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We’ve always considered ourselves sophisticated Northerners.

ERIC MORECAMBE

Music-hall … was professional, and our early ambition was always to become professional.

ERNIE WISE

Morecambe and Wise¹ were made in the North of England. Their North of England, as far as their television conversations were concerned, was squeezed into a surreal and nameless little town that somehow managed to straddle the Pennines, a timeless place where clog dancing and cloth caps were forever to be found in fashion, and where all events of any real significance took place at one or other of five peculiar locations: the very modest working-class home of the Morecambe family, the rather grander working-class home of the Wise family, the somewhat insalubrious Milverton Street School, the long, dense and exotic Tarryassan Street or the compact but endlessly fascinating strip of land over which Ada Bailey would hang out her knickers to dry. Their North of England, in reality, was the materially impoverished but culturally rich North of England of the twenties and thirties, an area that stretched more freely over Lancashire, Yorkshire and a small but significant portion of Northumberland.

Eric Morecambe was a Lancastrian. One only had to hear his memorable voice utter a phrase like, ‘I’ll tell you for why …’, or invite a distinguished politician to ‘sit down and take the weight off your manifestoes’, or respond to a sudden show of affection from a male friend by shouting, ‘Geddoff! Smash your face in!’, or greet the inexplicable with an exclamation that slipped out from under a sigh, ‘Hhahh-there’s no answer to that!’, to appreciate the effectiveness of that warmly authoritative Lancastrian accent. It was J. B. Priestley who, during his English Journey of the early thirties, remarked on the fact that the ‘rather flat but broad-vowelled speech’ of the Lancastrian had come to be regarded as ‘almost the official accent of music-hall humour’² – and that, coming from a Yorkshireman, was quite an admission.

It is certainly hard not to be struck by the fact that so many of the most memorable and original performers associated with a comic tradition running from the earliest days of music-hall through Variety and the BBC’s old North of England Home Service to the era of television have come from this solitary county: Billy Bennett, Harry Weldon, Robb Wilton, Fred Yule, Arthur Askey, Tommy Handley and Ken Dodd (all from Liverpool); George Formby Senior (from Ashton-under-Lyne); George Formby Junior, Frank Randle and Ted Ray (all from Wigan); Hylda Baker (Farnworth); Ted Lune (Bolton); Tubby Turner (Preston); Wilkie Bard and Les Dawson (Manchester); Al Read (Salford); and Gracie Fields, Tommy Fields and ‘Lancashire’s Ambassador of Mirth’, Norman Evans (Rochdale). What all of these otherwise disparate performers had in common was an accent that proved itself, as Priestley put it, ‘admirable for comic effect, being able to suggest either shrewdness or simplicity, or, what is more likely than not, a humorous mixture of both’,³ lending itself both to ironical under-statement (such as the exceptionally serviceable ‘Fancy!’ – used to register surprise at anything from run-of-the-mill gossip to declarations of war) and ingeniously sly put-downs (such as, ‘’Ave you ’ad your tea? We’ve ’ad ours!’ or, ‘I’d offer you a slice of pie, love, but there’s none cut into’).⁴ Priestley, attempting to define the distinctive character of the sound, listed ‘shrewdness, homely simplicity, irony, fierce independence, an impish delight in mocking whatever is thought to be affected and pretentious. That is Lancashire’.⁵ It was also, of course, unmistakably Eric Morecambe.

Ernie Wise, on the other hand, was a Yorkshireman. He was more than happy on stage and screen to play up to all of the old stereotypical character traits associated with the flat-capped tyke: arrogance (‘Welcome to the show,’ he would say to the audience. ‘What a pleasure it must be for you to be seeing me once again!’), conceit (the much-mocked wig), bluntness (when roused he would not hesitate to itemise all of his partner’s inadequacies) and stinginess (he would always be ashen-faced whenever a guest was brave enough to inquire about the possibility of a fee). There was also, of course, the Yorkshire accent – ‘quieter, less sociable and less given to pleasure’, according to the Bradford-born Priestley, ‘more self-sufficient and more conceited, I think, than the people at the other and softer side of the Pennines’⁶ – capable itself of conveying varying degrees of warmth, vulnerability and wit (witness the delivery of such gifted and popular comics as Albert Modley, Dave Morris, Harry Worth or Sandy Powell⁷), but ideally suited to the special technical skills of the straight-man.

Placed side by side, like their respective counties, Morecambe and Wise were able to play out their own private War of the Roses. Eric was hot, Ernie was cold. Eric was supple, Ernie was stiff. Eric was droll, Ernie was dour. Eric was playful with language, Ernie was respectful of it. Eric had the quick wit, Ernie the slow burn (ERNIE: ‘How do you spell incompetent?’ ERIC: ‘E-R-N-I-E.’ ERNIE: ‘E-R- … Doh!’). Eric knew all about the double entendre, Ernie still had much to learn about the single entendre (ERNIE: ‘I’ve always said there are no people like show people.’ ERIC: ‘Ask any prison warden.’). Eric liked to dress down (string vest, oversized khaki shorts, black suspenders, black socks and black shoes), Ernie loved to dress up (ill-advised ‘fashionable’ garments, odd ‘writerly’ outfits or white tie and tails). Eric was happy to appear less intelligent and cultured than he really was (‘I saw a play on TV last night: there was this woman – you could see her bum!’), Ernie yearned to appear less stupid and gauche than he really was (‘I’ve got 23 A levels, you know – 17 in Mathematics, and another 2, making 23’). While Eric had his feet planted firmly on the ground, Ernie’s head would sometimes float high up into the clouds (ERNIE: ‘You’re ruining everything! You’re making us look like a cheap music-hall act!’ ERIC: ‘But we are a cheap music-hall act!’).

Morecambe and Wise never were, strictly speaking, a music-hall act (the music-hall, as a distinct form of entertainment, had given way to the more structured commercial appeal of Variety long before either of them was born⁸), nor were they, except in the very early days, ‘cheap’, but the allusion, in spite of this, made sense. Both Morecambe and Wise grew up in poor communities rich in music-hall traditions: ‘We’re working-class comics,’ said Wise. ‘We didn’t go to college.’⁹ They went, instead, to the halls, where they studied every facet of Northern humour. ‘There used to be a big difference between North and South in humour,’ observed Wise, ‘and there used to be a definite dividing line between “Oop fert cup” and all that.’¹⁰

Many of the old theatres were still standing and most of them were still in use – such as the huge Winter Gardens in Morecambe and the small but very popular City Varieties in Leeds – although some had been transformed into cinemas by the twenties and thirties. These halls, situated as they often were in the poorer areas of the industrial towns, could seem to young people with dreams of better futures like strange, exotic and magical places of escape and adventure. The look of them alone was extraordinary – such as the Moorish Palace Theatre in Hull, with its glass-roofed conservatory, sumptuous crush-room and Indian-style entrance festooned with palms and ferns; or the shoe-box-small Argyle in Birkenhead, a self-consciously nostalgic construction with long narrow galleries and a uniquely warm and intimate atmosphere; or the medium-sized Bradford Alhambra, designed in the English Renaissance style and accommodating an exceptionally wide stage for all kinds of odd and ambitious productions.

Once inside these unworldly places the curious encountered novel sights and sounds of even deeper resonance: acrobats, unicyclists, tight-rope walkers, jugglers, paper-tearers, illusionists, dancers and singers. There were novelty acts such as the man who dressed up in a red wig and the uniform of the Ruritanian Navy, balanced himself on the top rung of a swaying ladder and then sang a song about his mother, or the contortionist who would leap out from within a little box and throw himself into fearsome postures, or Herr Gross and his Educated Baboons and John Higgins, ‘The Human Kangaroo’. Centre-stage, up and down the bill, were the comics – some brash and flashy, some shy and reserved, some piebald and pinguid – full of jokes about the mother-in-law, the lodger, the wife, the neighbours, the coal-mines and the cotton mills, showing off their red wigs and redder noses, check trousers and big boots, never stopping, never serious, never giving up. A splendid time was guaranteed for all.

‘It’s a fantastic thing,’ said Ernie Wise, reflecting on the success of his partnership with Eric Morecambe, ‘because all we have done is adapt music-hall on to the television and make it acceptable.’¹¹ It was, as an explanation, a simplification of a complex process, but it was, none the less, a revealing observation. Much of what came to be associated with Morecambe and Wise, in terms of gestures, phrases, attitudes and even routines, had its roots firmly in the music-hall experiences of their youth. The sand dance performed by Morecambe and Wise and Glenda Jackson in their celebrated ‘Cleopatra’ sketch was a homage to the great eccentric dancers Wilson, Keppel and Betty. The cod-vent act, performed by Eric Morecambe with dummies of varying shapes and sizes, owed much to Sandy Powell’s earlier version (POWELL: ‘How are you?’ DUMMY: ‘Aying gerry yell chrankchyew!’ POWELL: ‘He says he’s very well.’). Eric’s impromptu monologues (‘They were married at Hoo-Flung-Wotnot/But they had no children sweet/He was fifty and fat/She was fatter than that/So n’ere the twain will meet – boom boom!’) were borrowed from Billy Bennett. The regular bits of comic business involving the plush golden ‘tabs’ – tableaux curtains – such as Eric’s ‘mad throttler’ mime, had been inherited from innumerable half-forgotten old comics who once worked the halls. The direct address to the audience – ‘What do you think of the show so far?’ – harked back to a bygone era of a more intimate brand of popular entertainment.

The world of Morecambe and Wise – even after the former had decamped to Harpenden and the latter to Peterborough – remained the comic world of the traditional Northern humorist. This world was peopled by sad-faced, snail-paced, put-upon pedants like Robb Wilton’s fire chief (‘Oh, yes, oh aye, it’s a pretty big fire … should be, by now … oh, and I say, Arnold – Arnold – take the dog with you, it’ll be a run for him. He hasn’t been out lately … Oh, good gracious me, what’s the matter with the engine?’¹²), tactless busybodies like Norman Evans’ Auntie Doleful (‘You what? You’re feeling a lot better? Ah, well, you never know – I mean, there was Mrs White – it were nobbut last Thursday, you know – she was doin’ nicely, just like you are, you know – and all of a sudden she started off with spasms round the heart – she went off like a flash of lightning on Friday. They’re burying her today.’¹³), inveterate gossips like Evans’ Fanny Fairbottom (‘That woman at number seven? Is she? Gerraway! Well, I’m not surprised. Not really. She’s asked for it … I knew what she was as soon as I saw her … And that coalman. I wouldn’t put it past him, either … Not since he shouted “Whoa” to his horse from her bedroom window …’¹⁴) and spiky geriatrics like Frank Randle’s permanently louche octogenarian (‘I’m as full of vim as a butcher’s dog – I’m as lively as a cricket. Why I’ll take anybody on of me age and weight, dead or alive.’¹⁵).

This was a world where harsh reality intruded rudely into the most rhapsodic of disquisitions, forever dragging idle dreamers like Les Dawson’s Walter Mittyish ex-Hoover salesman back down to earth:

Last evening, I was sitting at the bottom of my garden, smoking a reflective cheroot, when I chanced to look up at the night sky. As I gazed, I marvelled at the myriad of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver cast carelessly on to black velvet. In awe, I watched the waxen moon ride like an amber chariot across the zenith of the heavens, towards the ebony void of infinite space, wherein the tethered bulks of Jupiter and Mars hung forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I stared in wonderment, I thought to myself... I must put a roof on this outside lavatory.¹⁶

This was a world in which marriage was regarded as two becoming one with forty years to determine which one it was. Al Read’s many vivid scenes featuring the desperately active wife and the deviously slothful husband captured the struggle memorably:

WIFE	Are you going to cut that grass or are you waiting till it comes in the hall?
HUSBAND	Er, what d’you mean, love?
WIFE	That garden’s a disgrace! You don’t seem to have any interest in it at all. First time the neighbours see you with a pair of shears in your hand they’ll swear you’re out for bother! And shift your feet – I’ve asked you to fill that coal bucket twice and you’ve cracked on you’ve not heard me! What we weren’t going to have in that garden – hanging baskets, a lily pond and goodness knows what! And what have we got? An air-raid shelter full of water and a tin hat with a daisy in it!
HUSBAND	Now, what time have I –
WIFE	Finds time next door! He’s made some beautiful shapes out of his privets – love birds and all sorts. I wouldn’t care, but he always does our hedge up to the gate. The only time I got you to do his, you went and cut the tail off his peacock!
HUSBAND	Well, I gave it ’im back!17

The Northern music-hall favoured the comedy of recognition, inclusive rather than exclusive in its attitude. ‘The traditional northern comic gets great sympathy,’ remarked James Casey (a writer and producer of radio comedy for the BBC’s North Region). ‘The southern comics didn’t get sympathy – they were smart, they would basically tell you how they topped somebody … The northern comedian [in contrast] would tell you how he was made a fool of.’¹⁸

At the centre of this world stood – a little unsurely at times – the great comic from Stockton-on-Tees, Jimmy James, a lugubrious and vaguely melancholic figure with gimlet eyes and protruding, cushiony lips. He usually found himself sandwiched between two prize idiots – Hutton Conyers on one side, Bretton Woods on the other. ‘Are you puttin’ it around that I’m barmy?’ one of them would ask him. ‘Why?’ James would reply. ‘Did you want to keep it a secret?’ Playfully indulgent, he would listen politely to his companions as they talked their way deeper into the depths of illogicality, rambling on about keeping man-eating lions in shoe-boxes and receiving sentimental gifts from South African trips. Sometimes he would interpose the odd supportive observation (‘Oh, well … they’re nice people, the Nyasas. I’ll bet they gave you something.’), or register a mild sense of surprise (‘Pardon?’), while pursuing a policy of divide and rule by encouraging the idiot on one side to think that the real idiot was on the other side (‘Dial 999 – somebody must be looking for him! … Go and get two coffees – I’ll try and keep him talking.’¹⁹).

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

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

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

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

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