Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
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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