Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

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,

and Eric Morecambe once claimed – erroneously – that they never did manage to appear on the show,

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,

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.

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 Wise

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.

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.

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 1953

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,’

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.’

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.

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:

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.

‘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”.’

‘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.’

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!”’

– 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.’

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!’

Doreen, who had already chided Wise for his lack of a sense of romance,

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.’

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’.

’

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.’

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!”’

TELEVISION (#ulink_d6cf62f0-22e3-5fa9-9952-0187fe6b6901)

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

THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN

CHAPTER V (#ulink_57dad70d-82dd-5113-b366-b551e1848e45)

A Box in the Corner (#ulink_57dad70d-82dd-5113-b366-b551e1848e45)

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.’

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.’