Graham McCann - Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

The double-act of Bartholomew and Wise duly made its début on the night of Friday 28 August 1941 15at 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’. 16The show was due to move on to a week-long engagement in Edinburgh, 17and 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’, 18but 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, 19Ernie in Coventry. 20According 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,’ 21she 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, 22who 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. 23What 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’, 24but, 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’ 25and, 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!’ 26Both 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.’ 27Morecambe 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 songs 28), 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.’ 29Eric 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:

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.