Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

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 to capture the imagination of the Windmill audience, they also knew that most of the other acts had failed to capture the imagination of the Windmill audience, and so 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 American singers, but had serious reservations about most other performers and had a special aversion to acts from south of the border. ‘They always opened the show with kilts – McKenzie Reid and Dorothy and their accordions, or a cripple,’ Wise recalled. ‘There’s nothing more guaranteed to get sympathy than a crippled man playing an accordion, especially if it’s a bit too heavy for him,’ added Morecambe knowingly.82 It was actually the sudden and premature death of McKenzie – he was run over by a tram – that led to the famously harrowing experience of Des O’Connor (‘It was the time’, Morecambe observed, ‘when Des really stood for desperate’83). McKenzie’s widow, Dorothy, insisted that the show must go on, and, with the assistance of a young nephew, she duly appeared, night after night, singing such songs as ‘Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?’ to uncharacteristically emotional audiences. O’Connor, unfortunately, was obliged to follow this act, night after night, with his amusing gags and humorous anecdotes about life down in Stepney. Each night proved worse than the previous one, until Dorothy, overcome with grief, cut short her act and thus forced O’Connor, coiled up in fear in a comer of his dressing-room, to hurry out and attempt to entertain a full-house of three thousand choked-up Glaswegians. He panicked, telling one story twice, then telling the end of the next joke before its beginning, all to an increasingly threatening kind of silence. With his mouth now bone-dry and his forehead dripping with sweat, he started to sway slowly from side to side and then, according to a gleeful Eric Morecambe, passed out: ‘He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I—I—I—” Bumph! He fainted! Actually fainted! From nerves, you know. And he was lifted up under the backcloth, and he was carried slowly off. His legs disappeared and he had “Goodbye” written on the soles of his shoes … I think that’s the best he’s ever gone!’84

When Morecambe and Wise came to make their début in Glasgow, they, like the vast majority of English comics who preceded them, walked off, shoulders slumped, to the terrible, flat sound of their own footsteps. As they passed the sad-faced fireman who always stood in the wings, he fixed them with a knowing look, flicked what little was left of his cigarette into a sandbucket and muttered, ‘They’re beginning to like you.’85 Occasions such as these, though hard to take at the time, helped them to continue to improve: ‘We needed to have experienced the knocks, working in Variety,’ Wise reflected. ‘It chipped the rough edges off us.’86 What that arduous process allowed was the emergence of something original from within the merely banal, taking the old music-hall cross-talk routine, technically elaborate but remorselessly anonymous, and adapting it to suit their own very special relationship. ‘I think there’s a simple revolution in what they did,’ Michael Grade remarked:

If you ever saw the double-acts of the thirties, forties or fifties, they never really talked to each other – they would only communicate to each other through the audience, and they would ‘work out’, as I call it. Whereas Eric and Ernie were the first double-act to develop an intimate style, they were the first to talk to one another, to listen to one another. The old acts had this big yawning distance that separated them from each other. Eric and Ernie were the first ones to really have a proper relationship on the stage.87

Their partnership had already lasted longer than most before they had even worked their way to the brink of stardom, and both of them appreciated the elective affinity that had drawn them so closely together. ‘There was a kind of lightning thing that went between us,’88 said Wise. ‘We were, I suppose, like brothers who rarely, if ever, quarrelled and could cope with what was an intense partnership without any fear of its overheating.’89

It was the sort of relationship that was well suited to the special demands of the next medium that they intended to master: radio. They understood the importance of radio to their future because Variety was on the decline and the mass audience could now only be reached, it seemed, through the wireless. They also recognised the remarkable power of the medium and its potential for transforming regional stars into national celebrities. This had been underlined in 1949 by the extraordinary public reaction to the death of the comedian Tommy Handley (‘a national calamity’ according to the Spectator), when thousands lined the streets of London to watch his funeral cortège and hundreds more went on to St Paul’s Cathedral for the national memorial service.90 Getting on to the wireless – and then staying on it – was the goal of any ambitious performer at this time.

Succeeding in radio, however, was something that was easier said than done. Eric Morecambe would look back on it as ‘the hardest medium of all’,91 and not without reason. The BBC was still uneasy about Variety’s lively unpredictability, and no performer was acceptable unless he or she could prove themselves to be adaptable. The infamous Green Book, devised in 1949 by the then Director of Variety Michael Standing as a guide for producers, writers and artistes, sought to preclude the slightest hint of a nudge or a wink from broadcast Variety. ‘Music-hall, stage, and to a lesser degree, screen standards’, the guide announced, ‘are not suitable to broadcasting,’ and all producers and performers were warned that any ‘crudities, coarseness and innuendo’ that might pass as entertainment on the Variety circuits were most certainly not acceptable on the wireless. There was, for example, an ‘absolute ban’ on trade names and ‘Americanisms’, as well as jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men and ‘immorality of any kind’, suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, prostitution, ‘ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on’, ‘animal habits, e.g. rabbits’, lodgers, commercial travellers, prenatal influences, ‘e.g. “His mother was frightened by a donkey”’, and marital infidelity. If one had to err, the Green Book advised, it was best to err on the side of caution: ‘“When in doubt, take it out” is the wisest maxim.’92

Such draconian rules left many popular comics with barely any material fit for broadcasting, and led to a few, such as Max Miller, being banned on several occasions (one of them prompted by his notorious optician joke: ‘That’s funny – every time I see F, you see K!’). Writers, too, were often driven to despair by the multiple objections to perfectly inoffensive scripts (Frank Muir, for example, remembered being ordered by Charles Maxwell, his producer, ‘to remove any mention of the word “towel” from a script Denis Norden and I had written for Take It From Here because it had “connotations”’93), causing them either to devise increasingly devious ways of outwitting the censors (an example being the regular appearance of a character named ‘Hugh Jampton’ – from the rhyming slang ‘Hampton Wick’ meaning dick – in The Goon Show) or else to focus more on comic situations than on comic lines.

Morecambe and Wise took some time to find a way into this imposing and unfamiliar medium. Since contributing to Youth Must Have Its Swing they had found further radio work hard to come by – just a couple of editions of the talent show Beginners, Please! (one in 1947, the other in 1948) and a single edition of Show Time in 1948. It was only in 1949, after writing a hopeful letter to Bowker Andrews, a BBC producer based in Manchester, asking him to consider using them in his Northern Variety broadcasts and reassuring him that ‘we are also both North Country’,94 that they started participating on a more regular basis. In 1952,95 after taking part in an edition of Workers’ Playtime, they were invited to be guests on one of the best Variety shows transmitted by the BBC’s North of England Home Service:96 Variety Fanfare, produced by Ronnie Taylor. Taylor (who was also responsible, as a writer as well as a producer, for such popular programmes as The Al Read Show and Jimmy Clitheroe’s Call Boy) was one of the BBC’s great nurturers of young talent on both sides of the microphone. His support for Morecambe and Wise over the next few years would prove to be invaluable. His initial enthusiasm for them, however, was only translated into a firm offer of further appearances after they had planted an entirely spurious story – via a third party – which suggested that the producers of the show’s more prestigious Southern equivalent, Variety Bandbox, were on the verge of offering them a residency. Anxious not to let one of his discoveries be poached by his colleagues in London, he proceeded to book Morecambe and Wise for a succession of Variety Fanfares.97

‘That was the big break for us,’ Eric Morecambe would say of this run of appearances, ‘even if it was only Northern Home Service in those days.’98 It served, said Ernie Wise, a dual purpose: on the one hand acting as ‘a useful safety net to cushion us when we fell on relatively lean times’,99 and, on the other, as a showcase that might attract the attention of other producers. ‘We had to get in on something,’ Morecambe recalled. ‘We had to get in somewhere and make this niche for ourselves.’100 In fact, in spite of their later claims to the contrary, they would have much preferred to have established this niche in London, on Variety Bandbox, rather than in Manchester, on Variety Fanfare.

Variety Bandbox, a weekly show that ran from the early forties through to the early fifties, was for many years the high-spot of the BBC’s Variety output and, as Morecambe and Wise well understood, the ideal programme for up-and-coming performers. It billed itself as the show that presented ‘the people of Variety to a variety of people’, and it had an excellent reputation for discovering and promoting new talent (such as Derek Roy, Frankie Howerd, Beryl Reid, Dick Emery, Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock, Reg Dixon and Bill Kerr). The failure of Morecambe and Wise to impress the show’s producer, Joy Russell-Smith, is a topic that is passed over in somewhat perfunctory fashion in their autobiography,101 and Eric Morecambe once claimed – erroneously – that they never did manage to appear on the show,102 but in fact – as the many letters preserved in the BBC’s archives reveal – they bombarded Russell-Smith and her colleagues for just over four years with their requests for a chance to take part.

The first letter (signed, like all subsequent ones, ‘Morecambe and Wise’ – as if the two of them were one person) was sent on 2 April 1948, and several more followed in quick succession until Joy Russell-Smith wrote back on 3 June inviting them for a private audition at Studio 2 of the BBC’s lofty Aeolian Hall in Bond Street on the afternoon of 10 June. No record of how they fared has been preserved in the archives, but, according to Eric Morecambe,103 Russell-Smith told them that they sounded ‘too much like Jewel and Warriss’ and advised them to try again ‘in five years’ once they had developed a more distinctive style. Far from resigning themselves to being pigeonholed as ‘Northern comics’, however, they persisted in writing both to Russell-Smith and to anyone else whom they felt might offer them an opportunity to take part in such a prestigious show. On 28 November 1950, writing from the Palace Theatre, Plymouth, they contacted Bryan Sears, another Bandbox producer:

Dear Sir,

We shall be at Finsbury Park Empire next month followed by Empire Shepherd’s Bush. We shall then be at the Hippodrome Golders Green for Pantomime which means we shall be in London for the next 12 weeks.