Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

His return only served, in a cruel way, to help him to sever most of the remaining emotional ties that had pulled him back there in the first place. He was shocked to see his father, now showing the physical effects of rheumatoid arthritis, looking so much older, and he was profoundly saddened by the greeting he received from him: ‘Why did you come home?’ his father asked him. ‘You had it made.’47 It suddenly seemed a mistake to have left Villa Daheim. Without the prospect of resurrecting the old father–son act, and without any enthusiasm for the odd solo spot in venues he had long since grown out of, he felt, at the age of fourteen, a burden: ‘I was, after all, just another mouth to feed, and hadn’t Mum said often enough to Dad, “When there’s no money in the house, love flies out the window”?’48

After working for a few difficult months as a coalman’s labourer, he was very relieved to receive a telegram from Bryan Michie, inviting him down to the Swansea Empire to join the touring version of Youth Takes a Bow. It was the opportunity – and the excuse – that he had been waiting for. He left immediately, desperate to resume his career in entertainment. He would never go home again.

CHAPTER IV

Double Act, Single Vision

It was fate – I happened to pull the Christmas cracker and Ernie was in it.

ERIC MORECAMBE

We’re a real Hollywood film, us – all the drama, the comedy.

ERNIE WISE

When Eric met Ernie, it was the former who found himself nursing feelings of envy towards the latter. Watching from the shadowy wings of the Swansea Empire, Eric was left in no doubt as to who was now the star of the show: Ernie. It was Ernie, the newcomer, Ernie, whose reputation as ‘The Jack Buchanan of Tomorrow’, ‘The Young Max Miller’ and ‘Britain’s own Mickey Rooney’ had preceded him,1 Ernie, taller – at that stage – than Eric and, indeed, better paid than Eric, who was now the real star of Youth Takes a Bow. As this supremely self-assured young man glided through his polished act, his immaculate made-to-measure suit accentuating each crisply competent step and gesture, Eric, standing silently to one side with arms tightly folded, could only think to himself: ‘Bighead.’2

Just two short months ago it had all been very different. After the worryingly long silence that had followed his audition for Jack Hylton in Manchester, Eric – in the company of Sadie, his chaperone – had been invited to join the cast of Youth Takes a Bow as one of Bryan Michie’s Discoveries. He made his debut at the Nottingham Empire, and, on a salary of £5 per week plus travelling expenses, the future seemed bright. He grew rapidly in confidence, attracted a fair number of complimentary notices and won the respect of the other members of the cast. Then, however, the rumours began: Ernie Wise, it was whispered, was about to join the show. Ernie Wise overshadowed them all. They had all heard him on the wireless exchanging comic repartee with the likes of Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch; they had all read about his triumphant performances on the West End stage; and they all knew that he was regarded in the business as Jack Hylton’s ‘golden boy’. When, therefore, he bounded on to the train at Crewe, his thick, shiny hair flopping over his forehead, his expensive-looking overcoat flapping loosely as he moved, he became – without any discernible effort on his part – instantly the centre of attention, and Eric, like many of the other boys in the carriage, was more than a little jealous.

It did not help, of course, that Ernie, almost as soon as he arrived, had taken to calling Eric ‘sonny’; nor did it help that Ernie, at the age of fifteen, was no longer required to go to school; and it certainly did not help that the combination of his greater height, more adult-looking clothes (long trousers, in contrast to Eric’s baggy shorts), superior wage (£2 per week more than Eric’s), fame and freedom from parental interference in his affairs caused him to appear, in Eric’s anxious eyes, a far more attractive proposition to the girls in the company. It must have seemed to Eric as though everything that he had begun to achieve over the past few weeks was now set to be eclipsed in an instant by the presence of this noisy bundle of energy and dreams.

Eric’s mother, however, knew better. Sadie saw straight through Ernie’s bravado and understood that, underneath, he was actually an insecure and forlorn little boy, far younger emotionally than he seemed, still struggling to repress the sadness he felt over his father’s broken spirit and only just beginning to settle into a peripatetic existence on the road. She observed him, to start with, from a distance, watching admiringly as he took complete responsibility for all of his travel and accommodation arrangements, sent the usual proportion of his weekly wage back home to his parents and, of course, banked the majority of the remainder. For all of his private problems, he never seemed, to the casual spectator, anything less than the very model of a self-reliant young professional, solid and sure-footed, but in reality he craved – perhaps more strongly than even Sadie had suspected – the very kind of support and security from which the vast majority of his contemporaries in the company were contriving to escape.

The only place where he felt genuinely sure of his worth was up on a stage in front of an audience. He knew that when he was up there he was good; he knew that audiences liked him. The rest of the company – adults and juveniles alike – admired him, too. Youth Takes a Bow was the second half of a two-part Variety show. The first half – usually billed as Secrets of the BBC – featured adult professional acts (such as Alice and Rosie Lloyd, sisters of the well-known music-hall star Marie Lloyd, and comedians Archie Glen, Dicky ‘large lumps’ Hassett and the double-act George Moon and Dick Bentley), while the second half was devoted to such young performers as Eric and Ernie, the singer Mary Naylor, the acrobat Jean Bamforth and the harmonica player Arthur Tolcher (who, thirty years later, would make regular, but comically curtailed, appearances on The Morecambe & Wise Show). Ernie Wise brought a certain amount of precious West End glamour to the latter part of the bill.

Although Eric, as the tour went on, grew to like Ernie as a person as well as to respect him as a performer, there was no obvious suggestion that their fast-blossoming friendship was likely to lead in the near future to the formation of an on-stage partnership. Eric was a comic, whereas Ernie was more of a song-and-dance man. Eric was appearing as the gormless little boy in the home-made comedy outfit, Ernie was playing the sharp-suited boulevardier – they seemed set on separate courses, pursuing different goals. Six months would go by until a combination of wartime exigencies and unexpected good fortune conspired to draw Ernie closer to Eric, and both of them nearer to the invention of a double-act.

At some point early in 1940, the cast arrived in Oxford for a show at the New Theatre, and, as usual, all of the individual performers dispersed to check in at their temporary accommodation. Ernie, however, had, for the first time, failed to book ahead, and, in a town that was packed full of troops, he had no choice but to trudge through the streets in search of a vacancy. Time and again he knocked on a door only to be informed that all rooms were occupied. Darkness fell, the temperature dropped, and Ernie was still wandering the streets on his own. It was well after ten o’clock at night that a cold and desolate Ernie Wise was found by a fellow member of the cast, a singer called Doreen Stevens.

Taking pity on him, she decided – even though her own room was waiting for her in another part of the town – to accompany him until they found somewhere for him to rest. After numerous disappointments, they reached yet another guest house and knocked on the door. ‘This is little Ernie Wise,’ said Doreen to the landlady. ‘Have you got any room in your house?’ Before the landlady could finish telling her that the house was fully booked for the whole week, Sadie Bartholomew’s distinctive voice could be heard from the top of the stairs: ‘Is it our Ernie?’3 Hurrying down to the door, with Eric following on behind her at a rather more leisurely pace, she announced that Ernie must come inside immediately and that he would be welcome to sleep with Eric in his bed. The next morning, as the three of them had their breakfast, Sadie suggested that Ernie – in order to avoid something similar to the traumatic experience of the previous evening ever happening again – might like to travel with them in future and leave all of the accommodation arrangements to her. He agreed, without the slightest hesitation, and, from that moment on, the three of them were virtually inseparable.

Ernie Wise did not just come to be treated by the Bartholomews as one of the family; he also came to rival Eric in Sadie’s affections. They clearly saw in each other a kindred spirit. ‘Ernie,’ Sadie would recall, ‘was gentle and shy, and sincere’:

Eric used to call him Lilywhite. ‘Look at Lilywhite, he never puts a foot wrong,’ he would say. He was right. Ernie never did wrong. Not that he was prim or prissy, or goody-goody, which is a person who just acts good but is really not good inside. Ernie was just naturally good, naturally truthful, fair and honest. We toured and lived together for years. I know Ernie.4

Ernie, in turn, saw in Sadie the same kind of enthusiasm and drive that he had once associated with his father. He felt that she, like him, possessed ‘a tungsten carbide core of solid ambition’,5 and he came to trust her implicitly.

According to Joan Morecambe, Sadie became a kind of second mother to Ernie:

I think she loved Ernie as much as she loved Eric. I really do. She’d never do something for one of them unless she could also do it for the other. That’s the way she felt about it.

I’m sure that she thought that Ernie was a positive influence on Eric. He’d push him in the same way that she’d always pushed him. Eric wasn’t like Sadie, he was more like his dad. Ernie was very much like Sadie – they were both very businesslike, very determined characters.6

So attached, in fact, did Ernie become to his surrogate family that, whenever he had the chance to relax for a few days, he chose to do so with the Bartholomews in Morecambe rather than the Wisemans in Leeds.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Eric and Ernie, now that they spent most of every day together, living almost like brothers, should develop an unusually deep kind of mutual understanding. Each would finish the other’s sentences, seeming to know what he was thinking and feeling, and each would try his best to make the other laugh. They never tired of telling jokes, singing songs and imitating all of the other acts. Sadie, at first, was amused by all of this, but after enduring a succession of increasingly loud, long and boisterous sessions on the way to and from each performance her patience was wearing thin. When, late in November 1940, the show reached the recently blitzed city of Coventry, she was at her wit’s end.

They had to commute each day from Birmingham – the site of their previous engagement – because the digs that Sadie had booked for them in Coventry had been destroyed by one of the bombs. If this was not bad enough, an additional problem was that the twenty-one-mile train ride each day was frequently disrupted and delayed by the damage that had been caused by the Blitz. Sadie, trapped in a stationary carriage with two hyperactive teenagers endlessly repeating comic routines to each other, could stand it no longer: why, she asked them, did they not channel their energy and talent more constructively by working together on a double-act that might actually help their careers as well as provide her with just a little peace and quiet? Both Eric and Ernie, it appears, thought this to be an inspired idea.

It started out, according to Ernie, as merely ‘a hobby, a sideline which we would work on in addition to the solo spots we each had’.7 Within days of Sadie’s suggestion, however, they had already worked out a basic routine, comprising of a few gags (‘adapted’ from Moon and Bentley’s repertoire) and a soft-shoe shuffle to the tune of ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’. They had also, with the speed and the ease that they would later come to be noted for, shaken hands on the ground rules for their professional association: everything was to be split down the middle, fifty-fifty, and it was never, ever, to matter who got the laughs (the only thing that mattered, they agreed, was that someone should get the laughs). Even Sadie was a little taken aback by the extent to which her suggestion, which had only been semi-serious in the first place, had captured their imaginations, but, once she saw how well they worked together, she became, as always, totally committed to their cause.

Ernie Wise would say that Sadie was ‘the key element’ in the development of their act.8 While they continued to concentrate primarily on their solo acts – which, as Ernie reminded Eric, were still the things that earned them their wages – Sadie studied the other performers, scoured old joke books for suitable material, thought about possible props and bits of comic business, and watched and listened attentively as they rehearsed tirelessly in front of her. The great quality she felt that both of them possessed was that of professionalism: ‘They always worked very hard. It was perfection or nothing.’9

Ernie became the straight-man, said Sadie, because ‘he was the good-looking personality boy’, and Eric became the comic, ‘because he could look like a vacant American college dude in glasses and a big fedora hat’.10 They based their style, to begin with, on the rapid and rather soulless cross-talk associated at the time with Abbott and Costello, and their homage went as far as assuming American accents. Their early material would inevitably have a patchwork quality about it, incorporating the radio-oriented puns of Askey and Murdoch:

ERNIE(points to a coat hanger) What’s that?ERICA hanger.ERNIEWhat’s it for?ERICAn aeroplane.

and the considerably more louche humour of the music-hall:

ERNIEWhat are you supposed to be?ERICI’m a businessman.ERNIEA businessman doesn’t walk like that.ERICYou don’t know my business.11

After several months of sustained effort (‘we lived, ate and slept the double-act’12) they – and Sadie – felt that they were ready. They approached Bryan Michie in the hope that he might consider allowing them to perform the act within the existing show. Although he seemed to like what they could do, he remained non-committal: Jack Hylton, he said, would have to see it first, and he was next due to visit the show when it reached Liverpool in the summer of 1941. ‘Leave it to me,’ announced Ernie. ‘I’ll tackle Mr Hylton.’13 He did, and Hylton, after suggesting a few changes – the most significant of which involved using another song, ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’, to complement their soft-shoe shuffle14 – instructed Michie to remove one of the acts from the bill so that Eric and Ernie could have their chance.

The double-act of Bartholomew and Wise duly made its début on the night of Friday 28 August 194115 at the Liverpool Empire. Sadie, standing next to Jack Hylton, watched proudly from the wings. Even though their material was blatantly unoriginal (their later exchange – ERNIE: That’s an Old Vic type joke./ERIC: I was there when old Vic told it – would have served as an apt evaluation of the antiquated nature of the affair), the audience, according to Sadie’s account, was sufficiently impressed to award her two ‘ardent and hard-working little troupers’ a ‘marvellous reception’.16 The show was due to move on to a week-long engagement in Edinburgh,17 and Hylton decreed that the double-act, in addition to Eric and Ernie’s existing solo acts, was, for the time being, to remain on the bill.

It took a while, none the less, for the partnership to find a regular spot in the show. Bryan Michie, fearful of incurring the wrath of the other mothers – some of whom could make formidable opponents – by appearing to indulge the whims of Sadie’s two boys, was hesitant at first. He only slipped the double-act on to the bill when he felt that he had a good enough reason to do so. There is no doubt, however, that Michie believed that it was worth persevering with – although not, he felt, with the names ‘Bartholomew and Wise’. He suggested either ‘Barlow and Wise’ or ‘Bartlett and Wise’,18 but neither sounded right to Eric and Ernie.

The matter was settled, eventually, when the tour reached the Midlands – Eric would remember the venue as being in Nottingham,19 Ernie in Coventry.20 According to most sources, the American singer Adelaide Hall and her husband Bert Hicks were appearing on the same bill as Eric and Ernie when Sadie encountered them backstage. ‘We’re trying to think of a name for Eric,’21 she explained. Hicks is reputed to have suggested that Eric should follow the example of an old friend of his who, in a similar situation, had assumed the name of his home town of Rochester in Minnesota. According to Michael Freedland,22 who ghostwrote Morecambe and Wise’s 1981 autobiography There’s No Answer to That!, Hicks was referring to Eddie Anderson, the song-and-dance man who found international fame in the role of Jack Benny’s gravel-voiced butler, Rochester. The only answer one can give to this assertion is a non-committal ‘yes and no’: Anderson was an old friend of Hicks, and he did come to be thought of as originating from Rochester, but, in reality, he had been born in Oakland, California, and one of Jack Benny’s writers had created the character called ‘Rochester’ long before Eddie Anderson ever came to audition for the role.23 What we can be sure of is that Sadie and Eric acted on Hicks’ basic advice and decided to change his name to Eric Morecambe. Ernie, perhaps overwhelmed momentarily by the spirit of adventure that was in the air, came close to changing his name to that of ‘Eddie Leeds’,24 but, in a cool hour, he realised that ‘Morecambe and Leeds’ sounded too much like a railway return ticket, and he thought better of it.

They would later discover that even this new combination was not without its own little drawbacks – Morecambe was frequently misspelt as ‘Morecombe’25 and, on at least one miserable afternoon during summer season, a compère shouting out to the audience, ‘Who goes with Morecambe?’ received the sarcastic reply, ‘Heysham!’26 Both Eric and Ernie agreed, however, that it had the same kind of auspiciously euphonious feel to it as ‘Laurel and Hardy’, and so, in the autumn of 1941, a new double-act called ‘Morecambe and Wise’ was born.

One advantage that they had over most of the famous double-acts they hoped one day to emulate was that their partnership had been formed at such an early stage in their careers. Unlike, say, Laurel and Hardy, who had come together when Laurel was aged thirty-seven and Hardy thirty-five, or Abbott and Costello, who had met when Abbott was thirty-six and Costello twenty-five, Morecambe and Wise formed their professional partnership when Morecambe was only fifteen and Wise not quite sixteen, before either had acquired a fixed identity or style, and they could grow together unencumbered by the baggage of earlier associations. Whereas many of their heroes had been obliged to work against their individual pasts, Morecambe and Wise would have the luxury of being able, from the very start, to work for their long-term collective future.

‘There’s no such thing as an original to start with,’ Eric Morecambe once remarked. ‘You start by copying and once you’ve built up confidence and worked hard enough, the real person begins to come out.’27 Morecambe and Wise had plenty of good double-acts to copy; the early forties were auspicious years for the format. Britain, for example, could offer Flanagan and Allen, Clapham and Dwyer, Murray and Mooney, Elsie and Doris Waters, Naughton and Gold, the Western Brothers and the increasingly popular Jewel and Warriss. America offered Burns and Allen, Olsen and Johnson, Hope and Crosby (intermittently), Laurel and Hardy and, then at their commercial peak, Abbott and Costello. Although Morecambe and Wise studied all of the British acts carefully (and, indeed, they would retain such a strong sense of affection for Flanagan and Allen that in the early seventies they would record a tribute album of their songs28), they drew most of their inspiration from the American double-acts that they watched on the movie screen.

Abbott and Costello, they always said, started them off: ‘They were the double-act of the time.’29 Eric and Ernie would go together to see each of their movies as soon as they were released: One Night in the Tropics, Buck Privates,30 In the Navy (1940); Hold That Ghost, Keep ’Em Flying (1941); Ride ’Em Cowboy, Rio Rita, Pardon My Sarong and Who Done It? (1942). They were viewed and reviewed, their accents copied and best routines memorised and not so subtly revised. For the next two or three years, Morecambe and Wise were, in their own minds at least, Abbott and Costello. Eric was Lou, slow-witted and submissive, and Ernie was Bud, dapper and domineering. They had the same hats turned up at the front, the same catchphrases (‘I’m a ba-a-a-d boy!’) and they tried their best to employ the same kind of breathlessly aggressive style of delivery. Years later they would revive one of these old routines for their television show:

ERICLend me two pounds. One’ll do – now you owe me one.ERNIEI don’t understand.ERICLend me two pounds. One’ll do – now you owe me one.ERNIEI don’t understand.ERICWell, I’ll show you. Ask me for two pounds.ERNIELend me two pounds.ERICThere’s two pounds. How much have you asked for?ERNIETwo pounds.ERICHow much have I given you?ERNIETwo pounds.ERICHow much do you owe me?ERNIETwo pounds.ERICThank you.31

The lightning pace of such routines did not just provide Morecambe and Wise with a fashionably dynamic act; it also prevented potential hecklers in the audience from ever getting a word in edgeways. Later on, as their confidence grew, they would look more to the character-based humour of Laurel and Hardy, a far warmer and more nuanced style of comedy, with the cheerfully diffident Laurel’s dazed-looking double-takes, the courteously pompous Hardy’s quietly despairing stares at the camera, and a shared attitude to bachelorhood that was coexistent with their nature as perpetual schoolboys. It would be an important change of direction for Morecambe and Wise, because at the heart of Laurel and Hardy was an immutable friendship, whereas at the heart of Abbott and Costello was a simmering hatred, and Morecambe and Wise, like Laurel and Hardy, were able to make people care about them rather than – as was the case with Abbott and Costello – merely respect them.

Morecambe, according to Wise’s account, was somewhat reluctant initially to play the dopey comic to Ernie’s sophisticated straight-man: ‘There was a part of Eric that longed to be a sort of Cary Grant figure, and part of him that resented being the comic while the straight man had the style.’32 If Morecambe did have any reservations about his role then they soon faded away – perhaps because of the laughs that he was getting – and the act settled down along the conventional lines of comic and feed. Sometimes, as the tour started to wind down and several members of the cast drifted away, they teamed up with Jean Bamforth as ‘Morecambe, Bamforth and Wise’, and sometimes they reverted to the double-act. Whatever the situation warranted, they worked and they reflected and they learned. By the end of 1941 they had built up the act to last seven minutes – or ten if they chose to work slowly. Their confidence was high, which was just as well, because early in 1942, as a result of a precipitous decline in fortune at the box-office, Jack Hylton decided to close the show: in future, they would have to fend for themselves.

Although Morecambe and Wise, full of youthful optimism, expected London agents to be queuing up for their signature, Sadie Bartholomew knew better. They were still known as ‘child discoveries’, and there were currently no shows that were in need of such performers. They would have to learn to be patient. Eric returned very reluctantly to Morecambe, where he found a job working a ten-hour day in the local razor-blade factory. Ernie, unwilling to go home to Leeds and convinced, in spite of the redoubtable Sadie’s judgement to the contrary, that someone just must be ready to find him a slot in another show, tried his luck in London. He lodged with a Japanese family of acrobats while he searched through the showbusiness papers in the hope of spotting an opening. Variety in the capital, however, was now virtually at a standstill on account of all the bombings, and eventually Ernie was left with no alternative but to return to Yorkshire and find work on a local coal round.