Graham McCann - Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

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First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Fourth Estate Limited

This edition published in 1999

Copyright © Graham McCann 1998

The right of Graham McCann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Source ISBN: 9781857029116

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780008187552

Version: 2016-05-05

To John Ammonds

Great comedy, great wit, makes the ceiling fly off, and suddenly liberates us again as we were when we were much younger and saw no reason not to believe that we could fly, or become someone else, or bound on a trampoline and not come down.

PENELOPE GILLIAT

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: MUSIC-HALL

I Northern Songs and Dances

II Morecambe before Wise

III Wise before Morecambe

IV Double Act, Single Vision

PART TWO: TELEVISION

V A Box in the Corner

VI Running Wild

VII A Brand New Bright Tomorrow?

VIII Two of a Kind

PART THREE: MOVIES

IX American Visions

X The Intelligence Men

XI That Riviera Touch

XII The Magnificent Two

PART FOUR: A NATIONAL INSTITUTION

XIII The Show of the Week

XIV Mass Entertainment

XV Get Out of That

XVI Loose Ends

EPILOGUE

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

List of Performances: Radio, Television, Movies and Records

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Television has shaped us – you can blame it for ‘abbreviated attention span’ and a failure to believe in realities; or you can notice how it promotes a low-level passive surrealism in expectations, and an uncatalogued memory bank for our minds. We may be more like crazed movie editors trying to splice our lives together because of TV. There is a resistance it has bred, as well as a chaos: you can’t have one without the other. And in the end, there is no point in being gloomy or cheerful about it. It’s there, here, without moratorium or chance of reversal.

DAVID THOMSON

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

W. H. AUDEN

It happened one night. It happened, to be precise, at 8.55 p.m. on the night of 25 December 1977, when an estimated 28,835,000 people 1– more than half of the total population of the United Kingdom – tuned their television sets to BBC1 and spent the next hour and ten minutes in the company of a rather tall man called Eric and a rather short man called Ernie.

It was an extraordinary night for British television in general and for the BBC in particular: 28,835,000 viewers for a single show. It was – at least as far as that catholic and capacious category known, somewhat apologetically, as ‘light entertainment’ was concerned – as close as British television had ever come, in some forty-one years of trying, 2to being a genuine mass medium. None of the usual rigid divisions and omissions were apparent in the broad audience of that remarkable night: no stark class bias, no pronounced gender imbalance, no obvious age asymmetry, no generalised demographic obliquities. 3The show had found its way into dense council estates, lofty tower blocks, smart suburban squares and leafily discreet country retreats – it was even watched with uncommon avidity at Windsor Castle, where assembled members of the Royal Family delayed their Christmas dinner until they had seen the show through to its proper conclusion. 4

It was also, of course, an extraordinary night for the two stars of that show: Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise – by far the most illustrious, and the best-loved, double-act that Britain has ever produced. Exceptionally professional yet endearingly personable, they were wonderful together as partners, as friends, as almost a distinct entity: not ‘Morecambe and Wise’ but ‘Morecambewise’ – one never could see the join. There was Eric and there was Ernie: one of them an idiot, the other a bigger idiot, each of them half a star, together a whole star, forever hopeful of that ‘brand new, bright tomorrow’ that they sang about at the end of each show. True, Eric would often slap Ernie smartly on the cheeks, but that was just a welling-up of applause that had been brought to a head: they clearly thought the world of each other, and the world thought a great deal of them, too.

Their show succeeded in attracting such a massive following on that memorable night because it had, over the course of the previous nine years or so, established, and then enhanced, an enviable reputation for consistency, inventiveness, unparalleled professional polish and, last but by no means least, a strong and sincere respect for its audience. The Morecambe & Wise Show stood for something greater, something far more precious, than mere first-rate but evanescent entertainment; it had come to stand – just as persuasively and as proudly as any earnest documentary or any epic drama – for excellence in broadcasting, the result not just of two gifted performers (great talent, alas, does not of itself guarantee great television) but also of a richly proficient and supremely committed production team. Together they combined to realise the basic ideal of public service broadcasting: that admirable old Reithian ambition to make excellence accessible, ‘to carry into the greatest possible number of homes everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour, and achievement’. 5

The show, culminating in the record-breaking triumph of that 1977 special, represented an achievement in high-quality popular programme-making that is now fast assuming the aura of a fairy tale – destined, one fears, to be passed on with bemused fascination from one doubtful generation to its even more disbelieving successor as the seemingly endless proliferation of new channels and novel forms of distraction continue to divide and disperse the old mass audience in the name of that remorseless (and self-fulfilling) quest for ‘quality demographics’ and ‘niche audiences’. The Morecambe & Wise Show appeared at a time before home video, before satellite dishes and cable technology, before the dawning of the digital revolution, a time when it was still considered desirable, as well as practicable, to make a television programme that might – just might – excite most of the people most of the time. Not every programme-maker and performer from this time was particularly well equipped or strongly inclined to pursue such a possibility, but Morecambe and Wise, working in close collaboration with the BBC, most certainly were.