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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.