Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
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to fees totalling £3 10s., doubling the family income at a stroke. If, as Ernie later claimed,19 his parents expected him to grow up to join his father on the railways – first as a fireman, later as a driver – the success of his sudden entry into showbusiness, even if it was only at the humble level of the local working men’s club circuit, appears to have prompted them to start having second thoughts. The extra income, of course, was extremely welcome, but there was more to it than that: Ernie was clearly enjoying the experience, and, as Harry could testify, he was getting to be very good at it. ‘I loved it,’ he would remember. ‘I had found my purpose in life.’20 There was none of the ambivalence exhibited by Eric Bartholomew in Ernie Wiseman’s attitude to showbusiness: ‘There is this incredible need to perform in front of people and I’ve had it since I was six years of age. This isn’t a job – it’s a way of life.’21
What the young Ernie Wiseman did have in common – unwittingly – with the young Eric Bartholomew, however, was an increasingly undistinguished school record. His nascent performing career was beginning to take its toll. The exciting but energy-sapping routine of Sunday evening shows followed by an often frenzied rush to catch the last bus home and then, a few hours later, the demoralising straggle to shake off the sleep and set off for school (two miles away in Thorpe) on Monday morning proved a punishing schedule. Ernie, predictably, started falling asleep during lessons. This resulted in a stern letter being sent to the Wisemans by the Leeds education authority, pointing out that exploiting juveniles was against the law and would have to stop immediately. Although the Wisemans were genuinely concerned about their son’s schoolwork, they knew that they could not do without the money he was helping to bring in, and they also appreciated the fact that he was by now in no mood to abandon the act. A not entirely satisfactory short-term solution was found: ‘We played a game of cat and mouse: if the authorities spotted us in Leeds we moved our activities to Wakefield and if, after a while, they rambled us in Wakefield we slipped quietly back to Leeds and Bradford. I’m sure in the end they turned a blind eye.’22
The reputation of Bert Carson and His Little Wonder – as they had come to style themselves – continued to spread across the West Riding region, and the bookings began to multiply. In 1936, at the age of eleven, Ernie had the chance of securing what he would later describe as his ‘first real launch into mainstream performing’.23 The local paper, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, organised an annual week-long charity event at the Alhambra Theatre that went under what now seems the improbable name of the ‘Nignog Revue’. During the year, children who had joined the club could take part in a variety of Nignog activities, such as talent competitions and the local ‘pies and peas’. Ernie soon became a ‘devoted’ – that word again – member, and he found in the Revue’s organiser, a certain Mr Timperley, a man ‘absolutely devoted’ to producing first-rate children’s entertainment.24 During the next two years Ernie played an important part in all of the Revues, and his self-confidence – which had never, in truth, seemed egregiously undernourished – grew immeasurably as a consequence of appearing on the stage of a great music-hall in front of two thousand people.
Not everyone, however, was impressed by his success. His school, by this time, was East Ardsley Secondary School, a large, dark, Victorian building which Ernie had come to hate the sight of. He was never, he admitted, a model pupil – describing himself as ‘just plain dumb’.25 He also found that his considerable reputation as a local performer only served to provoke some of his more mean-spirited teachers – and, indeed, some of his fellow pupils – to further acts of cruelty as he was routinely punished and humiliated for allowing his schoolwork to suffer. ‘Come up here, tap-dancer,’ one particularly malicious teacher would shout regularly at Ernie, his darkly sarcastic tone making the word ‘tap-dancer’ sound like quite the worst thing that a young Yorkshire boy could possibly be associated with, and then, on some pretext or other, the teacher would either smack him in front of the class or send him off to be caned. ‘Whatever he hoped to achieve by such public ridicule I do not know,’ Ernie would write, ‘but its effect was to turn me against the school and all it stood for and to alienate me from my classmates.’26
Such treatment, understandably, only served to strengthen his resolve to pursue a career of some kind in showbusiness. On the stage, dressed up in a costume, Ernie Wiseman felt different, more important, more sure of who he was and what he was capable of: ‘Entertaining was a sort of personality prop which helped me to cover up a deep-rooted shyness and sense of inadequacy. Entertaining brought me out of myself … I was able to step out of my very private little world and be an entirely different person, a cheeky chappie.’27
His stage persona was certainly bright and brash. There was something of the crowd-pleasing ebullience and somewhat dandified appearance of another Yorkshire comic singer of the time, Whit Cunliffe, in his carefree and cocksure performances. It helped him stand out from most of his contemporaries as a strong and seemingly nerveless entertainer with an unusually promising future ahead of him. That was certainly the impression he made on the impresario Bryan Michie when, in the autumn of 1938, he toured all over the North in search of new juvenile talent to showcase in a revue. Harry Wiseman had heard that Michie was holding auditions at the Leeds Empire, so he made sure that Ernie went along. Michie sat close to the front of the stalls, watching impassively as Ernie strode on to the stage, told a few jokes, sang one of his usual songs – ‘Knee-Deep in Daisies’ – and finished with his by now extremely competent quick-tempo clog dance. He left without hearing of any response – positive or negative – from Michie. Several months of silence passed, and Ernie, a little disheartened perhaps, returned to the old round of club dates and local talent competitions. Two things happened to lift his spirits again: first, he managed to make a brief appearance on a talent show in Leeds that was being broadcast by the BBC – an achievement that won him considerable respect among his friends and also, just as importantly, a fee of two guineas; and second, a letter finally arrived from London – not from Michie himself, but from his fellow impresario Jack Hylton. Hylton invited Ernie down to London for an audition. ‘There was,’ Ernie would recall, ‘great excitement in the house.’28
The subsequent events followed each other at a breathless pace. Harry travelled with Ernie down to London by train on 6 January 1939.29 On their arrival they went straight to the office of Jack Hylton, and the audition was held there and then. ‘He must have liked me,’ said Ernie, ‘because that same evening he put me in the show.’30 The show in question was a West End revue called Band Waggon – adapted from the hugely successful BBC radio programme of the same name – and, in spite of Arthur Askey’s presence at the top of the bill, it was not doing anything like as well as had been expected. Hylton’s impetuous decision may have been prompted more by an urgent need to improve his ailing production than it was by the precocious talents of the young stranger in his office, but, whatever the reasons, it was a decision that later that night proved itself to be inspired: Ernie was the talking-point in all of the reviews. The following morning the Daily Express, for example, reported:
At 6.40 last night Ernest Wiseman, fair, perky-faced, quiffy-haired thirteen-year-old son of a parcels porter at Leeds Central Station, made his first professional appearance on the stage in Jack Hylton’s Band Waggon at Princes Theatre [now the Shaftesbury]. The moment he went on he became Ernie Wise. That in future will be his name. I believe you are going to hear it often …
Ernie, one-quarter Max Miller, one-quarter Sydney Howard, and the other half a mixture of all the comics who have ever amused you, wears a squashed-in billycock hat, striped black and grey City trousers (too small for him), a black frock coat with a pink carnation in the buttonhole, grey spats, and brown clogs.
His timing and confidence are remarkable. At thirteen he is an old-time performer.31
Arthur Askey, interviewed almost forty years later, recalled his reaction to this new addition to the cast: ‘[He was a] fresh-faced, delightful kid, totally stage-struck. He had a good face, a good singing voice, and he was a very fair little dancer. He had a neat little evening dress with brown clogs on his feet – which didn’t quite go together – but he did a good clog dance.’32
It seemed as though