Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
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‘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