Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
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outfit of top hat, white tie and tails for his lessons. She worked with him over time on a series of mini-routines that included borrowings from the likes of Flanagan and Allen and the latest Hollywood musicals.44 She also had a calling-card made – ‘Master Eric Bartholomew. Vocal Comedy & Dancing’ – and started to find him opportunities to perform in front of an audience: low-key social events known locally as ‘pies and peas’ (because young amateur performers entertained elderly people – usually in a church hall – and, in return, were given a hot meal of meat pies and mushy peas). On at least a couple of occasions Eric also appeared at benefits at the Central Pier, where he would black-up and imitate G. H. Elliott, ‘The Chocolate-Coloured Coon’ – a very popular musical act of the time – singing ‘Lily of Leguna’.45 Offers of further work started to arrive. When George and Sadie took Eric to the Silver Jubilee Club – a working men’s club – in nearby Torrisholme, the concert secretary asked George if Eric would perform for them at dinner time on the following Saturday. Eric recalled: ‘My dad said, “Oh, yes, he’ll do it.” So the feller said, “How much will he want?” My dad said, “He’ll do it for nothing.” He didn’t want anything for it! And me mother hit him.’46 After Sadie’s swift intervention a fee of five shillings was agreed – the first sum of money Eric had ever earned for a performance. He arrived on time, put on his pumps (‘they wouldn’t let me put my taps on’), clambered up on to the billiard table that had been commandeered as a make-shift stage, and, there and then, did his act (‘There were balls flying everywhere!’).47 So popular was the performance that Eric found himself booked again for the following week.
His parents applied for a special licence from the local Education Committee that enabled him to perform in the local clubs, and the bookings began to accumulate: ‘For a Saturday dinner time and Saturday evening we used to get, I think, fifteen shillings to a pound, which was quite an addition to the family budget.’48 Sadie soon realised that the act would need more material to hold the attention of the often noisy and easily distracted audiences. She came across the sheet music for an old song made famous by Ella Shields – a male impersonator – entitled ‘I’m Not All There’ which, she felt, would be perfect – once shorn of its saucy connotations – for ‘Our Eric’: ‘I’m not all there, there’s something missing,/I’m not all there, so the folks declare./They call me looby,/Looby as a great big booby …’ Eric, who thought the song was ‘ghastly’,49 was also unimpressed by the costume Sadie designed to accompany it: from the top down, he wore a flat black beret, a kiss curl, round turtleshell spectacles, black bootlace-tie over a white shirt, a very tight waiter’s jacket ‘with a great big pin where the button should be’, very short pin-stripe ‘business trousers’, suspenders (which he would use to such comic effect thirty years later), red socks and black shoes, and he held in his hand an enormous lollipop – ‘as big as a plate’ – with a child-size bite taken out of it.50 From club to club, week after week, in front of audiences swelled by the combined presence of Sadie, George and all of George’s brothers, Eric would stand, dressed in this outfit, sporting a suitably gormless expression on his pasty-white face, and sing the song he grew to hate.
‘In those days’, he recalled somewhat ruefully, ‘it was a Northern trait that a comic had to be dressed “funny” – to tell everyone, “look, folks, I’m the comic!”’51 Although the ‘I’m Not All There’ routine worked extremely well, thus confirming Sadie’s shrewdness as his unofficial manager, he always resented having to perform it. The warm reception his act usually received may well have been welcome, but the succession of cramped and dingy clubs, each one smelling of stale ale and cigarette ash, harboured no hint of glamour for a young boy uneasy in his ‘gormless’ attire. ‘It was a thing I never really wanted to do,’ he would later protest. ‘I never really wanted to be a performer.’52 There was, it seems, no burning ambition, no sharp sense of urgency, no irresistible will to succeed, no discernible drive: ‘I had no bright ambitions. To me my future was clear. At fifteen I would get myself a paper round. At seventeen I would learn to read it. And at eighteen I would get a job on the Corporation like my dad.’53
If it had not been for his mother’s forcefulness, it seems doubtful that Eric would ever have become a professional entertainer. In later years he would certainly appear eager to seize any opportunity to express the opinion that Sadie had been a hard taskmistress – sometimes too hard – and a few of the jokes he would make at her expense seemed to carry just a hint of bitterness beneath the surface playfulness:
| ERIC | Ah, that’s me mother’s favourite song, that. If she was out there in the audience tonight there’d be tears in her eyes. |
| ERNIE | Why? |
| ERIC | She can’t stand me. |
Deep down, however, there were genuine feelings of respect and, in time, gratitude. As much as he adored his father, Eric knew that ‘the reason no one ever had a bad thing to say about him is because he never put himself in a position where he had to rock the boat, where he had to be judged’,54 whereas Sadie would sometimes be prepared to come into conflict with her son – and, for that matter, anyone else – if she believed that she had his best interests at heart.
‘The truth’, reflected Gary Morecambe, his son, ‘was that he would have achieved much less in his life without her constant support. Since this was perfectly well understood between them, the gibes were a ritualistic repartee of their relationship.’55 Joan, Morecambe’s widow, agreed: ‘They’d always row. Always. Never in a vicious sense, not like that, but they would never see eye to eye, so you always used to know that they were going to clash over something or other. You’d know it was ticking away somewhere in between them, ready to explode at any minute.’56
Eric may well have found performing a ‘chore’, and he may well have felt ‘a right Charlie’ in his comical costumes, but he knew that his ‘mother’s motives were the highest’. As he watched her cut out every reference to him in the local newspapers and paste them carefully into her album, he came to appreciate the fact that, for all their occasional disagreements, she clearly was devoted to him.57 It is also unlikely, said Gary Morecambe, that Sadie, had she known just how uncomfortable performing was making her son feel, would have persisted with her plans: ‘She genuinely believed he adored performing, and was unaware of his real feelings … Had Eric displayed abject misery, then she would not have pushed at all.’58
As it was, Sadie continued to push and to push. She entered her son in a swift succession of local talent competitions, and he did well enough to win several of them, attracting as a consequence his first reviews in the local press:
MORECAMBE BOY FIRST
A show within a show was staged at the Arcadian Theatre on Saturday night when the final of the talent-spotting competition took place.
The standard of local talent was surprisingly high and the audience enjoyed it immensely. It was only after considerable difficulty that Peter Bernard, one of the artistes in the Variety show, was able to select the three winners, who were chosen by the applause the audience gave them.
First prize was won by the Morecambe boy, Eric Bartholomew, whose singing of ‘I’m Not All There’ really got the crowd going.59
One day early in 1939, after a number of minor successes, a relatively major opportunity presented itself. Sadie came across an advertisement for a talent contest to be held at the Kingsway Cinema down in Hoylake, near Birkenhead. ‘In those days’, Eric would recall, ‘to me, going to Hoylake was like going to Australia.’60 This, however, was no ordinary contest: organised by a music weekly, Melody Maker, this was the Lancashire and Cheshire area heat of a national ‘search-for-talenť competition, and the prize for whoever came first was an audition before the important impresario Jack Hylton. Sadie travelled with Eric, and Melody Maker carried a report on the final in its next issue:
There were a hundred competitors in the area and the ten finalists appeared at the Kingsway Cinema, Hoylake, a week ago. Eric Bartholomew put over a brilliant comedy act which caused the audience to roar with laughter. In an interview, he said, ‘My ambition is to become a