Читать книгу Morecambe and Wise (Text Only) - Graham McCann - Страница 11

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