Graham McCann - Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

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?’ 3Hurrying 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’, 5and 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’. 7Within 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. 8While 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’. 10They 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:

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

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.’ 13He 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 shuffle 14– instructed Michie to remove one of the acts from the bill so that Eric and Ernie could have their chance.