Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
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they were, therefore, ‘devastated’ by this news;68 not only was it a cruel blow to their self-esteem, but it was also, more seriously still, a major setback to their hopes of finding an agent. Fortunately, Wise – with typically sound business sense – recovered enough of his composure before leaving to ask Van Damm if he would object if they sought to limit the damage to their professional reputation by placing a notice in The Stage to the effect that Morecambe and Wise were leaving the Windmill purely because of certain prior commitments. Van Damm smiled and acceded to the request and they parted company on as amicable terms as the sorry circumstances would allow.69
They played out the remaining days of that week and hoped that someone might see them and show some interest before they returned once again to obscurity. One agent did just that: Gordon Norval. Norval agreed to help them out, and he arranged for them to perform two spots the following Monday evening in yet another nude revue – this one entitled Fig Leaves and Apple Sauce – at the Clapham Grand. Unbeknown to Norval, however, there was a problem: they had agreed to perform two spots rather than one because the fee was £2 10s. more, but they were well aware of the fact that they had only twelve minutes of material rehearsed and there was no possibility that any number of Jack Benny-style pauses and silent stares could stretch this out for the duration of two whole spots. Panic, remembered Wise, was, in the absence of Sadie, ‘the mother of our invention’:70 locking themselves away in their digs and forcing themselves to come up with new ideas, they managed, just in time, to have a second act ready.
Arriving at the Grand on Monday evening, they had a plan fixed firmly in their minds: they would use their ‘proper’, well-rehearsed act for the first spot, win over the audience and then rely to some extent on that residual warmth to waft the remainder of their wafer-thin material through to the end of their second spot. The plan, however, had to be aborted after their first, disastrous appearance saw them walk off to the arctic chill that was known locally as the ‘Clapham silence’. Now all they had to rely on for their second spot was the residual indifference of the audience. They began with a barely concealed feeling of terror. What saved them was the unlikely success of a routine they had recently devised that featured Ernie teaching Eric how to sing ‘The Woody Woodpecker’s Song’; Eric, assured that he had the most important part, was eventually reduced to the famous five-note pay-off (‘Huh-huh-huh-huh-hah!’) at the end of each verse. It was a routine that they would return to later on in their career (with such songs as ‘Boom Oo Yatta-Ta-Ta’71) and it certainly proved popular with the audience that night – so much so, in fact, that not one but several theatre managers rushed backstage after the performance with offers of work. It was a turning-point in the development of the partnership. Suddenly, after the bleakest of times, they were in demand.
Nat Tennens, who ran the Kilburn Empire, booked them ‘act as seen’ for the following week. This time they reversed the order, starting with their new material. It was again so successful that it even seemed to breathe new life into the old act, and their confidence started to soar. They went on to make another appearance at the Clapham Grand, and the week after that they returned to the Kilburn Empire – only this time at the top of the bill. They were now earning £40 per week, and Gordon Norval, the man who had been in the right place at the right time to help them, became their first agent.
Their next stroke of good fortune, however, was prompted not by Norval but by a young dancer, Doreen Blythe, who had worked with Morecambe and Wise in Lord John Sanger’s touring show as one of ‘The Four Flashes’. She had grown sufficiently close to Wise to have carried on a correspondence with him once that unfortunate enterprise had ended. She was now appearing in another touring show, this one run by an impresario named Reggie Dennis, and – knowing of Morecambe and Wise’s recent success, and keen to find a way to spend more time with Ernie – she urged Dennis to go to see the double-act with a view to booking it for the next leg of the tour. He did so, and, liking what he saw, offered them the chance of almost a year’s continuous work in the revue he was calling Front Page Personalities. They accepted, and, on tour for the next eleven months, they polished their technique, improved their material and, for the first time, began to really relax in front of an audience.
It was towards the end of this tour, in the autumn of 1950, that Morecambe and Wise came to the attention of an extremely influential London-based agent called Frank Pope.72 Pope seemed to have a hand in most of the important theatre circuits in Variety. He was responsible, for example, for booking all of the acts for one of the key circuits associated with post-war Variety: the so-called ‘FJB’ circuit, set up by an enterprising man by the name of Freddy J. Butterworth after purchasing a dozen ailing cinemas and turning them back into music-halls.73 Pope also supplied acts to the far mightier Moss Empires circuit, which at that time owned around twenty-four large and well-run theatres (including the prestigious London Palladium). There could, therefore, have been few more suitable agents for Morecambe and Wise at this particular point in their career, because, as Morecambe noted: ‘In the early days our ambition [had been] to be second top of the bill at Moss Empires. Not top. At second top it was not your responsibility to fill the theatres,’74 and now, as Wise would recall, they were feeling so optimistic that they were ready to think of making the top of the bill at the Palladium ‘the apex of our ambition’.75 After coming to an amicable agreement with Gordon Norval, Pope signed Morecambe and Wise to what was a sole agency agreement (guaranteeing them a minimum of £10 per week but obliging them to give him at least six months’ notice if they ever wanted to opt out). They now, at long last, had the kind of backing that would provide them with a reasonably frill diary of top-flight Variety dates, a rewarding annual pantomime season as well as the chance to become recognised as fully fledged stars.
‘Eric always said to me’, Wise would recall, ‘that the reason we were so successful was that we stayed together. A simple enough statement,’ he added, ‘but also very profound. We were together from 1943, and from that moment on we sweated at it.’76 By the early 1950s the tremendous amount of effort that they had invested in their act was finally starting to pay dividends, but with these rewards came a new set of challenges: as Wise observed, in the old days of the ‘youth discovery’ shows, ‘the audiences are on your side. They say, “Oh, aren’t they good for amateurs!” But it’s when you turn professional – that’s when it becomes hard,’77 and not all of the audiences they now performed to were particularly easy to please. Southern audiences could sometimes be a problem, treating Northern comics with a certain amount of suspicion until they were satisfied that they could understand the accent and identify with the humour. Northern audiences, though obviously more suited in those days to an act like Morecambe and Wise (who by that time had abandoned their Abbott and Costello-style mannerisms and looked instead to Northern comics like Jimmy James and Dave Morris for inspiration78), could still be hard work (indeed, the old story about the two grim-faced Northerners watching a comic perform his act – ‘He’s not too bad, is he?’ says one of them. ‘He’s all right if you like laughing,’ mutters the other – was made real for Harry Secombe when a member of the audience in Blackpool ‘congratulated’ him by remarking, ‘You nearly had me laughing when you were on, you know’79). Clubs – even the relatively plush ones that were starting to emerge – were never among the favourite venues of Morecambe and Wise, in part because of the added burden of having to compete with the bar for the audience’s attention (one inexperienced comic, struggling in vain to win over an unresponsive crowd, was interrupted by a very loud and entirely unexpected roar of approval: ‘Don’t worry,’ the chairman told him. ‘It’s just that the hot pies have come …’80).
By far the most intimidating venue on the circuit, at least as far as English comics were concerned, was the notorious Glasgow Empire. When Cissie Williams – the formidable woman in charge of all bookings for Moss Empires – sent Morecambe and Wise up there for a week-long engagement, she paid them an extra £10 – not just to cover the rail fare and any other expenses but also to compensate them for the trauma of playing to such an aggressive audience. Everyone felt the same: whenever Jimmy James arrived at Glasgow station he would step out slowly on to the platform, sniff the air suspiciously, pause for a moment and say, ‘By ’eck, it’s been a long week!’81 Glaswegians loved