm and his ebullient sense of showmanship. Although she was never happier than when she had the time to sit at the piano and sing her favourite songs, she was, Ernie recalled, ‘temperamentally reluctant to perform in public’.⁹ The quixotic Harry, in contrast, was an instinctive performer, and talented enough (like his father before him) to take his amateur song and dance routines on to the local club circuit. Full of amusing stories, tried-and-tested jokes and familiar crowd-pleasing songs, Harry ‘would have made the perfect Butlin’s Redcoat’,¹⁰ and Connie, for all of her well-founded fears about their future, loved and admired – and perhaps even gently envied – that untamed and indomitable sense of fun.

She was not the only one who did. Ernie, from a very early age, was entranced by ‘this warm, immensely attractive man with a sunny personality and an optimistic disposition’.¹¹ If there is one word that appears more often than any other in the autobiography of Ernie Wise, then that word is ‘devoted’.¹² Beneath the bustling ambitiousness there was always a rare generosity of spirit about Ernie Wise, a genuine admiration of other performers. This uncommon yet thoroughly decent quality first became evident in the obvious enthusiasm that he showed for his father’s burgeoning stage career. He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps – not to compete with him but rather to join him – help him – and share in his joyful escapism.

When he reached the age of six or seven Ernie began to ask his mother to teach him some popular songs, such as ‘The Sheikh of Araby’, which he would then dutifully memorise and proceed to rehearse interminably. One evening, after Harry had finished his tea, Connie instructed him to get up from the table and go into the other room. ‘Ernest’, she said conspiratorially, ‘has something to show you.’¹³ When he opened the door to the living-room he was confronted by the unexpected sight of his diminutive son, complete with an old towel tied around the top of his head, rocking purposefully from side to side in a well-rehearsed way while singing of strange and exotic foreign climes. ‘I will never forget the reaction I got,’ Ernie would recall. ‘He was so bowled over, so excited and thrilled that his eldest son had taken after him and had a spark of talent that there were tears in his eyes.’¹⁴

Harry, from that point on, determined to teach his son everything he knew about performing. Tap-dancing lessons came first: Connie would play something on the piano while Harry watched their son practise three basic steps on the cold and hard kitchen floor. Songs and short comic routines followed on in the same methodical fashion. It is not entirely clear whether Harry, to begin with, saw in Ernie another potential child star in the making or merely a brief but charming effusion of juvenescent exuberance, but we do know that he wasted little time in drafting his son into his own act. Ernie, at the tender age of seven, joined Harry as part of a novelty double-act called, initially, Carson and Kid.

There is something quite remarkable, perhaps even Proustian, about Ernie’s typically detailed recollection of those first days on the stage, something almost reverential about the slow and precise route he charted through the rich minutiae hidden within the prosaic experience of playing the working men’s clubs:

[There would be] a big room with usually a long bar running along one side and a stage, the room filled with marble-topped, cast-iron tables, chairs and against the wall, benches. There’d be a snooker room and a place where you played darts. There’d be fruit machines. There’d be beer and sandwiches, pies, potato crisps, pickles and bottles of tomato sauce, the whole place crowded for the concert with working-class people dressed in their Sunday best. The men wore blue serge suits, white shirts with detachable, boned collars and patterned ties fastened to the shirt front by a clip, pocket handkerchiefs to match, black shoes and short hair slicked down. The women and girls wore homemade dresses, their hair in tight curls still smelling faintly of heated tongs, and the bolder, unmarried ones wore make-up. There’d be a scattering of children running about, getting in the way of waiters in white coats and long white aprons carrying trays laden with drinks, mainly beer; if they were paid with a note, you’d see them holding it in their teeth till they had produced the correct change. In the middle of it all there’d be the concert secretary at a table near the stage ringing his official bell and saying, ‘Now give order for the next act on the bill which is going to be, ladies and gentlemen – CARSON AND KID!’¹⁵

Ernie’s principal stage outfit in those days consisted of a black bowler hat with the brim cut off, a cut-down dinner jacket with a white carnation pinned to the left lapel, a white wing-collar shirt, a black bow tie, thin black-and-grey-striped trousers and little red clogs. His other occasional, more flamboyant, costumes included what might best be described as a kind of plaid Charlie Chaplin – complete with false moustache – and, made out of what looked suspiciously like the very same material, a most eye-catching little number that flared out wildly at the shoulders and thighs to form an elaborate butterfly shape. The songs that father and son sang together included ‘It Happened on the Beach at Bah Bali’ and ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland’, while Ernie’s solo repertoire included ‘I’m Knee Deep in Daisies’ and ‘Let’s Have a Tiddly at the Milk Bar’:

Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

Let’s make a night of it tonight.

Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

Let’s paint the town a lovely white.

You buy a half pint, I’ll buy a half pint.

We’ll try to drink a pint somehow.

Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

And drink to the dear old cow.¹⁶

The act was usually broken up into two single spots and a double: Harry would come on first and perform an abbreviated version of his old routine, then Ernie would appear and perform his own solo routine (lasting five or six minutes) and then, for the second half of the show, father would join son for a double-act.

One reason for the distinctive appeal of Carson and Kid (or, as they were sometimes billed, ‘Bert Carson and his Little Wonder’ or, in honour of the local distillery, ‘The Two Tetleys’) was the incongruity of a boy of seven or eight taking part in cross-talk of an ‘adult’ nature. One joke, for example, had Ernie announce, ‘There were two fellahs passing by a pub, and one said to the other as he saw a trickle of water coming from under the door, “What’s that? White Horse?” “No,” said the man bending down to taste it. “Fox terrier.’”¹⁷ A second reason for their popularity may have been their readiness to mix light comedy with the occasional detour into maudlin music-hall territory. One successful routine, ‘Little Pal’, had Harry blacked-up to resemble Al Jolson and Ernie sitting on his knee; Harry would sing:

Little pal, if daddy goes away.

If some day you should be

On a new daddy’s knee

Don’t forget about me, little pal.

Ernie, looking up plaintively at his father, replied:

If some day I should be

On a new daddy’s knee

Don’t forget about me, little pal.¹⁸

To audiences with relatively fresh memories of the loss and disruption that accompanied, and followed, the 1914—18 war, such an unashamedly manipulative exercise in sentimentality went down very well indeed.

Carson and Kid usually had at least three engagements every week – once on a Saturday evening, once at Sunday lunchtime and once on Sunday evening – which amounted to fees totalling £3 10s., doubling the family income at a stroke. If, as Ernie later claimed,¹⁹ his parents expected him to grow up to join his father on the railways – first as a fireman, later as a driver – the success of his sudden entry into showbusiness, even if it was only at the humble level of the local working men’s club circuit, appears to have prompted them to start having second thoughts. The extra income, of course, was extremely welcome, but there was more to it than that: Ernie was clearly enjoying the experience, and, as Harry could testify, he was getting to be very good at it. ‘I loved it,’ he would remember. ‘I had found my purpose in life.’²⁰ There was none of the ambivalence exhibited by Eric Bartholomew in Ernie Wiseman’s attitude to showbusiness: ‘There is this incredible need to perform in front of people and I’ve had it since I was six years of age. This isn’t a job – it’s a way of life.’²¹

What the young Ernie Wiseman did have in common – unwittingly – with the young Eric Bartholomew, however, was an increasingly undistinguished school record. His nascent performing career was beginning to take its toll. The exciting but energy-sapping routine of Sunday evening shows followed by an often frenzied rush to catch the last bus home and then, a few hours later, the demoralising straggle to shake off the sleep and set off for school (two miles away in Thorpe) on Monday morning proved a punishing schedule. Ernie, predictably, started falling asleep during lessons. This resulted in a stern letter being sent to the Wisemans by the Leeds education authority, pointing out that exploiting juveniles was against the law and would have to stop immediately. Although the Wisemans were genuinely concerned about their son’s schoolwork, they knew that they could not do without the money he was helping to bring in, and they also appreciated the fact that he was by now in no mood to abandon the act. A not entirely satisfactory short-term solution was found: ‘We played a game of cat and mouse: if the authorities spotted us in Leeds we moved our activities to Wakefield and if, after a while, they rambled us in Wakefield we slipped quietly back to Leeds and Bradford. I’m sure in the end they turned a blind eye.’²²

The reputation of Bert Carson and His Little Wonder – as they had come to style themselves – continued to spread across the West Riding region, and the bookings began to multiply. In 1936, at the age of eleven, Ernie had the chance of securing what he would later describe as his ‘first real launch into mainstream performing’.²³ The local paper, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, organised an annual week-long charity event at the Alhambra Theatre that went under what now seems the improbable name of the ‘Nignog Revue’. During the year, children who had joined the club could take part in a variety of Nignog activities, such as talent competitions and the local ‘pies and peas’. Ernie soon became a ‘devoted’ – that word again – member, and he found in the Revue’s organiser, a certain Mr Timperley, a man ‘absolutely devoted’ to producing first-rate children’s entertainment.²⁴ During the next two years Ernie played an important part in all of the Revues, and his self-confidence – which had never, in truth, seemed egregiously undernourished – grew immeasurably as a consequence of appearing on the stage of a great music-hall in front of two thousand people.

Not everyone, however, was impressed by his success. His school, by this time, was East Ardsley Secondary School, a large, dark, Victorian building which Ernie had come to hate the sight of. He was never, he admitted, a model pupil – describing himself as ‘just plain dumb’.²⁵ He also found that his considerable reputation as a local performer only served to provoke some of his more mean-spirited teachers – and, indeed, some of his fellow pupils – to further acts of cruelty as he was routinely punished and humiliated for allowing his schoolwork to suffer. ‘Come up here, tap-dancer,’ one particularly malicious teacher would shout regularly at Ernie, his darkly sarcastic tone making the word ‘tap-dancer’ sound like quite the worst thing that a young Yorkshire boy could possibly be associated with, and then, on some pretext or other, the teacher would either smack him in front of the class or send him off to be caned. ‘Whatever he hoped to achieve by such public ridicule I do not know,’ Ernie would write, ‘but its effect was to turn me against the school and all it stood for and to alienate me from my classmates.’²⁶

Such treatment, understandably, only served to strengthen his resolve to pursue a career of some kind in showbusiness. On the stage, dressed up in a costume, Ernie Wiseman felt different, more important, more sure of who he was and what he was capable of: ‘Entertaining was a sort of personality prop which helped me to cover up a deep-rooted shyness and sense of inadequacy. Entertaining brought me out of myself … I was able to step out of my very private little world and be an entirely different person, a cheeky chappie.’²⁷

His stage persona was certainly bright and brash. There was something of the crowd-pleasing ebullience and somewhat dandified appearance of another Yorkshire comic singer of the time, Whit Cunliffe, in his carefree and cocksure performances. It helped him stand out from most of his contemporaries as a strong and seemingly nerveless entertainer with an unusually promising future ahead of him. That was certainly the impression he made on the impresario Bryan Michie when, in the autumn of 1938, he toured all over the North in search of new juvenile talent to showcase in a revue. Harry Wiseman had heard that Michie was holding auditions at the Leeds Empire, so he made sure that Ernie went along. Michie sat close to the front of the stalls, watching impassively as Ernie strode on to the stage, told a few jokes, sang one of his usual songs – ‘Knee-Deep in Daisies’ – and finished with his by now extremely competent quick-tempo clog dance. He left without hearing of any response – positive or negative – from Michie. Several months of silence passed, and Ernie, a little disheartened perhaps, returned to the old round of club dates and local talent competitions. Two things happened to lift his spirits again: first, he managed to make a brief appearance on a talent show in Leeds that was being broadcast by the BBC – an achievement that won him considerable respect among his friends and also, just as importantly, a fee of two guineas; and second, a letter finally arrived from London – not from Michie himself, but from his fellow impresario Jack Hylton. Hylton invited Ernie down to London for an audition. ‘There was,’ Ernie would recall, ‘great excitement in the house.’²⁸

The subsequent events followed each other at a breathless pace. Harry travelled with Ernie down to London by train on 6 January 1939.²⁹ On their arrival they went straight to the office of Jack Hylton, and the audition was held there and then. ‘He must have liked me,’ said Ernie, ‘because that same evening he put me in the show.’³⁰ The show in question was a West End revue called Band Waggon – adapted from the hugely successful BBC radio programme of the same name – and, in spite of Arthur Askey’s presence at the top of the bill, it was not doing anything like as well as had been expected. Hylton’s impetuous decision may have been prompted more by an urgent need to improve his ailing production than it was by the precocious talents of the young stranger in his office, but, whatever the reasons, it was a decision that later that night proved itself to be inspired: Ernie was the talking-point in all of the reviews. The following morning the Daily Express, for example, reported:

At 6.40 last night Ernest Wiseman, fair, perky-faced, quiffy-haired thirteen-year-old son of a parcels porter at Leeds Central Station, made his first professional appearance on the stage in Jack Hylton’s Band Waggon at Princes Theatre [now the Shaftesbury]. The moment he went on he became Ernie Wise. That in future will be his name. I believe you are going to hear it often …

Ernie, one-quarter Max Miller, one-quarter Sydney Howard, and the other half a mixture of all the comics who have ever amused you, wears a squashed-in billycock hat, striped black and grey City trousers (too small for him), a black frock coat with a pink carnation in the buttonhole, grey spats, and brown clogs.

His timing and confidence are remarkable. At thirteen he is an old-time performer.³¹

Arthur Askey, interviewed almost forty years later, recalled his reaction to this new addition to the cast: ‘[He was a] fresh-faced, delightful kid, totally stage-struck. He had a good face, a good singing voice, and he was a very fair little dancer. He had a neat little evening dress with brown clogs on his feet – which didn’t quite go together – but he did a good clog dance.’³²

It seemed as though Ernie, all of a sudden, was actually living the kind of Hollywood fantasy that he had always found so irresistible. Sitting in the unfamiliar splendour of the large room in the Shaftesbury Hotel (‘it boasted a courtesy light in the loo’³³), Harry read through all of the newspaper reports of his son’s extraordinary achievement. Quickly, he came to the realisation that he would no longer be needed as either a co-performer or mentor. He had cried with pride the previous evening as he sat through the show, but now, in spite of receiving an offer from Jack Hylton to stay on as a kind of personal assistant to Ernie, he made up his mind to go back home to Yorkshire at the end of the following week.

Jack Hylton, in his absence, became, in effect, a surrogate father to Ernie, taking control of his career, his image and, for a time, his financial concerns. Ernest Wiseman became, on Hylton’s advice, Ernie Wise (easier to remember, he reasoned), and he was awarded a five-year contract that started at £6 per week (twice as much as Harry was earning at the time). Hylton moved him into a flat above the Fifty-Fifty, an Italian restaurant in St Martin’s Lane, and found him a chaperone in the form of a Mrs Rodway, a woman who had considerable experience in looking after juvenile performers.

Harry and Connie did begin to benefit financially from their son’s dramatic success – Mrs Rodway, on Ernie’s insistence, sent at least £3 home each week before banking the rest (Ernie kept the bank book) – but, in his absence, it was a bitter-sweet experience. Years later, after Harry had died, Connie confided to her son that going back home alone had been ‘the breaking of him’.³⁴ He had tried, for a while, to keep the act going with other young performers, but his heart was not in it and he gave up performing altogether. His health began to decline, and, with all of the extra money coming in each week from London, he virtually stopped working altogether.

Ernie, busy settling into a new routine and novel surroundings down South, was, it seems, entirely unaware of his father’s feelings. Everything was new and exciting and glamorous to the newly named Ernie Wise, West End star, and he threw himself into his new life ‘with all the ignorance and insouciance of the thirteen-year-old that I was’.³⁵ Although he was never quite the stolid and adamantine character that the public persona sometimes would suggest, the self-assured manner in which he coped with his sudden change of fortune was undeniably striking for one so young. One journalist who interviewed him immediately after his début in the show was understandably taken aback when Ernie, responding to a question concerning who would be looking after him during his time in London, answered coolly: ‘Nobody. Why should they?’³⁶

‘Ernie’, commented Arthur Askey, ‘was rather like a young Hylton then and I think that is one reason Jack liked him so much. He looked on him almost as a son.’³⁷ Hylton, a down-to-earth Lancastrian, made every effort to see that Ernie’s progress was not overly hindered by feelings of homesickness. After noting, for example, that the Italian food from the restaurant was not agreeing with Ernie’s East Ardsley appetite, Hylton invited him into his office to share meals of pork pie (made specially for him in Bolton) or cold tripe. Ernie respected him greatly, and was particularly impressed by his habit of keeping several thick rolls of banknotes stuffed inside his bulging pockets. Here, he thought, was a man worth listening to.

‘It was Jack Hylton who shaped my stage persona,’ he would say. ‘He knocked the raw edges off my act.’³⁸ The brown clogs were replaced with smart black tap shoes; the battered bowler hat was abandoned in favour of a new straw boater; and the odd, ill-fitting coat and striped trousers gave way to a sophisticated-looking bespoke white dinner jacket and black trousers. It represented a very deliberate and radical change of image: he now resembled more a cosmopolitan song-and-dance man than a parochial Northern comic, ‘more Maurice Chevalier than Max Miller’.³⁹ Hylton planned to promote Ernie Wise as ‘an altogether slicker product’ than before, a ‘boulevardier’ who performed like ‘an adult before his time’ (even if, as a consequence, that meant, as Wise would later reflect, that he remained ‘a child without a childhood’).⁴⁰

It was a sobering contradiction: while on stage Ernie Wise seemed to mature at a rapid rate, off stage and deep down there was something oddly immature about him. He noticed the difference himself when, after Band Waggon had finally bowed to public indifference and folded, he joined Jack Hylton and his band on a tour of the halls. The law required Wise to continue attending school while he travelled, and it was during his brief – sometimes just single-day – visits to the schools at each venue that he was struck by how much more worldly-wise other boys of his age appeared to be: ‘Their knowledge of sex, of smoking, of swearing and so on left me completely puzzled and made me feel like a very much younger brother learning the facts of life from his elders.’⁴¹ Although he was delighted to have the opportunity to perform professionally, there was, perhaps, some lingering sense of regret at the life he had been forced to overlook: ‘I led a very confined life, sheltered from ordinary boyhood influences and rigorously shielded by adults themselves from the raw adult world outside the theatre.’⁴²

He also found himself feeling just a little unsettled when, in the spring of 1939, he came across another juvenile performer, even younger than himself, whose ability to make people laugh caused him to wonder to himself if he might soon have a serious rival to contend with. When Eric Bartholomew went with his mother to the Manchester cinema for his audition before Jack Hylton, he was oblivious to the fact that among the audience, casting an ‘experienced’ eye over the new acts, was Hylton’s thirteen-year-old protégé, Ernie Wise. Wise, however, was extremely impressed by this unknown comic – as, indeed, was everyone else among Hylton’s entourage: ‘So much so that the boys in the band turned round to me and said (only half-joking!), “Bye, then, Ernie. Things won’t be the same with this new lad around, but I dare say we’ll soon get used to him. What are you going to do now?”’⁴³ Eric and Sadie, after receiving the not entirely reassuring news from Hylton that he would ‘let you know’, returned home to Morecambe without discovering just how popular the act had been, but Ernie, now sitting a little less comfortably than before in the darkness of the auditorium, knew exactly what had happened: ‘I had a lot of push in those days … but I have to admit my self-esteem took a bit of a knock from Eric even though we never said a word to each other.’⁴⁴

For the moment, however, Ernie Wise remained, without much doubt, the country’s pre-eminent child star. He continued to tour with Jack Hylton, and, when war broke out in September and the theatres closed down, he was invited to stay with Hylton and his wife and two daughters at Villa Daheim, the impresario’s country house in Angmering-on-Sea in Sussex. Hylton and his wife had a chauffeur, a German cook, a German maid and a nanny. Arthur Askey was a near-neighbour, as was George Black – another powerful West End impresario. Wise was given pocket money, substantial meals, a generous supply of sweets and was generally treated like one of the family. Surrounded by the self-conscious grandeur of a self-made man, as well as the bright appeal of an upmarket holiday resort that nestled snugly between Bognor Regis and Worthing, Ernie Wise would have been forgiven for wanting to stay as long as possible: ‘For a young lad from East Ardsley’, he recalled, ‘it could have been Hawaii.’⁴⁵ After a while, however, he became homesick, and so, with Hylton’s blessing, he made his way back North to his parents’ new home in Leeds.⁴⁶

His return only served, in a cruel way, to help him to sever most of the remaining emotional ties that had pulled him back there in the first place. He was shocked to see his father, now showing the physical effects of rheumatoid arthritis, looking so much older, and he was profoundly saddened by the greeting he received from him: ‘Why did you come home?’ his father asked him. ‘You had it made.’⁴⁷ It suddenly seemed a mistake to have left Villa Daheim. Without the prospect of resurrecting the old father–son act, and without any enthusiasm for the odd solo spot in venues he had long since grown out of, he felt, at the age of fourteen, a burden: ‘I was, after all, just another mouth to feed, and hadn’t Mum said often enough to Dad, “When there’s no money in the house, love flies out the window”?’⁴⁸

After working for a few difficult months as a coalman’s labourer, he was very relieved to receive a telegram from Bryan Michie, inviting him down to the Swansea Empire to join the touring version of Youth Takes a Bow. It was the opportunity – and the excuse – that he had been waiting for. He left immediately, desperate to resume his career in entertainment. He would never go home again.

CHAPTER IV
Double Act, Single Vision

It was fate – I happened to pull the Christmas cracker and Ernie was in it.

ERIC MORECAMBE

We’re a real Hollywood film, us – all the drama, the comedy.

ERNIE WISE

When Eric met Ernie, it was the former who found himself nursing feelings of envy towards the latter. Watching from the shadowy wings of the Swansea Empire, Eric was left in no doubt as to who was now the star of the show: Ernie. It was Ernie, the newcomer, Ernie, whose reputation as ‘The Jack Buchanan of Tomorrow’, ‘The Young Max Miller’ and ‘Britain’s own Mickey Rooney’ had preceded him,¹ Ernie, taller – at that stage – than Eric and, indeed, better paid than Eric, who was now the real star of Youth Takes a Bow. As this supremely self-assured young man glided through his polished act, his immaculate made-to-measure suit accentuating each crisply competent step and gesture, Eric, standing silently to one side with arms tightly folded, could only think to himself: ‘Bighead.’²

Just two short months ago it had all been very different. After the worryingly long silence that had followed his audition for Jack Hylton in Manchester, Eric – in the company of Sadie, his chaperone – had been invited to join the cast of Youth Takes a Bow as one of Bryan Michie’s Discoveries. He made his debut at the Nottingham Empire, and, on a salary of £5 per week plus travelling expenses, the future seemed bright. He grew rapidly in confidence, attracted a fair number of complimentary notices and won the respect of the other members of the cast. Then, however, the rumours began: Ernie Wise, it was whispered, was about to join the show. Ernie Wise overshadowed them all. They had all heard him on the wireless exchanging comic repartee with the likes of Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch; they had all read about his triumphant performances on the West End stage; and they all knew that he was regarded in the business as Jack Hylton’s ‘golden boy’. When, therefore, he bounded on to the train at Crewe, his thick, shiny hair flopping over his forehead, his expensive-looking overcoat flapping loosely as he moved, he became – without any discernible effort on his part – instantly the centre of attention, and Eric, like many of the other boys in the carriage, was more than a little jealous.

It did not help, of course, that Ernie, almost as soon as he arrived, had taken to calling Eric ‘sonny’; nor did it help that Ernie, at the age of fifteen, was no longer required to go to school; and it certainly did not help that the combination of his greater height, more adult-looking clothes (long trousers, in contrast to Eric’s baggy shorts), superior wage (£2 per week more than Eric’s), fame and freedom from parental interference in his affairs caused him to appear, in Eric’s anxious eyes, a far more attractive proposition to the girls in the company. It must have seemed to Eric as though everything that he had begun to achieve over the past few weeks was now set to be eclipsed in an instant by the presence of this noisy bundle of energy and dreams.

Eric’s mother, however, knew better. Sadie saw straight through Ernie’s bravado and understood that, underneath, he was actually an insecure and forlorn little boy, far younger emotionally than he seemed, still struggling to repress the sadness he felt over his father’s broken spirit and only just beginning to settle into a peripatetic existence on the road. She observed him, to start with, from a distance, watching admiringly as he took complete responsibility for all of his travel and accommodation arrangements, sent the usual proportion of his weekly wage back home to his parents and, of course, banked the majority of the remainder. For all of his private problems, he never seemed, to the casual spectator, anything less than the very model of a self-reliant young professional, solid and sure-footed, but in reality he craved – perhaps more strongly than even Sadie had suspected – the very kind of support and security from which the vast majority of his contemporaries in the company were contriving to escape.

The only place where he felt genuinely sure of his worth was up on a stage in front of an audience. He knew that when he was up there he was good; he knew that audiences liked him. The rest of the company – adults and juveniles alike – admired him, too. Youth Takes a Bow was the second half of a two-part Variety show. The first half – usually billed as Secrets of the BBC – featured adult professional acts (such as Alice and Rosie Lloyd, sisters of the well-known music-hall star Marie Lloyd, and comedians Archie Glen, Dicky ‘large lumps’ Hassett and the double-act George Moon and Dick Bentley), while the second half was devoted to such young performers as Eric and Ernie, the singer Mary Naylor, the acrobat Jean Bamforth and the harmonica player Arthur Tolcher (who, thirty years later, would make regular, but comically curtailed, appearances on The Morecambe & Wise Show). Ernie Wise brought a certain amount of precious West End glamour to the latter part of the bill.

Although Eric, as the tour went on, grew to like Ernie as a person as well as to respect him as a performer, there was no obvious suggestion that their fast-blossoming friendship was likely to lead in the near future to the formation of an on-stage partnership. Eric was a comic, whereas Ernie was more of a song-and-dance man. Eric was appearing as the gormless little boy in the home-made comedy outfit, Ernie was playing the sharp-suited boulevardier – they seemed set on separate courses, pursuing different goals. Six months would go by until a combination of wartime exigencies and unexpected good fortune conspired to draw Ernie closer to Eric, and both of them nearer to the invention of a double-act.

At some point early in 1940, the cast arrived in Oxford for a show at the New Theatre, and, as usual, all of the individual performers dispersed to check in at their temporary accommodation. Ernie, however, had, for the first time, failed to book ahead, and, in a town that was packed full of troops, he had no choice but to trudge through the streets in search of a vacancy. Time and again he knocked on a door only to be informed that all rooms were occupied. Darkness fell, the temperature dropped, and Ernie was still wandering the streets on his own. It was well after ten o’clock at night that a cold and desolate Ernie Wise was found by a fellow member of the cast, a singer called Doreen Stevens.

Taking pity on him, she decided – even though her own room was waiting for her in another part of the town – to accompany him until they found somewhere for him to rest. After numerous disappointments, they reached yet another guest house and knocked on the door. ‘This is little Ernie Wise,’ said Doreen to the landlady. ‘Have you got any room in your house?’ Before the landlady could finish telling her that the house was fully booked for the whole week, Sadie Bartholomew’s distinctive voice could be heard from the top of the stairs: ‘Is it our Ernie?’³ Hurrying down to the door, with Eric following on behind her at a rather more leisurely pace, she announced that Ernie must come inside immediately and that he would be welcome to sleep with Eric in his bed. The next morning, as the three of them had their breakfast, Sadie suggested that Ernie – in order to avoid something similar to the traumatic experience of the previous evening ever happening again – might like to travel with them in future and leave all of the accommodation arrangements to her. He agreed, without the slightest hesitation, and, from that moment on, the three of them were virtually inseparable.

Ernie Wise did not just come to be treated by the Bartholomews as one of the family; he also came to rival Eric in Sadie’s affections. They clearly saw in each other a kindred spirit. ‘Ernie,’ Sadie would recall, ‘was gentle and shy, and sincere’:

Eric used to call him Lilywhite. ‘Look at Lilywhite, he never puts a foot wrong,’ he would say. He was right. Ernie never did wrong. Not that he was prim or prissy, or goody-goody, which is a person who just acts good but is really not good inside. Ernie was just naturally good, naturally truthful, fair and honest. We toured and lived together for years. I know Ernie.⁴

Ernie, in turn, saw in Sadie the same kind of enthusiasm and drive that he had once associated with his father. He felt that she, like him, possessed ‘a tungsten carbide core of solid ambition’,⁵ and he came to trust her implicitly.

According to Joan Morecambe, Sadie became a kind of second mother to Ernie:

I think she loved Ernie as much as she loved Eric. I really do. She’d never do something for one of them unless she could also do it for the other. That’s the way she felt about it.

I’m sure that she thought that Ernie was a positive influence on Eric. He’d push him in the same way that she’d always pushed him. Eric wasn’t like Sadie, he was more like his dad. Ernie was very much like Sadie – they were both very businesslike, very determined characters.⁶

So attached, in fact, did Ernie become to his surrogate family that, whenever he had the chance to relax for a few days, he chose to do so with the Bartholomews in Morecambe rather than the Wisemans in Leeds.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Eric and Ernie, now that they spent most of every day together, living almost like brothers, should develop an unusually deep kind of mutual understanding. Each would finish the other’s sentences, seeming to know what he was thinking and feeling, and each would try his best to make the other laugh. They never tired of telling jokes, singing songs and imitating all of the other acts. Sadie, at first, was amused by all of this, but after enduring a succession of increasingly loud, long and boisterous sessions on the way to and from each performance her patience was wearing thin. When, late in November 1940, the show reached the recently blitzed city of Coventry, she was at her wit’s end.

They had to commute each day from Birmingham – the site of their previous engagement – because the digs that Sadie had booked for them in Coventry had been destroyed by one of the bombs. If this was not bad enough, an additional problem was that the twenty-one-mile train ride each day was frequently disrupted and delayed by the damage that had been caused by the Blitz. Sadie, trapped in a stationary carriage with two hyperactive teenagers endlessly repeating comic routines to each other, could stand it no longer: why, she asked them, did they not channel their energy and talent more constructively by working together on a double-act that might actually help their careers as well as provide her with just a little peace and quiet? Both Eric and Ernie, it appears, thought this to be an inspired idea.

It started out, according to Ernie, as merely ‘a hobby, a sideline which we would work on in addition to the solo spots we each had’.⁷ Within days of Sadie’s suggestion, however, they had already worked out a basic routine, comprising of a few gags (‘adapted’ from Moon and Bentley’s repertoire) and a soft-shoe shuffle to the tune of ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’. They had also, with the speed and the ease that they would later come to be noted for, shaken hands on the ground rules for their professional association: everything was to be split down the middle, fifty-fifty, and it was never, ever, to matter who got the laughs (the only thing that mattered, they agreed, was that someone should get the laughs). Even Sadie was a little taken aback by the extent to which her suggestion, which had only been semi-serious in the first place, had captured their imaginations, but, once she saw how well they worked together, she became, as always, totally committed to their cause.

Ernie Wise would say that Sadie was ‘the key element’ in the development of their act.⁸ While they continued to concentrate primarily on their solo acts – which, as Ernie reminded Eric, were still the things that earned them their wages – Sadie studied the other performers, scoured old joke books for suitable material, thought about possible props and bits of comic business, and watched and listened attentively as they rehearsed tirelessly in front of her. The great quality she felt that both of them possessed was that of professionalism: ‘They always worked very hard. It was perfection or nothing.’⁹

Ernie became the straight-man, said Sadie, because ‘he was the good-looking personality boy’, and Eric became the comic, ‘because he could look like a vacant American college dude in glasses and a big fedora hat’.¹⁰ They based their style, to begin with, on the rapid and rather soulless cross-talk associated at the time with Abbott and Costello, and their homage went as far as assuming American accents. Their early material would inevitably have a patchwork quality about it, incorporating the radio-oriented puns of Askey and Murdoch:

ERNIE | (points to a coat hanger) What’s that?
ERIC | A hanger.
ERNIE | What’s it for?
ERIC | An aeroplane.

and the considerably more louche humour of the music-hall:

ERNIE | What are you supposed to be?
ERIC | I’m a businessman.
ERNIE | A businessman doesn’t walk like that.
ERIC | You don’t know my business.¹¹

After several months of sustained effort (‘we lived, ate and slept the double-act’¹²) they – and Sadie – felt that they were ready. They approached Bryan Michie in the hope that he might consider allowing them to perform the act within the existing show. Although he seemed to like what they could do, he remained non-committal: Jack Hylton, he said, would have to see it first, and he was next due to visit the show when it reached Liverpool in the summer of 1941. ‘Leave it to me,’ announced Ernie. ‘I’ll tackle Mr Hylton.’¹³ He did, and Hylton, after suggesting a few changes – the most significant of which involved using another song, ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’, to complement their soft-shoe shuffle¹⁴ – instructed Michie to remove one of the acts from the bill so that Eric and Ernie could have their chance.

The double-act of Bartholomew and Wise duly made its début on the night of Friday 28 August 1941¹⁵ at the Liverpool Empire. Sadie, standing next to Jack Hylton, watched proudly from the wings. Even though their material was blatantly unoriginal (their later exchange – ERNIE: That’s an Old Vic type joke./ERIC: I was there when old Vic told it – would have served as an apt evaluation of the antiquated nature of the affair), the audience, according to Sadie’s account, was sufficiently impressed to award her two ‘ardent and hard-working little troupers’ a ‘marvellous reception’.¹⁶ The show was due to move on to a week-long engagement in Edinburgh,¹⁷ and Hylton decreed that the double-act, in addition to Eric and Ernie’s existing solo acts, was, for the time being, to remain on the bill.

It took a while, none the less, for the partnership to find a regular spot in the show. Bryan Michie, fearful of incurring the wrath of the other mothers – some of whom could make formidable opponents – by appearing to indulge the whims of Sadie’s two boys, was hesitant at first. He only slipped the double-act on to the bill when he felt that he had a good enough reason to do so. There is no doubt, however, that Michie believed that it was worth persevering with – although not, he felt, with the names ‘Bartholomew and Wise’. He suggested either ‘Barlow and Wise’ or ‘Bartlett and Wise’,¹⁸ but neither sounded right to Eric and Ernie.

The matter was settled, eventually, when the tour reached the Midlands – Eric would remember the venue as being in Nottingham,¹⁹ Ernie in Coventry.²⁰ According to most sources, the American singer Adelaide Hall and her husband Bert Hicks were appearing on the same bill as Eric and Ernie when Sadie encountered them backstage. ‘We’re trying to think of a name for Eric,’²¹ she explained. Hicks is reputed to have suggested that Eric should follow the example of an old friend of his who, in a similar situation, had assumed the name of his home town of Rochester in Minnesota. According to Michael Freedland,²² who ghostwrote Morecambe and Wise’s 1981 autobiography There’s No Answer to That!, Hicks was referring to Eddie Anderson, the song-and-dance man who found international fame in the role of Jack Benny’s gravel-voiced butler, Rochester. The only answer one can give to this assertion is a non-committal ‘yes and no’: Anderson was an old friend of Hicks, and he did come to be thought of as originating from Rochester, but, in reality, he had been born in Oakland, California, and one of Jack Benny’s writers had created the character called ‘Rochester’ long before Eddie Anderson ever came to audition for the role.²³ What we can be sure of is that Sadie and Eric acted on Hicks’ basic advice and decided to change his name to Eric Morecambe. Ernie, perhaps overwhelmed momentarily by the spirit of adventure that was in the air, came close to changing his name to that of ‘Eddie Leeds’,²⁴ but, in a cool hour, he realised that ‘Morecambe and Leeds’ sounded too much like a railway return ticket, and he thought better of it.

They would later discover that even this new combination was not without its own little drawbacks – Morecambe was frequently misspelt as ‘Morecombe’²⁵ and, on at least one miserable afternoon during summer season, a compère shouting out to the audience, ‘Who goes with Morecambe?’ received the sarcastic reply, ‘Heysham!’²⁶ Both Eric and Ernie agreed, however, that it had the same kind of auspiciously euphonious feel to it as ‘Laurel and Hardy’, and so, in the autumn of 1941, a new double-act called ‘Morecambe and Wise’ was born.

One advantage that they had over most of the famous double-acts they hoped one day to emulate was that their partnership had been formed at such an early stage in their careers. Unlike, say, Laurel and Hardy, who had come together when Laurel was aged thirty-seven and Hardy thirty-five, or Abbott and Costello, who had met when Abbott was thirty-six and Costello twenty-five, Morecambe and Wise formed their professional partnership when Morecambe was only fifteen and Wise not quite sixteen, before either had acquired a fixed identity or style, and they could grow together unencumbered by the baggage of earlier associations. Whereas many of their heroes had been obliged to work against their individual pasts, Morecambe and Wise would have the luxury of being able, from the very start, to work for their long-term collective future.

‘There’s no such thing as an original to start with,’ Eric Morecambe once remarked. ‘You start by copying and once you’ve built up confidence and worked hard enough, the real person begins to come out.’²⁷ Morecambe and Wise had plenty of good double-acts to copy; the early forties were auspicious years for the format. Britain, for example, could offer Flanagan and Allen, Clapham and Dwyer, Murray and Mooney, Elsie and Doris Waters, Naughton and Gold, the Western Brothers and the increasingly popular Jewel and Warriss. America offered Burns and Allen, Olsen and Johnson, Hope and Crosby (intermittently), Laurel and Hardy and, then at their commercial peak, Abbott and Costello. Although Morecambe and Wise studied all of the British acts carefully (and, indeed, they would retain such a strong sense of affection for Flanagan and Allen that in the early seventies they would record a tribute album of their songs²⁸), they drew most of their inspiration from the American double-acts that they watched on the movie screen.

Abbott and Costello, they always said, started them off: ‘They were the double-act of the time.’²⁹ Eric and Ernie would go together to see each of their movies as soon as they were released: One Night in the Tropics, Buck Privates,³⁰ In the Navy (1940); Hold That Ghost, Keep ’Em Flying (1941); Ride ’Em Cowboy, Rio Rita, Pardon My Sarong and Who Done It? (1942). They were viewed and reviewed, their accents copied and best routines memorised and not so subtly revised. For the next two or three years, Morecambe and Wise were, in their own minds at least, Abbott and Costello. Eric was Lou, slow-witted and submissive, and Ernie was Bud, dapper and domineering. They had the same hats turned up at the front, the same catchphrases (‘I’m a ba-a-a-d boy!’) and they tried their best to employ the same kind of breathlessly aggressive style of delivery. Years later they would revive one of these old routines for their television show:

ERIC | Lend me two pounds. One’ll do – now you owe me one.
ERNIE | I don’t understand.
ERIC | Lend me two pounds. One’ll do – now you owe me one.
ERNIE | I don’t understand.
ERIC | Well, I’ll show you. Ask me for two pounds.
ERNIE | Lend me two pounds.
ERIC | There’s two pounds. How much have you asked for?
ERNIE | Two pounds.
ERIC | How much have I given you?
ERNIE | Two pounds.
ERIC | How much do you owe me?
ERNIE | Two pounds.
ERIC | Thank you.³¹

The lightning pace of such routines did not just provide Morecambe and Wise with a fashionably dynamic act; it also prevented potential hecklers in the audience from ever getting a word in edgeways. Later on, as their confidence grew, they would look more to the character-based humour of Laurel and Hardy, a far warmer and more nuanced style of comedy, with the cheerfully diffident Laurel’s dazed-looking double-takes, the courteously pompous Hardy’s quietly despairing stares at the camera, and a shared attitude to bachelorhood that was coexistent with their nature as perpetual schoolboys. It would be an important change of direction for Morecambe and Wise, because at the heart of Laurel and Hardy was an immutable friendship, whereas at the heart of Abbott and Costello was a simmering hatred, and Morecambe and Wise, like Laurel and Hardy, were able to make people care about them rather than – as was the case with Abbott and Costello – merely respect them.

Morecambe, according to Wise’s account, was somewhat reluctant initially to play the dopey comic to Ernie’s sophisticated straight-man: ‘There was a part of Eric that longed to be a sort of Cary Grant figure, and part of him that resented being the comic while the straight man had the style.’³² If Morecambe did have any reservations about his role then they soon faded away – perhaps because of the laughs that he was getting – and the act settled down along the conventional lines of comic and feed. Sometimes, as the tour started to wind down and several members of the cast drifted away, they teamed up with Jean Bamforth as ‘Morecambe, Bamforth and Wise’, and sometimes they reverted to the double-act. Whatever the situation warranted, they worked and they reflected and they learned. By the end of 1941 they had built up the act to last seven minutes – or ten if they chose to work slowly. Their confidence was high, which was just as well, because early in 1942, as a result of a precipitous decline in fortune at the box-office, Jack Hylton decided to close the show: in future, they would have to fend for themselves.

Although Morecambe and Wise, full of youthful optimism, expected London agents to be queuing up for their signature, Sadie Bartholomew knew better. They were still known as ‘child discoveries’, and there were currently no shows that were in need of such performers. They would have to learn to be patient. Eric returned very reluctantly to Morecambe, where he found a job working a ten-hour day in the local razor-blade factory. Ernie, unwilling to go home to Leeds and convinced, in spite of the redoubtable Sadie’s judgement to the contrary, that someone just must be ready to find him a slot in another show, tried his luck in London. He lodged with a Japanese family of acrobats while he searched through the showbusiness papers in the hope of spotting an opening. Variety in the capital, however, was now virtually at a standstill on account of all the bombings, and eventually Ernie was left with no alternative but to return to Yorkshire and find work on a local coal round.

Throughout the three months during which they were apart, however, Morecambe and Wise kept in touch with each other, and, at the end of that period, Ernie, unable to stand the situation any longer, went to stay with Eric in Morecambe. Reunited, they tried seaside concert parties, working men’s clubs and all the agents in the area, but there were no engagements to be had. They were saved, yet again, by Sadie. Seeing how no adversity seemed to shake their resolve to resume a career in showbusiness, she decided to accompany them to London and get them their chance. It was an extraordinary act of faith on her part, not to mention a serious financial sacrifice at an uncertain time, but it was certainly appreciated by both Eric and Ernie.

With Sadie at their side they felt that something positive was always likely to happen. She was disciplined, imaginative and, when she needed to be, cunning, and she was certainly tireless in the pursuit of her goals. After finding the three of them a flat – in Momington Crescent – she took them to see an agent³³ she had heard of in Charing Cross Road. The agent did not offer to sign them up, but he did make the suggestion that they might go round to the Hippodrome³⁴ in Cranbourne Street on the following Monday and attend the auditions that were being held for a new show, Strike a New Note.

George Black, the show’s producer, knew Ernie Wise from the days when they used to meet at Angmering-on-Sea. He had heard a few favourable reports about Morecambe and Wise in recent months, but, when they auditioned before him, he seemed less than enthusiastic. ‘How much are you earning these days, boys?’ he asked. Wise, belying his growing reputation as a shrewd negotiator, answered honestly, ‘Oh, about £20 between the two of us.’ Black smiled and said, ‘Right. I’ll give you that!’³⁵ The failure to follow the bargaining ritual of naming an exaggerated sum before accepting, with mock reluctance, a lower but still very satisfactory offer was, at such an early stage in their careers, understandable. This was not, however, the last of their disappointments: Black did not want the double-act at all, he revealed, but just the two of them as individuals ‘doing bits and pieces’.³⁶

They were crestfallen. Ernie, with the daring stubbornness for which he would later become famous, responded: ‘Mr Black, if you don’t want our act, I don’t think we are really interested.’³⁷ Black – not to mention Morecambe – was somewhat taken aback by the sheer impudence of this, but, quickly regaining his composure, he made a minor concession: if the second comic in the show, Alec ‘Mr Funny Face’ Pleon, was ever indisposed, the double-act could take his place. At that, they shook hands with Black and went off with Sadie to celebrate their first engagement in over three months.

Strike a New Note opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 18 March 1943. The programme heralded ‘George Black and the Rising Generation’, and, inside, an insert read: ‘HERE IS YOUTH. These boys and girls have been gathered from every part of the country. All are players of experience, needing but the opportunity to make themselves known. They have worked, they have learned; this then is their chance to show what they are worth.’³⁸ The cast included the comedian and singer Derek Roy, the South African musical comedy performer Zoe Gail, Bernard Hunter, Betty and Billy Dainty and the dancer Johnny Brandon, but, without any doubt, the stars of the show very quickly became the brilliant comedian from Birmingham Sid Field and his excellent straight-man Jerry Desmonde.

Field was hardly a representative of ‘Youth’. He had been touring the provinces for years, largely unknown to Southern audiences and critics, and now, suddenly, at the age of thirty-nine, he found himself being hailed as the proverbial ‘overnight success’. He was a comic with a gift for dialects (‘I’m not drinking that sterf!’) and his own personal repertory of characters: the spiv ‘Slasher Green’, the camp photographer, the would-be snooker player, the unteachable golfer, the music professor and the quick-change artiste. ‘No more naturalistic clown walked the land,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan of him, adding that now, with the assistance of the admirably disciplined and unselfish Jerry Desmonde, he appeared beyond comparison: ‘Nobody has done such things before on our stages’.³⁹ Another, very experienced, critic said of that first night:

Never before have I heard such gales of laughter and applause whirling through a theatre … The man in front of me laughed so helplessly that he had to be carried out, and given first aid. I, myself, felt weak with mirth. I was sure that every man and woman was longing to shout to the comedian on that stage: ‘For mercy’s sake, stop! You’ll kill us with laughter.’⁴⁰

It was a good show to be a part of. Although neither Morecambe nor Wise had much to do, and Alec Pleon’s health – in spite of daily prayers to the contrary from Eric and Ernie – remained depressingly hardy, both of them realised that there was a priceless education to be had from watching two inspired performers like Field and Desmonde, and they also appreciated the fact that the sight of such a successful show on any performer’s curriculum vitae – regardless of how minor a role they may actually have played in its popularity – was guaranteed to impress prospective employers. They relished the opportunity to bask vicariously in Fields’ newly won celebrity: any star who happened to be visiting London at the time seemed to make a point of seeing the show, and among the visitors backstage whom Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise encountered were Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Deborah Kerr, Alfred Hitchcock and George Raft. On one memorable occasion, Adolphe Menjou complimented Wise on his typically spirited impression of Jimmy Cagney singing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ (which proved, of course, sufficient encouragement for him to reprise the performance at regular intervals during the next thirty years). They also met innumerable West End stars at drinks parties hosted by Wendy Toye, the show’s choreographer.

Throughout all of the seductive hubbub of this brightly unfamiliar showbusiness world, Morecambe and Wise continued to work diligently to promote their critically neglected double-act: ‘At least we loved our act,’ said Wise; ‘we thought it wonderful and were prepared to do it anywhere, anytime, at the drop of a hat.’⁴¹ They played several dates at the American officers’ club in Hans Crescent, off the Brompton Road. They stood in at short notice for indisposed acts on local Variety bills. They even played in people’s front rooms – anything to keep in practise and keep being noticed. They also managed during this period to make their very first radio appearances together when the BBC broadcast a special version of Strike a New Note on 16 April 1943, followed in May and June by a ‘spin-off’ series, Youth Must Have Its Swing, on the Home Service.⁴² In spite of their persistence, however, not everyone was convinced that the double-act had a future. Wendy Toye, for example – who had watched them perform both in the theatre and, slightly less willingly perhaps, in the middle of one of her soirées – continued to regard their partnership with a certain amount of scepticism. ‘I was very fond of both of them,’ she would recall, ‘but I did all I could to separate them’:

I remember saying to Eric, ‘You know, Eric, you’re such a wonderful comedian, you ought to be your own stand-up comedian,’ and I remember taking Ernie to one side and saying to him, ‘That lad’s holding you back – you ought to be a solo song-and-dance man. You’d go straight into musicals and do very, very well.’ They stuck together, thank goodness, but just think: I nearly put a stop to that great double-act!⁴³

Ernie Wise, by this time, was quite impervious to such advice. His often overlooked yet invaluable capacity for loyalty was very evident here – as, indeed, it would be at several crucial points later on in the act’s development – and even Sadie was surprised by how utterly devoted he had become to his partner. Although Wise was, strictly speaking, the one with the more distinguished past and still, some were saying, the more obviously promising future, he seemed perfectly content to let Morecambe berate him at regular intervals for his supposed inadequacies. ‘You’re not a bit of good,’ Morecambe would shout at him after he had forgotten or mistimed a tag line. ‘You’re supposed to have learnt this.’⁴⁴ On one occasion, Sadie, feeling that things had gone too far, intervened by ordering Eric to leave the room. Ernie’s reaction, she would recall, was entirely unexpected:

Ernie turned to me. ‘You know, you shouldn’t have interfered.’

‘But I’m sticking up for you,’ I said.

‘Don’t you see? Eric is only trying to make me the best feed in the country, like Jerry Desmonde is to Sid Field,’ Ernie said.

‘Make you the feed!’

‘Yes, and shall I tell you something? He’s going to be the best comic in the British Isles.’

Later I told Eric this, and there was no more temperament from my son, never another cross word, never any more argument.⁴⁵

Their progress, however, was interrupted abruptly on 27 November 1943 with the arrival of Ernie Wise’s call-up papers. He had the option of joining the Army, the Merchant Navy or going down the mines; he decided to join the Merchant Navy, anticipating an exotic life at sea but ending up ferrying coal from Newcastle and South Shields down to Battersea Power Station in London for the Gas Light and Coke Company. Eric Morecambe, who was not due to be called up before May of the following year, stayed on in Strike a New Note until it finally broke up. He then found a job in ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association⁴⁶) as a straight-man to a Blackpool comic called Gus Morris (brother of the more talented Dave Morris). When his papers did eventually arrive, he opted to become a Bevin Boy,⁴⁷ volunteering to work down the mines in Accrington for Hargreaves Collieries. Eleven months later, however, he was classified C3 with what was referred to at the time as a touch of heart trouble and was sent home to Morecambe – first to rest and regain his good health, and then to work once again at the local razor-blade factory.

Sadie Bartholomew, scanning the ‘wanted’ columns in The Stage, came across the news that a touring show was looking for a straight-man for its principal comic, Billy Revell. Morecambe got the job, earning £12 per week, and the show ran for six months. Wise was also doing his best to keep himself involved in showbusiness during this period. He had been made part of a permanent reserve of seamen available for placement anywhere in the world at short notice, but, as there were often long breaks between postings, he took the opportunity to keep in touch with a circle of agents and producers who provided him with a steady supply of short-term engagements around the country (billing him as a ‘boy from the brave merchant navy’⁴⁸). When at last he was discharged in April 1945 he returned to a civilian life still committed to the world of entertainment but now, it seemed, as a solo performer. During his prolonged separation from Morecambe the idea of being part of a double-act had lost some of its appeal – perhaps because of a belief that, at eighteen, it was time to redeem a once promising but recently stalled career, and a solo act might prove more adaptable than a double-act in an increasingly competitive market-place.

Morecambe and Wise might never have reformed their partnership had not, yet again, another happy accident intervened. Sadie had taken Eric to London in order to assist him, once again, in his search for work.⁴⁹ After finding a suitable base in theatrical digs owned and presided over by a Mrs Nell Duer at 13 Clifton Gardens, in Chiswick, they had started the onerous task of scouring all of the showbusiness papers and visiting innumerable agents in the hope of chancing upon an opening. One day, as they walked purposefully along Regent Street, Eric glanced across to see the familiar figure of Ernie Wise waving frantically from the other side of the street.⁵⁰ When Sadie discovered that Ernie was staying in a rather insalubrious form of accommodation in Brixton, she invited him to move in with her and Eric: ‘You two might as well be out of work together as separately,’ she remarked.⁵¹

As it happened, Sadie soon found work for both of them in a peculiar hybrid of a show that went under the grandiose title of Lord John Sanger’s Circus & Variety. This particular combination of Circus and Variety had been popularised in the Victorian era by a colourful showman called ‘Lord’ George Sanger.⁵² George Sanger’s involvement had ended abruptly back in 1911 when his manservant – in an egregious fit of pique – battered him to death with a hatchet, but the tradition stretched on into the post-war years under the watchful eye of the similarly self-ennobled ‘Lord’ John. The reasoning behind the project was that provincial audiences, starved of top-class professional entertainment and lacking the grand music-halls of the big cities, would welcome the opportunity to sample the respective delights of Circus and Variety within the same makeshift arena. It seemed, as both Morecambe and Wise would later remark, a good idea at the time.

Sanger’s brother, Edward – who had known Morecambe and Wise since the days when he assisted Bryan Michie on Youth Takes a Bow – booked each of them separately for the tour. Wise was selected first – as a comic – on a wage of £12 per week. Morecambe, much to his and Sadie’s surprise, was selected as Wise’s ‘Wellma boy’ – the straight-man who starts with the self-assured line ‘Well, my boy, and what are you going to do tonight?’ only to be insulted by the irreverent comic – on a wage of £10 per week.⁵³ It was, at least as far as Eric and Sadie were concerned, a less than satisfactory arrangement, but, as no alternative engagements were available and no money was coming in, there was nothing to do but to accept it.

The show travelled from place to place in a slow procession of converted RAF trailers, putting up the big top on village greens or in conveniently situated fields. On arrival, the performers themselves were obliged to set out seats for up to seven hundred people, put down the sawdust, set up the stage and help sell the tickets. Included on the bill were Speedy Yelding, ‘Britain’s Greatest Clown’; the singer Mollie Seddon, ‘A Thrill to Your Eyes, Ears & Heart’; Peter, ‘The Equine Marvel’; Evelyn’s Dogs & Pigeons; a quartet of dancers, ‘The Four Flashes’; Eric Morecambe and ‘England’s Mickey Rooney’, Ernie Wise. Each prospective member of the audience, as he or she pondered the 3s. 6d. that was the price of admission, was urged not to ’fail to visit the pets comer after the performance’.⁵⁴

It did not go to plan. Audiences – when there were any – arrived expecting an event of Barnum and Bailey proportions, and were not at all pleased to discover that, far from a fierce menagerie of lions, tigers and elephants, the best that Sanger could offer them was one tired-looking donkey, a silent parrot, two chubby hamsters, a team of performing dogs, a shivering wallaby and a ring-tailed lemur. In between these so-called Circus acts the Variety performers, such as Morecambe and Wise, filled-in with, in their own words, ‘unfunny sketches and unfunny jokes’.⁵⁵

Sanger himself lived and travelled in comfort, but his employees were not so fortunate. Each battered old trailer contained a canvas bucket as a make-shift sink and the artistes’ bathroom at each site consisted of a hole in the ground surrounded by a malodorous canvas screen. Meals were cooked over campfires and served on dented tin plates to be consumed under a nearby tree. Although both Morecambe and Wise came from relatively humble backgrounds, they enjoyed their creature comforts none the less and loathed this sharp taste of life on the road. Their lowest point came when they were obliged to perform in front of an audience made up of just six young boys, all of whom were seated right at the very back of the cavernous marquee in the cheapest of the seven hundred seats.

Things went from bad to worse. First, everyone was obliged to take a cut in their wages: Morecambe’s went down to £5 per week, Wise’s to £7. They were then forced into taking part in an increasingly embarrassing and exhausting succession of gimmicks, the last of which involved the marquee being converted into a booth through which the audience wandered while the company somehow managed to perform no fewer than seventy-three shows in three days. Finally, to the disappointment of no one except, perhaps, Sanger himself, the show came to a premature end in October 1947 at Nottingham’s Goose Fair. Morecambe and Wise, tired-eyed and chap-fallen, dragged themselves back to their old digs at Mrs Duer’s in Chiswick and pondered their immediate future.

It was, without doubt, a bleak time for both of them, but perhaps especially so for Ernie Wise, whose career had begun almost a decade before in such propitious circumstances. Mickey Rooney, by the tender age of twenty-two, had made over a hundred two-reel Hollywood comedies, been handed a special Academy Award and had married the very beautiful Ava Gardner, whereas Wise – supposedly Britain’s answer to America’s indefatigably spirited child star – was at the same age stuck in cramped digs in Chiswick, single, unemployed and in very grave danger, it seemed, of being forgotten. Sadie Bartholomew, by this time, had returned home to Morecambe, which left the two of them feeling even more insecure and uncertain. Sadie’s endless stream of sobering proverbs – such as ‘Marry a girl and your fourpenny pie will cost you eight pence’⁵⁶ – continued to echo in their heads. Neither of them yet drank alcohol, nor did either of them have any time for any of the other recreational pursuits associated with their profession, and each tried as best he could (Wise with greater success than Morecambe) to save what money he possessed, but it was still a period of considerable anxiety.

Out-of-work Variety acts, they soon discovered, tended to converge on an unprepossessing Express Dairy café that was situated, in those days, near the Leicester Square tube station. Every morning the place would be packed with the usual mixture of young, old, ex- and would-be performers, each cupping their hands gratefully around hot mugs of tea and announcing loudly but unconvincingly that they had, or would soon have, or would definitely have for certain in a month or two, a marvellous job lined up for themselves. Overhearing these fanciful monologues, Morecambe and Wise noticed that agents seemed to be crucial figures in this profession, and, as a consequence, they made up their minds to find one for themselves as soon as possible.

One way to attract an agent, they were told, was to get oneself on to the bill of certain key Variety theatres – such as the Metropolitan on the Edgware Road, the Brixton Empress or the East Ham Palace – which functioned as shop windows for new talent, but, paradoxically, Morecambe and Wise found it hard to secure a booking at such places without the assistance of an agent: it was a vicious circle. Determined somehow to get noticed, and to improve their act in the process, they lowered their sights and started accepting anything: one-off club and pub nights, masonic dances, a very rough week at a rowdy venue near Barry Docks in Cardiff, the odd date with ENSA, the occasional day’s work at the Nuffield Centre (a club just off Piccadilly where ex- and current servicemen could perform), a short tour of the American army camps in Germany and even the occasional private party. The only bona fide Variety engagement they attracted during this depressingly barren period was for a week at the Palace, Walthamstow in March 1948, but even this modest success was diminished by the fact that because one of the other, more established acts was called Vic Wise and Nita Lane, Morecambe and Wise – to avoid causing any confusion – were billed as ‘Morecambe and Wisdom’.⁵⁷

The one bright spot amidst all of this gloom was the kindness of their landlady, Nell Duer. Although there were stretches of fourteen to eighteen weeks at a time when Morecambe and Wise were unable to pay their rent she remained remarkably sympathetic to their plight, telling them just to pay her when they could afford to. When things became intolerable they would take an overnight bus to Morecambe and stay with Eric’s parents for a week – sometimes a fortnight – before returning, well-fed and with a couple more pounds in their pockets, to mount yet another attempt at finding long-term employment. Oddly enough, however, neither Morecambe nor Wise was ever tempted during this time to seek a job outside of showbusiness: ‘The matter was never broached between us,’ said Wise. ‘We were Variety artists; we were pros. To consider anything else would have been heresy.’⁵⁸

The post-war years were not easy times for any young entertainer to find employment. London was besieged by returning ex-servicemen nursing hopes of establishing (or, in a few cases, re-establishing) themselves in showbusiness: comics such as Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Eric Sykes, Graham Stark, Jimmy Edwards, Tommy Cooper, Benny Hill, Dick Emery, Eric Barker, Harry Worth, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Max Bygraves, Bruce Forsyth, Norman Wisdom, Alfred Marks and Arthur English were all back in the capital and all clamouring for an opportunity to show an agent or impresario or a BBC producer just what they could do. It was, to say the least, a fiercely competitive time. Morecambe and Wise, in the course of their long-running search for work, gravitated – like most other comics – to the one place in London where they felt they might be given the chance to perform: the Windmill Theatre in Great Windmill Street, Soho. The Windmill, since 1932, had been permitted by the Lord Chamberlain to present – as one element of the Variety revues known as Revudeville – nude tableaux on condition that all of the young women remained perfectly still for the duration of each presentation, the stage lighting was always ‘subdued’ and no ‘artificial aids to vision’ were permitted in the auditorium.

Its owner, Vivian Van Damm (known to everyone as ‘VD’), was involved in every aspect of the running of the theatre, from opening the office mail to hiring and firing the artistes. He was sufficiently proud of the fact that the Windmill had remained open throughout the war to coin the slogan, ‘We Never Closed’, and he was sufficiently astute not to object when this was perverted into ‘We Never Clothed’ by the habitués of the shows for which his stage was famous. Ann Hamilton, who in 1959 became the five hundredth Windmill Girl and would later become the regular female presence in The Morecambe & Wise Show, recalled: ‘He would always say that we were in showbusiness – with the accent on show. Because of censorship he never told the girls to show everything, but, as far as the Fan Dance was concerned, he certainly wasn’t averse to the fans being lowered to reveal the breasts, which could always be explained away as an unfortunate slip.’⁵⁹

Van Damm preferred to employ women as young as fourteen and a half, but he would often continue to employ them until it was deemed that they required the support of a bra. He was part benevolent father figure, part seedy voyeur: on the one hand, he would see that all of his young women were groomed in elocution, make-up, deportment, dress sense and singing and dancing skills, and also that each of them received free medical and dental treatment; on the other hand, as Ann Hamilton recalled:

He would never knock when he entered the dressing-room. It was so hot in there, deep in the bowels of the earth where the girls had to change, that people would sit around with nothing on – because it was all girls together. He knew that, and he always walked straight in, but we’d know when he was on his way because you could hear his little shuffling footsteps and smell the smoke from his cigar.⁶⁰

Although Van Damm took great delight in erecting a mahogany plaque outside on the comer of his theatre that listed all of those ‘Stars of Today Who Started Their Careers in This Theatre’, most if not all of the performers whom he claimed to have either ‘discovered’ or ‘nurtured’ were, in reality, regarded merely as tolerable distractions during the brief intervals that separated one nude tableau from the next. His policy was to audition almost anyone who applied to him, but he was by no means as easy to please as has sometimes been implied (his daughter, Sheila, estimated that around 75 per cent of all applicants were rejected⁶¹). Harry Secombe, who worked there during 1946, remembered the sad fate suffered by a Chinese illusionist who was auditioned by Van Damm: after spending most of the previous night sweating over his routine and preparing all of his elaborate props and painting on his intricate make-up, he shuffled on to the stage, bowed slowly with Chinese precision, and was just about to open his mouth when Van Damm shouted ‘Thank you’, thus forcing him to shuffle all the way back off again in silence.⁶² In his time, Van Damm also dismissed, with a similarly curt ‘Thank you’, Spike Milligan, Roy Castle, Charlie Drake, Norman Wisdom, Benny Hill and Kenneth Tynan. It was, however, as Morecambe and Wise discovered, one of the least worst places to attract the attention of a relatively good London agent. Peter Prichard, a regular visitor in those days, remarked:

It became the nursery for comedians in this country. We used to go, as agents, to spot the talent. We could hardly ever get a seat, because there was the famous ‘Windmill Jump’ – these guys would sit in the audience for two or three shows and, eventually, if one in the front got up to leave, all the others would jump over the seats to try and get the front seat.⁶³

Michael Bentine played there as part of a novelty double-act called Sherwood and Forrest:

An extraordinary place. Very small theatre. Very small stage. And statuesque and beautiful girls. And, of course, the mackintosh brigade came in, as you can imagine, with a copy of The Times, and, shall we say, ‘engaged’ with other interests, and suddenly one of the girls would come off after a scene and say, ‘Row 3, seat 26: dirty bastard!’ The guy would be picked up by the muscle men and thrown out the door.⁶⁴

It seems likely that Morecambe and Wise knew at least a little about this when one Sunday morning they went up to Van Damm’s tiny, dark and smoke-filled office near the top of the theatre, but they were determined to find somewhere that allowed them to perform. Van Damm sat at his desk (behind which the observation ‘There are No Pockets in Shrouds’ was spelled out in large Gothic type) and puffed on his cigar as they went through all ten minutes of their current act. He nodded his approval – a slow nod to register only mild approval – and informed them that he was prepared to engage them for one week (six shows a day, from 12.15 p.m. until 10.30 p.m.) with an option for a further five weeks. Their wage, between them, was to be £25.⁶⁵ Their rehearsal – the ‘undress rehearsal’ as some called it – went rather well, and they both looked forward to the first week of what they hoped would be a long run in the show.

They were swiftly disabused of such dreams. On the Monday they found themselves having to follow an act which involved bare-chested male dancers squeezed into tights, cracking whips and adopting vaguely Wagnerian poses, female dancers performing their various jetés with the assistance of ‘artistic’ lighting effects, and, of course, several stationary nudes. They had seen nothing like this at the Bradford Alhambra. When the curtain came down they walked out on the stage to complete silence, and started their act in what they hoped would soon be familiar as their ‘usual way’ – ‘Hello, music lovers!’ They continued for seven painfully elongated minutes, facing an impersonal mass of crumpled broadsheet newspapers, before walking back slowly and disconsolately to the shelter of the wings. The same thing happened throughout the rest of the day – at the second house, and the third, fourth, fifth and sixth – each appearance eliciting complete indifference. Tuesday, if anything, was worse still, and after the last of their appearances on the Wednesday they were met at their dressing-room by a grim-faced Ben Fuller, the burly stage-door keeper who was often called upon to act as the harbinger of bad news.

Fuller, ominously silent, escorted the two of them up to Van Damm’s office. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Van Damm with a wan smile. ‘My patrons seem to prefer the other double-act, Hank and Scott.’⁶⁶ ‘Hank’ was a young Tony Hancock, and ‘Scott’ was the pianist Derek Scott. ‘I’m not taking the option up, boys,’ Wise recalled Van Damm informing them ‘with all the charm of a surgeon telling you the worst’,⁶⁷ and they were instructed to leave at the end of their first and only week. Although both of them knew that their act had failed to capture the imagination of the Windmill audience, they also knew that most of the other acts had failed to capture the imagination of the Windmill audience, and so they were, therefore, ‘devastated’ by this news;⁶⁸ not only was it a cruel blow to their self-esteem, but it was also, more seriously still, a major setback to their hopes of finding an agent. Fortunately, Wise – with typically sound business sense – recovered enough of his composure before leaving to ask Van Damm if he would object if they sought to limit the damage to their professional reputation by placing a notice in The Stage to the effect that Morecambe and Wise were leaving the Windmill purely because of certain prior commitments. Van Damm smiled and acceded to the request and they parted company on as amicable terms as the sorry circumstances would allow.⁶⁹

They played out the remaining days of that week and hoped that someone might see them and show some interest before they returned once again to obscurity. One agent did just that: Gordon Norval. Norval agreed to help them out, and he arranged for them to perform two spots the following Monday evening in yet another nude revue – this one entitled Fig Leaves and Apple Sauce – at the Clapham Grand. Unbeknown to Norval, however, there was a problem: they had agreed to perform two spots rather than one because the fee was £2 10s. more, but they were well aware of the fact that they had only twelve minutes of material rehearsed and there was no possibility that any number of Jack Benny-style pauses and silent stares could stretch this out for the duration of two whole spots. Panic, remembered Wise, was, in the absence of Sadie, ‘the mother of our invention’:⁷⁰ locking themselves away in their digs and forcing themselves to come up with new ideas, they managed, just in time, to have a second act ready.

Arriving at the Grand on Monday evening, they had a plan fixed firmly in their minds: they would use their ‘proper’, well-rehearsed act for the first spot, win over the audience and then rely to some extent on that residual warmth to waft the remainder of their wafer-thin material through to the end of their second spot. The plan, however, had to be aborted after their first, disastrous appearance saw them walk off to the arctic chill that was known locally as the ‘Clapham silence’. Now all they had to rely on for their second spot was the residual indifference of the audience. They began with a barely concealed feeling of terror. What saved them was the unlikely success of a routine they had recently devised that featured Ernie teaching Eric how to sing ‘The Woody Woodpecker’s Song’; Eric, assured that he had the most important part, was eventually reduced to the famous five-note pay-off (‘Huh-huh-huh-huh-hah!’) at the end of each verse. It was a routine that they would return to later on in their career (with such songs as ‘Boom Oo Yatta-Ta-Ta’⁷¹) and it certainly proved popular with the audience that night – so much so, in fact, that not one but several theatre managers rushed backstage after the performance with offers of work. It was a turning-point in the development of the partnership. Suddenly, after the bleakest of times, they were in demand.

Nat Tennens, who ran the Kilburn Empire, booked them ‘act as seen’ for the following week. This time they reversed the order, starting with their new material. It was again so successful that it even seemed to breathe new life into the old act, and their confidence started to soar. They went on to make another appearance at the Clapham Grand, and the week after that they returned to the Kilburn Empire – only this time at the top of the bill. They were now earning £40 per week, and Gordon Norval, the man who had been in the right place at the right time to help them, became their first agent.

Their next stroke of good fortune, however, was prompted not by Norval but by a young dancer, Doreen Blythe, who had worked with Morecambe and Wise in Lord John Sanger’s touring show as one of ‘The Four Flashes’. She had grown sufficiently close to Wise to have carried on a correspondence with him once that unfortunate enterprise had ended. She was now appearing in another touring show, this one run by an impresario named Reggie Dennis, and – knowing of Morecambe and Wise’s recent success, and keen to find a way to spend more time with Ernie – she urged Dennis to go to see the double-act with a view to booking it for the next leg of the tour. He did so, and, liking what he saw, offered them the chance of almost a year’s continuous work in the revue he was calling Front Page Personalities. They accepted, and, on tour for the next eleven months, they polished their technique, improved their material and, for the first time, began to really relax in front of an audience.

It was towards the end of this tour, in the autumn of 1950, that Morecambe and Wise came to the attention of an extremely influential London-based agent called Frank Pope.⁷² Pope seemed to have a hand in most of the important theatre circuits in Variety. He was responsible, for example, for booking all of the acts for one of the key circuits associated with post-war Variety: the so-called ‘FJB’ circuit, set up by an enterprising man by the name of Freddy J. Butterworth after purchasing a dozen ailing cinemas and turning them back into music-halls.⁷³ Pope also supplied acts to the far mightier Moss Empires circuit, which at that time owned around twenty-four large and well-run theatres (including the prestigious London Palladium). There could, therefore, have been few more suitable agents for Morecambe and Wise at this particular point in their career, because, as Morecambe noted: ‘In the early days our ambition [had been] to be second top of the bill at Moss Empires. Not top. At second top it was not your responsibility to fill the theatres,’⁷⁴ and now, as Wise would recall, they were feeling so optimistic that they were ready to think of making the top of the bill at the Palladium ‘the apex of our ambition’.⁷⁵ After coming to an amicable agreement with Gordon Norval, Pope signed Morecambe and Wise to what was a sole agency agreement (guaranteeing them a minimum of £10 per week but obliging them to give him at least six months’ notice if they ever wanted to opt out). They now, at long last, had the kind of backing that would provide them with a reasonably frill diary of top-flight Variety dates, a rewarding annual pantomime season as well as the chance to become recognised as fully fledged stars.

‘Eric always said to me’, Wise would recall, ‘that the reason we were so successful was that we stayed together. A simple enough statement,’ he added, ‘but also very profound. We were together from 1943, and from that moment on we sweated at it.’⁷⁶ By the early 1950s the tremendous amount of effort that they had invested in their act was finally starting to pay dividends, but with these rewards came a new set of challenges: as Wise observed, in the old days of the ‘youth discovery’ shows, ‘the audiences are on your side. They say, “Oh, aren’t they good for amateurs!” But it’s when you turn professional – that’s when it becomes hard,’⁷⁷ and not all of the audiences they now performed to were particularly easy to please. Southern audiences could sometimes be a problem, treating Northern comics with a certain amount of suspicion until they were satisfied that they could understand the accent and identify with the humour. Northern audiences, though obviously more suited in those days to an act like Morecambe and Wise (who by that time had abandoned their Abbott and Costello-style mannerisms and looked instead to Northern comics like Jimmy James and Dave Morris for inspiration⁷⁸), could still be hard work (indeed, the old story about the two grim-faced Northerners watching a comic perform his act – ‘He’s not too bad, is he?’ says one of them. ‘He’s all right if you like laughing,’ mutters the other – was made real for Harry Secombe when a member of the audience in Blackpool ‘congratulated’ him by remarking, ‘You nearly had me laughing when you were on, you know’⁷⁹). Clubs – even the relatively plush ones that were starting to emerge – were never among the favourite venues of Morecambe and Wise, in part because of the added burden of having to compete with the bar for the audience’s attention (one inexperienced comic, struggling in vain to win over an unresponsive crowd, was interrupted by a very loud and entirely unexpected roar of approval: ‘Don’t worry,’ the chairman told him. ‘It’s just that the hot pies have come …’⁸⁰).

By far the most intimidating venue on the circuit, at least as far as English comics were concerned, was the notorious Glasgow Empire. When Cissie Williams – the formidable woman in charge of all bookings for Moss Empires – sent Morecambe and Wise up there for a week-long engagement, she paid them an extra £10 – not just to cover the rail fare and any other expenses but also to compensate them for the trauma of playing to such an aggressive audience. Everyone felt the same: whenever Jimmy James arrived at Glasgow station he would step out slowly on to the platform, sniff the air suspiciously, pause for a moment and say, ‘By ’eck, it’s been a long week!’⁸¹ Glaswegians loved American singers, but had serious reservations about most other performers and had a special aversion to acts from south of the border. ‘They always opened the show with kilts – McKenzie Reid and Dorothy and their accordions, or a cripple,’ Wise recalled. ‘There’s nothing more guaranteed to get sympathy than a crippled man playing an accordion, especially if it’s a bit too heavy for him,’ added Morecambe knowingly.⁸² It was actually the sudden and premature death of McKenzie – he was run over by a tram – that led to the famously harrowing experience of Des O’Connor (‘It was the time’, Morecambe observed, ‘when Des really stood for desperate’⁸³). McKenzie’s widow, Dorothy, insisted that the show must go on, and, with the assistance of a young nephew, she duly appeared, night after night, singing such songs as ‘Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?’ to uncharacteristically emotional audiences. O’Connor, unfortunately, was obliged to follow this act, night after night, with his amusing gags and humorous anecdotes about life down in Stepney. Each night proved worse than the previous one, until Dorothy, overcome with grief, cut short her act and thus forced O’Connor, coiled up in fear in a comer of his dressing-room, to hurry out and attempt to entertain a full-house of three thousand choked-up Glaswegians. He panicked, telling one story twice, then telling the end of the next joke before its beginning, all to an increasingly threatening kind of silence. With his mouth now bone-dry and his forehead dripping with sweat, he started to sway slowly from side to side and then, according to a gleeful Eric Morecambe, passed out: ‘He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I—I—I—” Bumph! He fainted! Actually fainted! From nerves, you know. And he was lifted up under the backcloth, and he was carried slowly off. His legs disappeared and he had “Goodbye” written on the soles of his shoes … I think that’s the best he’s ever gone!’⁸⁴

When Morecambe and Wise came to make their début in Glasgow, they, like the vast majority of English comics who preceded them, walked off, shoulders slumped, to the terrible, flat sound of their own footsteps. As they passed the sad-faced fireman who always stood in the wings, he fixed them with a knowing look, flicked what little was left of his cigarette into a sandbucket and muttered, ‘They’re beginning to like you.’⁸⁵ Occasions such as these, though hard to take at the time, helped them to continue to improve: ‘We needed to have experienced the knocks, working in Variety,’ Wise reflected. ‘It chipped the rough edges off us.’⁸⁶ What that arduous process allowed was the emergence of something original from within the merely banal, taking the old music-hall cross-talk routine, technically elaborate but remorselessly anonymous, and adapting it to suit their own very special relationship. ‘I think there’s a simple revolution in what they did,’ Michael Grade remarked:

If you ever saw the double-acts of the thirties, forties or fifties, they never really talked to each other – they would only communicate to each other through the audience, and they would ‘work out’, as I call it. Whereas Eric and Ernie were the first double-act to develop an intimate style, they were the first to talk to one another, to listen to one another. The old acts had this big yawning distance that separated them from each other. Eric and Ernie were the first ones to really have a proper relationship on the stage.⁸⁷

Their partnership had already lasted longer than most before they had even worked their way to the brink of stardom, and both of them appreciated the elective affinity that had drawn them so closely together. ‘There was a kind of lightning thing that went between us,’⁸⁸ said Wise. ‘We were, I suppose, like brothers who rarely, if ever, quarrelled and could cope with what was an intense partnership without any fear of its overheating.’⁸⁹

It was the sort of relationship that was well suited to the special demands of the next medium that they intended to master: radio. They understood the importance of radio to their future because Variety was on the decline and the mass audience could now only be reached, it seemed, through the wireless. They also recognised the remarkable power of the medium and its potential for transforming regional stars into national celebrities. This had been underlined in 1949 by the extraordinary public reaction to the death of the comedian Tommy Handley (‘a national calamity’ according to the Spectator), when thousands lined the streets of London to watch his funeral cortège and hundreds more went on to St Paul’s Cathedral for the national memorial service.⁹⁰ Getting on to the wireless – and then staying on it – was the goal of any ambitious performer at this time.

Succeeding in radio, however, was something that was easier said than done. Eric Morecambe would look back on it as ‘the hardest medium of all’,⁹¹ and not without reason. The BBC was still uneasy about Variety’s lively unpredictability, and no performer was acceptable unless he or she could prove themselves to be adaptable. The infamous Green Book, devised in 1949 by the then Director of Variety Michael Standing as a guide for producers, writers and artistes, sought to preclude the slightest hint of a nudge or a wink from broadcast Variety. ‘Music-hall, stage, and to a lesser degree, screen standards’, the guide announced, ‘are not suitable to broadcasting,’ and all producers and performers were warned that any ‘crudities, coarseness and innuendo’ that might pass as entertainment on the Variety circuits were most certainly not acceptable on the wireless. There was, for example, an ‘absolute ban’ on trade names and ‘Americanisms’, as well as jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men and ‘immorality of any kind’, suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, prostitution, ‘ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on’, ‘animal habits, e.g. rabbits’, lodgers, commercial travellers, prenatal influences, ‘e.g. “His mother was frightened by a donkey”’, and marital infidelity. If one had to err, the Green Book advised, it was best to err on the side of caution: ‘“When in doubt, take it out” is the wisest maxim.’⁹²

Such draconian rules left many popular comics with barely any material fit for broadcasting, and led to a few, such as Max Miller, being banned on several occasions (one of them prompted by his notorious optician joke: ‘That’s funny – every time I see F, you see K!’). Writers, too, were often driven to despair by the multiple objections to perfectly inoffensive scripts (Frank Muir, for example, remembered being ordered by Charles Maxwell, his producer, ‘to remove any mention of the word “towel” from a script Denis Norden and I had written for Take It From Here because it had “connotations”’⁹³), causing them either to devise increasingly devious ways of outwitting the censors (an example being the regular appearance of a character named ‘Hugh Jampton’ – from the rhyming slang ‘Hampton Wick’ meaning dick – in The Goon Show) or else to focus more on comic situations than on comic lines.

Morecambe and Wise took some time to find a way into this imposing and unfamiliar medium. Since contributing to Youth Must Have Its Swing they had found further radio work hard to come by – just a couple of editions of the talent show Beginners, Please! (one in 1947, the other in 1948) and a single edition of Show Time in 1948. It was only in 1949, after writing a hopeful letter to Bowker Andrews, a BBC producer based in Manchester, asking him to consider using them in his Northern Variety broadcasts and reassuring him that ‘we are also both North Country’,⁹⁴ that they started participating on a more regular basis. In 1952,⁹⁵ after taking part in an edition of Workers’ Playtime, they were invited to be guests on one of the best Variety shows transmitted by the BBC’s North of England Home Service:⁹⁶ Variety Fanfare, produced by Ronnie Taylor. Taylor (who was also responsible, as a writer as well as a producer, for such popular programmes as The Al Read Show and Jimmy Clitheroe’s Call Boy) was one of the BBC’s great nurturers of young talent on both sides of the microphone. His support for Morecambe and Wise over the next few years would prove to be invaluable. His initial enthusiasm for them, however, was only translated into a firm offer of further appearances after they had planted an entirely spurious story – via a third party – which suggested that the producers of the show’s more prestigious Southern equivalent, Variety Bandbox, were on the verge of offering them a residency. Anxious not to let one of his discoveries be poached by his colleagues in London, he proceeded to book Morecambe and Wise for a succession of Variety Fanfares.97

‘That was the big break for us,’ Eric Morecambe would say of this run of appearances, ‘even if it was only Northern Home Service in those days.’⁹⁸ It served, said Ernie Wise, a dual purpose: on the one hand acting as ‘a useful safety net to cushion us when we fell on relatively lean times’,⁹⁹ and, on the other, as a showcase that might attract the attention of other producers. ‘We had to get in on something,’ Morecambe recalled. ‘We had to get in somewhere and make this niche for ourselves.’¹⁰⁰ In fact, in spite of their later claims to the contrary, they would have much preferred to have established this niche in London, on Variety Bandbox, rather than in Manchester, on Variety Fanfare.

Variety Bandbox, a weekly show that ran from the early forties through to the early fifties, was for many years the high-spot of the BBC’s Variety output and, as Morecambe and Wise well understood, the ideal programme for up-and-coming performers. It billed itself as the show that presented ‘the people of Variety to a variety of people’, and it had an excellent reputation for discovering and promoting new talent (such as Derek Roy, Frankie Howerd, Beryl Reid, Dick Emery, Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock, Reg Dixon and Bill Kerr). The failure of Morecambe and Wise to impress the show’s producer, Joy Russell-Smith, is a topic that is passed over in somewhat perfunctory fashion in their autobiography,¹⁰¹ and Eric Morecambe once claimed – erroneously – that they never did manage to appear on the show,¹⁰² but in fact – as the many letters preserved in the BBC’s archives reveal – they bombarded Russell-Smith and her colleagues for just over four years with their requests for a chance to take part.

The first letter (signed, like all subsequent ones, ‘Morecambe and Wise’ – as if the two of them were one person) was sent on 2 April 1948, and several more followed in quick succession until Joy Russell-Smith wrote back on 3 June inviting them for a private audition at Studio 2 of the BBC’s lofty Aeolian Hall in Bond Street on the afternoon of 10 June. No record of how they fared has been preserved in the archives, but, according to Eric Morecambe,¹⁰³ Russell-Smith told them that they sounded ‘too much like Jewel and Warriss’ and advised them to try again ‘in five years’ once they had developed a more distinctive style. Far from resigning themselves to being pigeonholed as ‘Northern comics’, however, they persisted in writing both to Russell-Smith and to anyone else whom they felt might offer them an opportunity to take part in such a prestigious show. On 28 November 1950, writing from the Palace Theatre, Plymouth, they contacted Bryan Sears, another Bandbox producer:

Dear Sir,

We shall be at Finsbury Park Empire next month followed by Empire Shepherd’s Bush. We shall then be at the Hippodrome Golders Green for Pantomime which means we shall be in London for the next 12 weeks.

We know you are a very busy man and may not be able to get along to see us. So do you think you could arrange to give us an audition with a view to booking us on Variety Bandbox?

We know you are always looking for comedians, so how about giving us a chance to show our ability?

Thanking you,

Sincerely,

Morecambe and Wise¹⁰⁴

Frank Pope, once he became their agent, added his weight to this long-running campaign, writing on 16 July 1951 to the then Deputy Head of Variety Pat Hillyard and urging him and his producers to at least go to see his clients perform. Someone did act on this request, because the following note, scribbled in pencil, was sent by a producer to Patrick Newman, the bookings manager, shortly after:

I saw this act last night and came to the conclusion that the act is, of necessity, too visual, and certainly with too much slap-stick for Sound.

Television might well be interested in them, but there is nothing I could say is outstanding. Some of their patter struck me as being rather aged.¹⁰⁵

It seems likely that Morecambe and Wise – and Frank Pope – remained ignorant of this negative verdict, because their campaign continued unchecked, and culminated in the decision of May 1952 by John Foreman, one of the last producers of Variety Bandbox, to include them in one of the programmes. It proved to be something of a pyrrhic victory – the show closed down for good in September that year – but it served as a testimony to the extraordinary tenacity exhibited by Morecambe and Wise in their pursuit of what seemed to them a worthwhile goal.¹⁰⁶

Throughout this period their broadcasts from Manchester were winning them some influential admirers, and Ronnie Taylor, in particular, was coming rapidly to the conclusion that they might well be worth the gamble of a show of their own. It was the very thing that they had been hoping for: a chance to grow, to develop a lasting relationship with a large radio audience, to amass a substantial body of work and negotiate a pay-rise – 20 guineas per show – into the bargain. The first series of You’re Only Young Once (YoYo as it became known) started on 9 November 1953¹⁰⁷ with Ronnie Taylor as producer, Frank Roscoe as writer and a cast that included Pearl Carr and Deryck Guyler. The shows consisted of short sketches, a musical interlude and a guest star, and were based – very loosely – around the framework of a detective agency run by Morecambe and Wise. When the second series began the following year, Taylor – now Head of Light Entertainment at BBC North – handed over the production duties to one of his most talented young protégés, John Ammonds. Ammonds had joined the BBC in 1941, acquiring invaluable experience during the following thirteen years working in the BBC’s Variety department at London, Bristol and Bangor before moving to Manchester and working closely with Taylor on a number of radio projects. Programmes were made at a very rapid pace in those days, and producers were often called upon to rewrite material – and sometimes, indeed, to conjure up material which had simply failed to arrive – shortly before a recording. Ammonds, in particular, had shown a real talent for this, and, as a consequence, he proved to be an enormously reassuring presence as Morecambe and Wise worked hard to improve on the basic format of the show.

‘Frank Roscoe was a pretty good writer,’¹⁰⁸ Ammonds recalled, ‘but he was always working on about three scripts at once – he was doing a script for Ken Platt and other stand-up comics, and one for us. There’d always be parts of the script we’d have to work on once we got it. I’d change this and that, add the odd line here and there, and, of course, the boys – Eric and Ernie – would turn up with all these big old joke books they carried everywhere with them and attempt to fill up the script with gags from those.’¹⁰⁹ Ammonds struck up a friendship with them that would last for the rest of their careers:

We got on well from the start. They weren’t just good performers, they were nice people, too. Easy to work with – very keen, quick learners and very, very hard workers, even way back then.

Of course, they were much more ‘Northern’ in those days. Eric was playing this gormless type of character, and his accent was fairly strong, whereas Ernie sounded pretty much then as he did years later on the TV shows.¹¹⁰

YoYo’s style of comedy was, even in 1954, slightly dated – owing more than a little to the kind of fast, pun-packed cross-talk (itself influenced by American radio shows) popularised in Britain by the writing team of Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin – but it retained an engaging spirit:

ERIC | Men: when you go to a dance, are you a wall-flower? When you get up to leave at the end, is the seat you’ve been sitting on warmer than you are? Instead of dancing like Astaire, do you dance like you’ve just tripped over one?
ERNIE | Well, then, what you need is the Swanee Dancing Course. It comes to you by post in six easy lessons, and here are some of the useful hints: ‘How to improve your chasse’ –
ERIC | Eat less.
ERNIE | ‘How to make women fall for you on the ballroom floor’ –
ERIC | Trip ’em up.
ERNIE | ‘What to do when a lady says “Excuse me”’ –
ERIC | Offer her a mint.
ERNIE | Yes, men, the Swanee Dancing Course is what you need. So why not enrol today? Just send us five pounds in notes to Morecambe and Wise. And those of you who have already sent us the money, don’t forget our slogan –
ERIC | Up the Swanee!

The relative success of this series, and the financial remuneration (by now 30 guineas per show) that went with it, was a great source of comfort to Morecambe and Wise at a time when they were not only still working hard on the Moss circuit but had also both recently married – Wise, at long last, to Doreen Blythe, and Morecambe, as soon as he possibly could, to a young soubrette called Joan Bartlett.¹¹¹ ‘The first sighting’, Joan recalled, ‘was at a bandcall on a Monday morning at the Empire in Edinburgh, because Eric always used to say they should put a plaque there saying, “Eric Morecambe Fell Here”.’¹¹² ‘I saw this tall girl,’ he said, ‘who was very beautiful with wonderful eyes, and who had a wonderful kind of sweetness which made your knees buckle ... I knew at once that she was the one for me for life. It was as sudden as that.’¹¹³ Although Joan, once she had sensed something of his ardour, was not exactly encouraging – ‘I thought, “Not a hope – nope, fat chance he’s got!”’¹¹⁴ – he remained undeterred. In Joan he saw not just a very attractive woman but also someone who would be a calming influence on him, someone who – as a talented performer herself – would understand his anxieties and offer him encouragement as well as constructive criticism. ‘How on earth anyone could possibly have worked all that out in a single glance is beyond me,’ she laughed, ‘but that’s the kind of man he was, and the pursuit was on.’¹¹⁵ Morecambe – as decisive and as determined about some things as he was indecisive and irresolute about others – persisted, and on 11 December 1952, a mere six months after that first meeting, they were married. Ernie Wise, who was best man, spent the day in a kind of daze: ‘I think it was the fact that it had all happened so quickly,’ Joan recalled. ‘He was like somebody is after an accident, in a state of complete shock!’¹¹⁶ Doreen, who had already chided Wise for his lack of a sense of romance,¹¹⁷ was probably quick to help him recover sufficiently to see the obvious moral to be drawn from this episode, and, after five years of courtship, they too were married on 18 January 1953.

These were brightly propitious times for Morecambe and Wise. Settled and secure in their personal lives, increasingly successful in their professional lives, they must have taken special pleasure in responding to an offer of more work at the end of 1953 from the once-unapproachable BBC by sending back a telegram that read: ‘VERY SORRY UNABLE TO ACCEPT = MORECAMBE AND WISE.’¹¹⁸ The tables had, at long last, been turned. Now producers had to pursue Morecambe and Wise. They were starting to be billed as ‘stars of radio’, and, after just one brief appearance on a televised Variety show, they were even being touted in some quarters as ‘the white hopes of television humour’.¹¹⁹’

Such talk did nothing to unnerve them. ‘There is nobody making a mark on television now,’ Eric was reported as having said. ‘We would like to try.’¹²⁰ They did not, in fact, have long to wait. They were appearing at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool when Ronnie Waldman, the man responsible for BBC TV’s light entertainment output, arrived backstage at their dressing-room with the offer of a television series of their own. ‘Ernie and I looked at each other,’ recalled Morecambe, ‘and we said, “We’ll do it!”’¹²¹

TELEVISION

We are privileged if we can work in this, the most entrancing of all the many palaces of varieties. Switch on, tune in and grow.

DENNIS POTTER

WOMAN | Have you noticed?
MAN | What?
WOMAN | There’s no TV in this room.
MAN | Then why does it exist?

THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN

CHAPTER V
A Box in the Corner

I’ve been in the theatre, in cabaret, in films and television – and this is undoubtedly the toughest job of them all.

RONNIE WALDMAN

‘Light Entertainment.’ What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment? or Dark Entertainment?

ERIC MASCHWITZ

‘When we start analysing our good fortune,’ reflected Ernie Wise from the vantage point of the late 1970s, ‘a great deal of it comes from the fact that we came in at the tail-end of the music-hall era, and we were young enough to start again in a new medium, television.’¹ Eric Morecambe agreed: ‘If we hadn’t gone through the transition, we would have ended up as unknowns doing the whole of the North in the clubs.’² Neither man was joking: surviving that transition had been the greatest challenge of their entire career. Morecambe and Wise took a long time to discover how to make the most of television, and television took an even longer time to discover how to make the most of Morecambe and Wise.

Television, in fact, took quite a long time to discover how to make the most of television. The fitful nature of its early evolution (launched in 1936, suspended in 1939, relaunched in 1946) did nothing to help matters, and neither did its exorbitant cost (the price of a post-war ‘budget-model’ set was in the region of £50, while the average weekly industrial wage was just under £7) and its limited reach (full, nationwide coverage would not be achieved for several more years because tight Government control of capital expenditure restricted the construction of new transmitters).³ Even by the early fifties, when the ‘television public’ was estimated to be around 22 per cent of the UK population⁴ and the number of people with television licences was beginning to increase significantly,⁵ the BBC continued to exhibit a certain ambivalence in its attitude to the fledgling medium, slipping its television schedule at the back of the Radio Times as a four-page afterthought. This unhappy situation owed more than a little to the intransigence of Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC between 1944 and 1952. Television, noted Grace Wyndham Goldie (a producer at the time), was Haley’s ‘blind spot. He appeared to distrust and dislike it and his attitudes … seemed to be rooted in a moral disapproval of the medium itself.’⁶

Hours of viewing, like hours of public drinking, were limited in the interests of temperance: transmitters were turned on at three o’clock in the afternoon during weekdays and five o’clock on Sundays; the screen was blank between six and seven o’clock each evening in order to ensure that parents were not distracted from the task of putting their children to bed; and transmission ended at around half past ten on most nights or, on very special occasions, at quarter to eleven. Even in between programmes there were often soothing ‘interludes’ featuring windmills turning, horse ploughs ploughing, waves breaking and potters’ wheels revolving. For long stretches of the day there was nothing on offer other than a blank screen or the sound of something from one of Mozart’s less sensational compositions.

The situation changed dramatically in 1953 with the televised coverage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Until that moment, remarked Peter Dimmock (the man responsible for producing the historic broadcast), the Establishment, and a fair proportion of the general public, had looked upon television ‘as a bit of a peep-show’.⁷ Then, with a near-flawless production involving the use of 5 cameras inside Westminster Abbey and 21 cameras situated at 5 separate sites outside, the visual power and immediacy of the medium was, at last, underlined. More than 19 million people – 53 per cent of the adult population of Great Britain – saw the television coverage, with 7,800,000 viewing in their own homes, 10,400,000 in the homes of friends and a further 1,500,000 in cinemas, halls and public houses.⁸ It was the first time that a television audience had exceeded a radio audience. The critics reacted positively – the Star declaring that ‘television had cornered the right to put its name first over the BBC door’, and Philip Hope-Wallace announcing, ‘This was television’s Coronation’⁹ – and so, judging from the BBC’s own research, did the public at large – 98 per cent of television viewers (as opposed to 84 per cent of radio listeners) declaring themselves to be ‘completely satisfied’ with the coverage.¹⁰

The BBC now had in Sir Ian Jacob, its Director-General between 1952 and 1959, a man who appreciated both the potential of television to capture the public imagination and also the duty of programme-makers to realise that potential. ‘A public service broadcasting service,’ he wrote, ‘must set as its aim the best available in every field … [This] means that in covering the whole range of broadcasting the opportunity should be given to each individual to choose freely between the best of the one kind of programme with which he is familiar, and the best of another kind which may be less familiar.’¹¹ By the early fifties, a fair proportion of the BBC’s output had begun to live up to that high ideal, with its dramatic productions in particular succeeding in bringing classic literature to an increasingly broad audience (‘We are only a working-class family,’ wrote one group of grateful viewers after seeing a performance of King John. ‘You showed our England to us. Please give us more Shakespeare’¹²). When it came to Variety, however, the results were, to say the least, unsatisfactory.

The BBC’s inaugural Variety Party of 7 June 1946 was merely the first in a long line of embarrassingly ham-fisted attempts at forcing the bright, brash exuberance of the halls to fit the gently flickering intimacy of the small screen. Peter Waring, looking more like a slightly shifty butler than the insouciant comic that he was, set the tone when he stood stock-still in his over-starched white tie and tails and welcomed viewers with the confession: ‘I must say, I feel a trifle self-conscious going into the lens of this thing.’¹³ The problem was that television did not know what to do with Variety. The BBC had been quick enough to devise ways of adapting theatrical plays for the small screen, but it seemed at a loss when confronted with the task of taking a form as bold and as boisterous as music-hall – which thrived on its interaction with a lively audience – and distilling it into a medium intended to be experienced in the privacy of the family living-room. The BBC, without any doubt, meant well, but for a long time its attitude to Variety seemed akin to that of Mr Gladstone’s attitude to fallen women – more a case of pity than passion.

The newspaper critics, though unimpressed by the standard of many of the programmes being transmitted, were at least prepared to persevere with the enterprise. The Observer’s J. P. W. Mallalieu, with his distinctive brand of hopeful ambivalence, urged his fellow viewers not to give up:

We select, and what we select more often than not stimulates rather than depresses. I do not mean that what we select is always good. It is often terrible. But even in what is probably the most terrible BBC effort of all – the portrayal of Variety – when I have seen a performer on my screen I am more interested than I would otherwise have been to see him on the stage, if only to find out whether he is quite as bad as all that.¹⁴

It was a different story in America, where Variety was the least of commercial television’s worries. Unencumbered by any public service ethic, and urged on by sponsors eager for it to embrace all of the most glittering prizes thrown up by the more demotic of pursuits, American television was busy raiding vaudeville, radio and Hollywood in search of available talent. By the early fifties it could boast such hugely popular shows as The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, The Burns and Allen Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Milton Berle Show, Your Show of Shows, Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Colgate Comedy Hour and Ed Sullivan’s increasingly influential The Toast of the Town. It was estimated during this period that television stations in New York were devoting as much as 53.3 per cent of their time to light entertainment – in stark contrast to the BBC in London, which was devoting as little as 15.7 per cent to the same kind of material.¹⁵ This yawning disparity was underlined by the BBC’s use of several US imports in its schedules. When, for example, Amos ŉ’ Andy was shown for the first time on the BBC in 1954, the Daily Mirror’s Clifford Davis greeted it with the warmest of praise, pointing out that such a ‘slick, professional effort’ served to make the Corporation’s home-grown comedy shows seem ‘puny by comparison’.¹⁶

It was, in some ways, an unfair comparison to make. For all the brilliance of the very best of American television’s Variety output, it was still the case that the sheer crassness of the rest was closer to the norm, and even if the BBC had somehow found a way to raise the vast sums of money it would have needed to lure stars of comparable stature to its own studios it seems unlikely that many of them would have risen to the bait. Variety agents and managers – echoing their earlier reaction to the advent of radio – eyed television with considerable suspicion, believing initially that it represented little more than a particularly devious way of exhausting an entire career’s worth of material in a single evening, and, as a consequence, hastening the decline of an already precarious business.

Undeterred by such predictable resistance, the BBC struggled on, but for some time yet Variety on television would continue to take the form of televised Variety rather than television Variety. The best examples of this – such as Barney Colehan’s self-consciously antiquated The Good Old Days (which ran from 1953 to 1983), and Bill Cotton Senior’s band shows – had their own unpretentious charm, and the BBC would learn to produce them far more impressively than any of its future competitors ever would, but the worst – such as the half-hearted Café Continental (a cabaret-style show based at the Chiswick Empire) – seemed merely superfluous. It was not obvious, however, how the situation might best be remedied. One problem was that Variety performers tended to fail on television because they would over-project, forgetting the fact that now, instead of reaching out above all the hubbub to the back of the cavernous halls, they were supposed to be reaching directly into someone’s cosy front room. Jimmy Grafton, one of the producers obliged to deal with this issue, recalled a typical example: ‘Ethel Revnell, who was a very strong cockney character comedienne in Variety, was in an early [television show]; we brought her in to play a character in a situation comedy, and she played it like a Variety sketch, expecting she was going to get a laugh when she came on, and grimacing at the audience. She was so much larger than life that we had to scrap the show.’¹⁷

The performers who survived the transition were those who had been both willing and able to adapt. Terry-Thomas, for example, was handed his own comedy series, How Do You View?, in 1951, and others, such as Frankie Howerd, Max Wall, Arthur Askey, Jimmy Edwards and Bob Monkhouse started to appear on a regular basis soon after. Terry-Thomas commanded £100 for each fortnightly show – and by 1953 this had risen to 140 guineas¹⁸ – but most of those who were signed up at this time were placed on salaries that, compared both to radio and the most prestigious Variety circuits, were relatively modest. Ronnie Waldman – the BBC’s Head of Television Light Entertainment – certainly did believe in the viability of television Variety, but he was subject to the same degree of financial limitations as his opposite number in radio, even though his expenses, of necessity, were far greater (as average programme costs for television in 1954 were £892 per hour¹⁹). As a consequence, promising radio stars, such as Bernard Braden, or up-and-coming screen stars, such as Norman Wisdom, tended to be too expensive to hire more than occasionally. ‘Personality programmes’, such as the very popular What’s My Line?, proved to be far easier and cheaper to broadcast than Variety, as they had no need of well-written scripts or elaborate stage sets, and they also created their own television-bred celebrities, such as the notoriously brusque Gilbert Harding.

Waldman, however, was a determined man. Writing in the Radio Times shortly after assuming control of his department in 1951, he declared that he and his team of producers were committed to the creation of ‘something that had never existed before the invention of television – something that we call Television Light Entertainment … Our aim’, he continued, ‘is now to try and bring the entertainment profession as a whole to believe, with us, that television does not mean the mere photographing of something that could be entertaining in a theatre or a cinema. Television demands a very high standard of performance and an immense degree of polish from its artists. Inexperience and lack of “authority” ... are things with which the television camera has no mercy. Only the best is good enough for television.’²⁰ His department, he insisted, was going to be dedicated to the ideal of making ‘as many people as possible as happy as possible’.²¹ Eager to find new and exciting ideas with which he might invigorate his department, he set off on a fact-finding tour of the United States of America – ‘to see how the other chap does it’²² – taking in 114 different television programmes during a tour that took in New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California, Arizona and Nevada. What impressed him most was not the commercial aspect of American television, but rather its lack of embarrassment about the idea of popular television. On his return to Britain, Waldman was in a bullish mood: his ambition, he announced, was ‘to give viewers what they want – but better than they expect it’.²³ By the beginning of 1954, he took great pleasure in drawing his colleagues’ attention to the fact that the Light Entertainment department was now producing around 400 shows per year – ‘a vastly greater output than that of any theatrical or film organisation’.²⁴ This was in spite of the fact that its full-time staff numbered no more than thirty seriously over-worked people. In the future, he concluded, there would be no excuse for a lack of variety in television Variety.

Morecambe and Wise were regarded within the BBC at this time as two of Waldman’s protégés, but the irony was that their television career – like their radio career – began only after years of unanswered letters, abortive engagements and innumerable false dawns. They had actually been trying to appear on television since 1948 – the year in which Ernie Wise first resolved to subject the BBC’s television producers and bookings managers to the same kind of remorseless letter-writing campaign that he had already begun to inflict on their radio counterparts.²⁵ On 21 April of that year, in fact, they were invited to an audition at Star Sound Studios near Baker Street in London; the report card has been preserved in the BBC’s archives²⁶:

MORECAMBE & WISE (Comedy duo)

DESCRIPTION | 2 young men in ‘Healthy Hank’ & ‘Lingering Death’ make-up.
DATE OF AUDITION | 21 April, 1948.
PERFORMANCE | Cross talk, Inkspots impe[rsonation], Vocal finish with ‘dance’ movements.
TIME | 8 mins.
EXPERIENCE | Equity. Panto. B[roa]dcast.
REMARKS | Parts of this act might be suitable. Suggestive material & dancing together should be omitted.
[SCORE] | 8.

Although this was judged to have been good enough to warrant a further invitation for a test ‘under normal Television studio conditions, at Alexandra Palace, as soon as possible’,²⁷ nothing came of it as far as actual television appearances were concerned. They did manage a brief appearance on Youth Parade in the autumn of 1951,²⁸ but it was not until Stars at Blackpool, in 1953, and their subsequent encounter with Waldman himself, that their luck really changed for the better.

Had Ronnie Waldman been a less understanding patron, Morecambe and Wise could easily have found themselves ostracised before their television career had really begun. While Waldman, from a discreet distance, was monitoring their development and making tentative plans to sign them up for a series of their own, Frank Pope, their agent, and George Campey, a journalist friend from the London Evening Standard, were allowing themselves to get carried away by their various efforts at publicising the act. Things came to a head when, due to some kind of failure of communication between Pope and Campey, an aggressively pro-Morecambe and Wise article by Campey²⁹ (which practically ordered Waldman to sign them up immediately, and even suggested what their salary should be) appeared several days after Waldman had assured them that he was very close to confirming the series for the 1954 spring schedules. Pope, fearing the worst, wrote to Waldman on 9 November 1953³⁰ – the same day as the appearance of the offending article – explaining that it had all been a most unfortunate mistake and apologising profusely for any embarrassment that might have been caused. Waldman, however, was more amused than angered by the unsolicited advice, and he continued as before with his plans for the series.

Morecambe and Wise had regarded Waldman’s initial offer to them as representing ‘a delirious moment’,³¹ and they had been young enough and ambitious enough to refuse to be unnerved by the various warnings they received from older performers once the news began to circulate. Ernie Wise recalled:

You will hear old pros tell you that the twenties were the heyday of music-hall, or Variety, as it became known, and that by 1939 it was already dying, that the cinema was killing it. Yet, when we started in 1939, Variety was booming. We believe that if anything killed Variety it was the war when a lot of brilliant acts disappeared and the Palladium embarked on a policy of using only American tops of the bill … [O]n top of that TV was in the ascendancy despite the pundits who scoffed at the new medium. ‘TV will never kill Variety,’ we heard so many say. ‘Who’ll bother to watch a screen when you can see acts live in the theatre?’³²

The answer, Morecambe and Wise believed, was ‘an increasingly significant number’, and they were determined to make the most of the opportunity they had been handed to be in at the start of an exciting new era. They certainly felt as though they were malleable enough to adapt: they had done so once before, for radio, and saw no reason why they could not now do so again. They appreciated the fact that there was much that needed changing. Morecambe acknowledged that the act they ‘had in music-hall had 15 to 20 minutes of material in it’, which could have been used continuously for years on the circuit (because ‘if a boy saw you doing a sketch when he was 15 he’d usually have completely forgotten it by the time he was 19’³³). They needed a new one – several new ones, in fact – to satisfy the voracious appetite of television. Between them, they soon came up with a number of ideas – some drawn from personal experience, some from writer friends, and some from the trusted old joke books they carried everywhere with them – and so, when Bryan Sears, their new producer/director,³⁴ arranged to visit them in Sheffield, where they were playing, to commence preliminary discussions, they looked forward to the meeting with more than a little confidence. It proved, however, to have been confidence misplaced.

Ronnie Waldman may well have been in charge of the BBC’s Light Entertainment division, and he may well have believed fervently in breaking down the old cultural barriers that divided the North from the South, but not all of the producers underneath him were inclined to act entirely in accordance with his admirable ideals. Bryan Sears, for one, did not share his superior’s optimism as far as Morecambe and Wise’s future on television was concerned. The first thing that he did after having listened politely to all of their ideas was to tell them that none of them would work ‘down South’. They should be aware, he informed them, that they had a serious problem, and the problem was that they came from the ‘wrong’ part of the country. Both Morecambe and Wise sat open-mouthed as Sears explained that they were unfortunate to be ‘“Northern” comics, [and] that a barrier of prejudice existed separating the North from the South and from Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well’.³⁵ This must have sounded somewhat surprising to performers who only recently had played to large and very appreciative audiences in various parts of London, and whose London-based agent was at that very moment busy responding to numerous requests for return engagements in such places as Bedford, Brighton, Oxford and Norwich. It would have seemed equally fanciful to those in the radio division of the BBCs Variety department who were more eager than ever to offer Morecambe and Wise further opportunities to appear on shows that were broadcast nationally. This, however, was television, and Sears was a television producer, and a good one at that, so they assumed that he must know what was best for them now.

Although one can question his reasoning, one can hardly doubt that Bryan Sears was committed to doing what he felt was most likely to make Morecambe and Wise’s first television series a success. His primary goal, of course, was to produce a good show – rather than to ensure that Morecambe and Wise became stars – but it seemed logical to presume that by doing the former he would probably also be doing the latter. He informed them that they would require a great deal of help if they were to overcome all of the obstacles that were facing them, and that they would therefore need to be ready to make a number of compromises in order to benefit from the support that he and the rest of his production team were willing to offer. Morecambe and Wise agreed, although privately they were now considerably more apprehensive than before.

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