Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

We know you are a very busy man and may not be able to get along to see us. So do you think you could arrange to give us an audition with a view to booking us on Variety Bandbox?

We know you are always looking for comedians, so how about giving us a chance to show our ability?

Thanking you,

Sincerely,

Morecambe and Wise104

Frank Pope, once he became their agent, added his weight to this long-running campaign, writing on 16 July 1951 to the then Deputy Head of Variety Pat Hillyard and urging him and his producers to at least go to see his clients perform. Someone did act on this request, because the following note, scribbled in pencil, was sent by a producer to Patrick Newman, the bookings manager, shortly after:

I saw this act last night and came to the conclusion that the act is, of necessity, too visual, and certainly with too much slap-stick for Sound.

Television might well be interested in them, but there is nothing I could say is outstanding. Some of their patter struck me as being rather aged.105

It seems likely that Morecambe and Wise – and Frank Pope – remained ignorant of this negative verdict, because their campaign continued unchecked, and culminated in the decision of May 1952 by John Foreman, one of the last producers of Variety Bandbox, to include them in one of the programmes. It proved to be something of a pyrrhic victory – the show closed down for good in September that year – but it served as a testimony to the extraordinary tenacity exhibited by Morecambe and Wise in their pursuit of what seemed to them a worthwhile goal.106

Throughout this period their broadcasts from Manchester were winning them some influential admirers, and Ronnie Taylor, in particular, was coming rapidly to the conclusion that they might well be worth the gamble of a show of their own. It was the very thing that they had been hoping for: a chance to grow, to develop a lasting relationship with a large radio audience, to amass a substantial body of work and negotiate a pay-rise – 20 guineas per show – into the bargain. The first series of You’re Only Young Once (YoYo as it became known) started on 9 November 1953107 with Ronnie Taylor as producer, Frank Roscoe as writer and a cast that included Pearl Carr and Deryck Guyler. The shows consisted of short sketches, a musical interlude and a guest star, and were based – very loosely – around the framework of a detective agency run by Morecambe and Wise. When the second series began the following year, Taylor – now Head of Light Entertainment at BBC North – handed over the production duties to one of his most talented young protégés, John Ammonds. Ammonds had joined the BBC in 1941, acquiring invaluable experience during the following thirteen years working in the BBC’s Variety department at London, Bristol and Bangor before moving to Manchester and working closely with Taylor on a number of radio projects. Programmes were made at a very rapid pace in those days, and producers were often called upon to rewrite material – and sometimes, indeed, to conjure up material which had simply failed to arrive – shortly before a recording. Ammonds, in particular, had shown a real talent for this, and, as a consequence, he proved to be an enormously reassuring presence as Morecambe and Wise worked hard to improve on the basic format of the show.

‘Frank Roscoe was a pretty good writer,’108 Ammonds recalled, ‘but he was always working on about three scripts at once – he was doing a script for Ken Platt and other stand-up comics, and one for us. There’d always be parts of the script we’d have to work on once we got it. I’d change this and that, add the odd line here and there, and, of course, the boys – Eric and Ernie – would turn up with all these big old joke books they carried everywhere with them and attempt to fill up the script with gags from those.’109 Ammonds struck up a friendship with them that would last for the rest of their careers:

We got on well from the start. They weren’t just good performers, they were nice people, too. Easy to work with – very keen, quick learners and very, very hard workers, even way back then.

Of course, they were much more ‘Northern’ in those days. Eric was playing this gormless type of character, and his accent was fairly strong, whereas Ernie sounded pretty much then as he did years later on the TV shows.110

YoYo’s style of comedy was, even in 1954, slightly dated – owing more than a little to the kind of fast, pun-packed cross-talk (itself influenced by American radio shows) popularised in Britain by the writing team of Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin – but it retained an engaging spirit:

ERICMen: when you go to a dance, are you a wall-flower? When you get up to leave at the end, is the seat you’ve been sitting on warmer than you are? Instead of dancing like Astaire, do you dance like you’ve just tripped over one?ERNIEWell, then, what you need is the Swanee Dancing Course. It comes to you by post in six easy lessons, and here are some of the useful hints: ‘How to improve your chasse’ –ERICEat less.ERNIE‘How to make women fall for you on the ballroom floor’ –ERICTrip ’em up.ERNIE‘What to do when a lady says “Excuse me”’ –ERICOffer her a mint.ERNIEYes, men, the Swanee Dancing Course is what you need. So why not enrol today? Just send us five pounds in notes to Morecambe and Wise. And those of you who have already sent us the money, don’t forget our slogan –ERICUp the Swanee!

The relative success of this series, and the financial remuneration (by now 30 guineas per show) that went with it, was a great source of comfort to Morecambe and Wise at a time when they were not only still working hard on the Moss circuit but had also both recently married – Wise, at long last, to Doreen Blythe, and Morecambe, as soon as he possibly could, to a young soubrette called Joan Bartlett.111 ‘The first sighting’, Joan recalled, ‘was at a bandcall on a Monday morning at the Empire in Edinburgh, because Eric always used to say they should put a plaque there saying, “Eric Morecambe Fell Here”.’112 ‘I saw this tall girl,’ he said, ‘who was very beautiful with wonderful eyes, and who had a wonderful kind of sweetness which made your knees buckle ... I knew at once that she was the one for me for life. It was as sudden as that.’113 Although Joan, once she had sensed something of his ardour, was not exactly encouraging – ‘I thought, “Not a hope – nope, fat chance he’s got!”’114 – he remained undeterred. In Joan he saw not just a very attractive woman but also someone who would be a calming influence on him, someone who – as a talented performer herself – would understand his anxieties and offer him encouragement as well as constructive criticism. ‘How on earth anyone could possibly have worked all that out in a single glance is beyond me,’ she laughed, ‘but that’s the kind of man he was, and the pursuit was on.’115 Morecambe – as decisive and as determined about some things as he was indecisive and irresolute about others – persisted, and on 11 December 1952, a mere six months after that first meeting, they were married. Ernie Wise, who was best man, spent the day in a kind of daze: ‘I think it was the fact that it had all happened so quickly,’ Joan recalled. ‘He was like somebody is after an accident, in a state of complete shock!’116 Doreen, who had already chided Wise for his lack of a sense of romance,117 was probably quick to help him recover sufficiently to see the obvious moral to be drawn from this episode, and, after five years of courtship, they too were married on 18 January 1953.

These were brightly propitious times for Morecambe and Wise. Settled and secure in their personal lives, increasingly successful in their professional lives, they must have taken special pleasure in responding to an offer of more work at the end of 1953 from the once-unapproachable BBC by sending back a telegram that read: ‘VERY SORRY UNABLE TO ACCEPT = MORECAMBE AND WISE.’118 The tables had, at long last, been turned. Now producers had to pursue Morecambe and Wise. They were starting to be billed as ‘stars of radio’, and, after just one brief appearance on a televised Variety show, they were even being touted in some quarters as ‘the white hopes of television humour’.119’

Such talk did nothing to unnerve them. ‘There is nobody making a mark on television now,’ Eric was reported as having said. ‘We would like to try.’120 They did not, in fact, have long to wait. They were appearing at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool when Ronnie Waldman, the man responsible for BBC TV’s light entertainment output, arrived backstage at their dressing-room with the offer of a television series of their own. ‘Ernie and I looked at each other,’ recalled Morecambe, ‘and we said, “We’ll do it!”’121

TELEVISION

We are privileged if we can work in this, the most entrancing of all the many palaces of varieties. Switch on, tune in and grow.

DENNIS POTTER

WOMANHave you noticed?MANWhat?WOMANThere’s no TV in this room.MANThen why does it exist?

THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN

CHAPTER V

A Box in the Corner

I’ve been in the theatre, in cabaret, in films and television – and this is undoubtedly the toughest job of them all.

RONNIE WALDMAN

‘Light Entertainment.’ What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment? or Dark Entertainment?

ERIC MASCHWITZ

‘When we start analysing our good fortune,’ reflected Ernie Wise from the vantage point of the late 1970s, ‘a great deal of it comes from the fact that we came in at the tail-end of the music-hall era, and we were young enough to start again in a new medium, television.’1 Eric Morecambe agreed: ‘If we hadn’t gone through the transition, we would have ended up as unknowns doing the whole of the North in the clubs.’2 Neither man was joking: surviving that transition had been the greatest challenge of their entire career. Morecambe and Wise took a long time to discover how to make the most of television, and television took an even longer time to discover how to make the most of Morecambe and Wise.

Television, in fact, took quite a long time to discover how to make the most of television. The fitful nature of its early evolution (launched in 1936, suspended in 1939, relaunched in 1946) did nothing to help matters, and neither did its exorbitant cost (the price of a post-war ‘budget-model’ set was in the region of £50, while the average weekly industrial wage was just under £7) and its limited reach (full, nationwide coverage would not be achieved for several more years because tight Government control of capital expenditure restricted the construction of new transmitters).3 Even by the early fifties, when the ‘television public’ was estimated to be around 22 per cent of the UK population4 and the number of people with television licences was beginning to increase significantly,5 the BBC continued to exhibit a certain ambivalence in its attitude to the fledgling medium, slipping its television schedule at the back of the Radio Times as a four-page afterthought. This unhappy situation owed more than a little to the intransigence of Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC between 1944 and 1952. Television, noted Grace Wyndham Goldie (a producer at the time), was Haley’s ‘blind spot. He appeared to distrust and dislike it and his attitudes … seemed to be rooted in a moral disapproval of the medium itself.’6

Hours of viewing, like hours of public drinking, were limited in the interests of temperance: transmitters were turned on at three o’clock in the afternoon during weekdays and five o’clock on Sundays; the screen was blank between six and seven o’clock each evening in order to ensure that parents were not distracted from the task of putting their children to bed; and transmission ended at around half past ten on most nights or, on very special occasions, at quarter to eleven. Even in between programmes there were often soothing ‘interludes’ featuring windmills turning, horse ploughs ploughing, waves breaking and potters’ wheels revolving. For long stretches of the day there was nothing on offer other than a blank screen or the sound of something from one of Mozart’s less sensational compositions.

The situation changed dramatically in 1953 with the televised coverage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Until that moment, remarked Peter Dimmock (the man responsible for producing the historic broadcast), the Establishment, and a fair proportion of the general public, had looked upon television ‘as a bit of a peep-show’.7 Then, with a near-flawless production involving the use of 5 cameras inside Westminster Abbey and 21 cameras situated at 5 separate sites outside, the visual power and immediacy of the medium was, at last, underlined. More than 19 million people – 53 per cent of the adult population of Great Britain – saw the television coverage, with 7,800,000 viewing in their own homes, 10,400,000 in the homes of friends and a further 1,500,000 in cinemas, halls and public houses.8 It was the first time that a television audience had exceeded a radio audience. The critics reacted positively – the Star declaring that ‘television had cornered the right to put its name first over the BBC door’, and Philip Hope-Wallace announcing, ‘This was television’s Coronation’9 – and so, judging from the BBC’s own research, did the public at large – 98 per cent of television viewers (as opposed to 84 per cent of radio listeners) declaring themselves to be ‘completely satisfied’ with the coverage.10

The BBC now had in Sir Ian Jacob, its Director-General between 1952 and 1959, a man who appreciated both the potential of television to capture the public imagination and also the duty of programme-makers to realise that potential. ‘A public service broadcasting service,’ he wrote, ‘must set as its aim the best available in every field … [This] means that in covering the whole range of broadcasting the opportunity should be given to each individual to choose freely between the best of the one kind of programme with which he is familiar, and the best of another kind which may be less familiar.’11 By the early fifties, a fair proportion of the BBC’s output had begun to live up to that high ideal, with its dramatic productions in particular succeeding in bringing classic literature to an increasingly broad audience (‘We are only a working-class family,’ wrote one group of grateful viewers after seeing a performance of King John. ‘You showed our England to us. Please give us more Shakespeare’12). When it came to Variety, however, the results were, to say the least, unsatisfactory.

The BBC’s inaugural Variety Party of 7 June 1946 was merely the first in a long line of embarrassingly ham-fisted attempts at forcing the bright, brash exuberance of the halls to fit the gently flickering intimacy of the small screen. Peter Waring, looking more like a slightly shifty butler than the insouciant comic that he was, set the tone when he stood stock-still in his over-starched white tie and tails and welcomed viewers with the confession: ‘I must say, I feel a trifle self-conscious going into the lens of this thing.’13 The problem was that television did not know what to do with Variety. The BBC had been quick enough to devise ways of adapting theatrical plays for the small screen, but it seemed at a loss when confronted with the task of taking a form as bold and as boisterous as music-hall – which thrived on its interaction with a lively audience – and distilling it into a medium intended to be experienced in the privacy of the family living-room. The BBC, without any doubt, meant well, but for a long time its attitude to Variety seemed akin to that of Mr Gladstone’s attitude to fallen women – more a case of pity than passion.

The newspaper critics, though unimpressed by the standard of many of the programmes being transmitted, were at least prepared to persevere with the enterprise. The Observer’s J. P. W. Mallalieu, with his distinctive brand of hopeful ambivalence, urged his fellow viewers not to give up:

We select, and what we select more often than not stimulates rather than depresses. I do not mean that what we select is always good. It is often terrible. But even in what is probably the most terrible BBC effort of all – the portrayal of Variety – when I have seen a performer on my screen I am more interested than I would otherwise have been to see him on the stage, if only to find out whether he is quite as bad as all that.14

It was a different story in America, where Variety was the least of commercial television’s worries. Unencumbered by any public service ethic, and urged on by sponsors eager for it to embrace all of the most glittering prizes thrown up by the more demotic of pursuits, American television was busy raiding vaudeville, radio and Hollywood in search of available talent. By the early fifties it could boast such hugely popular shows as The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, The Burns and Allen Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Milton Berle Show, Your Show of Shows, Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Colgate Comedy Hour and Ed Sullivan’s increasingly influential The Toast of the Town. It was estimated during this period that television stations in New York were devoting as much as 53.3 per cent of their time to light entertainment – in stark contrast to the BBC in London, which was devoting as little as 15.7 per cent to the same kind of material.15 This yawning disparity was underlined by the BBC’s use of several US imports in its schedules. When, for example, Amos ʼn’ Andy was shown for the first time on the BBC in 1954, the Daily Mirror’s Clifford Davis greeted it with the warmest of praise, pointing out that such a ‘slick, professional effort’ served to make the Corporation’s home-grown comedy shows seem ‘puny by comparison’.16

It was, in some ways, an unfair comparison to make. For all the brilliance of the very best of American television’s Variety output, it was still the case that the sheer crassness of the rest was closer to the norm, and even if the BBC had somehow found a way to raise the vast sums of money it would have needed to lure stars of comparable stature to its own studios it seems unlikely that many of them would have risen to the bait. Variety agents and managers – echoing their earlier reaction to the advent of radio – eyed television with considerable suspicion, believing initially that it represented little more than a particularly devious way of exhausting an entire career’s worth of material in a single evening, and, as a consequence, hastening the decline of an already precarious business.

Undeterred by such predictable resistance, the BBC struggled on, but for some time yet Variety on television would continue to take the form of televised Variety rather than television Variety. The best examples of this – such as Barney Colehan’s self-consciously antiquated The Good Old Days (which ran from 1953 to 1983), and Bill Cotton Senior’s band shows – had their own unpretentious charm, and the BBC would learn to produce them far more impressively than any of its future competitors ever would, but the worst – such as the half-hearted Café Continental (a cabaret-style show based at the Chiswick Empire) – seemed merely superfluous. It was not obvious, however, how the situation might best be remedied. One problem was that Variety performers tended to fail on television because they would over-project, forgetting the fact that now, instead of reaching out above all the hubbub to the back of the cavernous halls, they were supposed to be reaching directly into someone’s cosy front room. Jimmy Grafton, one of the producers obliged to deal with this issue, recalled a typical example: ‘Ethel Revnell, who was a very strong cockney character comedienne in Variety, was in an early [television show]; we brought her in to play a character in a situation comedy, and she played it like a Variety sketch, expecting she was going to get a laugh when she came on, and grimacing at the audience. She was so much larger than life that we had to scrap the show.’17

The performers who survived the transition were those who had been both willing and able to adapt. Terry-Thomas, for example, was handed his own comedy series, How Do You View?, in 1951, and others, such as Frankie Howerd, Max Wall, Arthur Askey, Jimmy Edwards and Bob Monkhouse started to appear on a regular basis soon after. Terry-Thomas commanded £100 for each fortnightly show – and by 1953 this had risen to 140 guineas18 – but most of those who were signed up at this time were placed on salaries that, compared both to radio and the most prestigious Variety circuits, were relatively modest. Ronnie Waldman – the BBC’s Head of Television Light Entertainment – certainly did believe in the viability of television Variety, but he was subject to the same degree of financial limitations as his opposite number in radio, even though his expenses, of necessity, were far greater (as average programme costs for television in 1954 were £892 per hour19). As a consequence, promising radio stars, such as Bernard Braden, or up-and-coming screen stars, such as Norman Wisdom, tended to be too expensive to hire more than occasionally. ‘Personality programmes’, such as the very popular What’s My Line?, proved to be far easier and cheaper to broadcast than Variety, as they had no need of well-written scripts or elaborate stage sets, and they also created their own television-bred celebrities, such as the notoriously brusque Gilbert Harding.

Waldman, however, was a determined man. Writing in the Radio Times shortly after assuming control of his department in 1951, he declared that he and his team of producers were committed to the creation of ‘something that had never existed before the invention of television – something that we call Television Light Entertainment … Our aim’, he continued, ‘is now to try and bring the entertainment profession as a whole to believe, with us, that television does not mean the mere photographing of something that could be entertaining in a theatre or a cinema. Television demands a very high standard of performance and an immense degree of polish from its artists. Inexperience and lack of “authority” ... are things with which the television camera has no mercy. Only the best is good enough for television.’20 His department, he insisted, was going to be dedicated to the ideal of making ‘as many people as possible as happy as possible’.21 Eager to find new and exciting ideas with which he might invigorate his department, he set off on a fact-finding tour of the United States of America – ‘to see how the other chap does it’22 – taking in 114 different television programmes during a tour that took in New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California, Arizona and Nevada. What impressed him most was not the commercial aspect of American television, but rather its lack of embarrassment about the idea of popular television. On his return to Britain, Waldman was in a bullish mood: his ambition, he announced, was ‘to give viewers what they want – but better than they expect it’.23 By the beginning of 1954, he took great pleasure in drawing his colleagues’ attention to the fact that the Light Entertainment department was now producing around 400 shows per year – ‘a vastly greater output than that of any theatrical or film organisation’.24 This was in spite of the fact that its full-time staff numbered no more than thirty seriously over-worked people. In the future, he concluded, there would be no excuse for a lack of variety in television Variety.

Morecambe and Wise were regarded within the BBC at this time as two of Waldman’s protégés, but the irony was that their television career – like their radio career – began only after years of unanswered letters, abortive engagements and innumerable false dawns. They had actually been trying to appear on television since 1948 – the year in which Ernie Wise first resolved to subject the BBC’s television producers and bookings managers to the same kind of remorseless letter-writing campaign that he had already begun to inflict on their radio counterparts.25 On 21 April of that year, in fact, they were invited to an audition at Star Sound Studios near Baker Street in London; the report card has been preserved in the BBC’s archives26: