morecambeandwise

 Today, as is readily apparent on social media sites, marks 100 years since Eric Morecambe was born. I don't recall Ernie Wise's centenary making a similar hoo-ha last year, which is a pity: as with the pair's onetime TV guests, the Beatles, there have been many books, articles and documentaries about Morecambe and Wise, and, just as Ringo is given short shrift in some assessments, the role which Ernie played in securing the laughs for the pair often seems to be undervalued, as though Eric was really a solo act. 

Nohow and contrariwise. I don't suppose sculptor Graham Ibbeson had much of a say in it himself but there seems to me to be something fundamentally wrong about a joint tribute to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Laurel's birthplace, Ulverston, when Eric Morecambe is depicted on his own in the former Eric Bartholomew's home town; even with a pair of binoculars bunged on the statue to indicate interests beyond comedy no one is going to look at it and think: "Wow, that's one ace birdwatcher!"

I have written a few times about Morecambe and Wise earlier in this blog and will provide links to them at the end. The piece I'm fondest of quotes extensively from David Nathan's admirable book The Laughtermakers (1970), which devoted most of the chapter entitled Mixed Doubles to Nathan's account of Morecambe and Wise recording a TV show, and how - as born theatre performers - they responded to mistakes. 

You can read at at your leisure but one detail worth noting here is when Nathan indicates the close bond between the two. Eric gets a phrase the wrong way round ("powers of corridor", which wasn't even in the script), recovers himself with an adlib, then a little later Ernie stumbles and, before going back to the routine, Eric says: "You’ve got to be careful – the suit drops off as well." (The moment is captured in the image at the top.) Nathan  concludes his piece:

The “suit drops off as well” is almost a private joke and goes largely unrecognised by the audience. It is possibly a tag-line from some old story about a series of disasters and it taps the performer’s nightmare of appearing on stage improperly dressed. In its way it is a reassurance, one of the verbal amulets they constantly exchange in a world that could turn hostile without warning. 

Before proceeding to the links to those earlier M&W posts, however, here is an extract from the 2007 book Morecambe and Wise Untold by William Cook, based on an interview with Freddie Davies, who saw the duo perform live in the sometime cavernous clubs which sprang up in the North in the early sixties, as explained in Freddie's own book Funny Bones, which I cowrote:

The Gaming Act of 1962 had led to an upsurge in smarter venues which provided entertainment along with blackjack and roulette ... But while the surroundings were undoubtedly plusher, and it was nice to have such luxuries as a good sound system, most of these clubs were 1,500-2,000 seater excinemas and all too often would be comedians’ graveyards.

Here's the relevant extract from William Cook's Morecambe and Wise Untold, in which Freddie, as a fellow comic, can see the importance of Ernie:

Freddie went into Butlins in 1958 as a bingo caller and came out in 1963 as a fully-fledged stand-up comic. By now Variety was on its last legs, so he started playing the working men's clubs. They were huge barns, these places, often converted cinemas, which staged wrestling as well as comedians, sometimes in the same show. For the comics, there were no in-betweens.You either died on your arse or you ripped the roof off. 

These clubs were brash and boozy, but they weren't all rough and tumble. The top club was Jimmy Corrigan's Batley Variety Club, where Eric had his first heart attack, onstage in 1968. Freddie played there in 1967, a week after it opened, alongside Val Doonican. Subsequent acts included stars like Shirley Bassey, the Bee Gees, Louis Armstrong and Roy Orbison. It was all done on a grand scale, with every headliner a household name, but these showbiz legends were still all introduced by the club chairman, rather than a proper compere, just as they would be in any working men's club. 

Eric and Ernie never really relished playing these sorts of places, but the fact that they could play them, and play them really well, says a lot about their pedigree as a proper front-of-curtain turn. "They were essentially a theatre act, a live act," says Freddie. "While they managed to transfer to television, in the main, they were really marvellous live." Freddie saw a side of them onstage that the rest of us only ever glimpsed on telly. "They had a great affinity," he says. "The best double acts always have eye contact with one another. They know where they're going with a routine. If you watch a really good double act work together, the straight man will always know how far to take a routine. The people that make the best straight men are usually comics, because they know where the laugh is." Ernie had been a comic, before he teamed up with Eric, and Freddie could see that he wasn't just a feed. "Ernie was a very funny man. He knew where the laughs were."

Although not in a double act himself, Freddie grew up watching his grandfather, the comedian Jack Herbert, partnered either with his brother, Cyril Hatton, or Ruth Beaumont, Freddie's "Grandma Ruth", from the wings of the Salford Hippodrome. Jack's full story can be found in Funny Bones - which, obviously, I entreat you to buy - but for those not good at deferred gratification there is a piece about Jack originally published in the Call Boy, the BMHS magazine. 

 

Related posts:

Morecambe, Wise and Nathan
Eric, Ernie and Me by Neil Forsyth & Morecambe and Wise's Home Movies
Little Ern! (biography of Ernie Wise)
Eric & Ernie biopic by Peter Bowker

For readers in the UK, the routine which David Nathan describes can be found at the beginning of the edition of The Perfect Morecambe and Wise compilation series, repeated on BBC 4 tonight and available on iPlayer for another 29 days.