Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ and sense of inadequacy. Entertaining brought me out of myself … I was able to step out of my very private little world and be an entirely different person, a cheeky chappie.’²⁷

      His stage persona was certainly bright and brash. There was something of the crowd-pleasing ebullience and somewhat dandified appearance of another Yorkshire comic singer of the time, Whit Cunliffe, in his carefree and cocksure performances. It helped him stand out from most of his contemporaries as a strong and seemingly nerveless entertainer with an unusually promising future ahead of him. That was certainly the impression he made on the impresario Bryan Michie when, in the autumn of 1938, he toured all over the North in search of new juvenile talent to showcase in a revue. Harry Wiseman had heard that Michie was holding auditions at the Leeds Empire, so he made sure that Ernie went along. Michie sat close to the front of the stalls, watching impassively as Ernie strode on to the stage, told a few jokes, sang one of his usual songs – ‘Knee-Deep in Daisies’ – and finished with his by now extremely competent quick-tempo clog dance. He left without hearing of any response – positive or negative – from Michie. Several months of silence passed, and Ernie, a little disheartened perhaps, returned to the old round of club dates and local talent competitions. Two things happened to lift his spirits again: first, he managed to make a brief appearance on a talent show in Leeds that was being broadcast by the BBC – an achievement that won him considerable respect among his friends and also, just as importantly, a fee of two guineas; and second, a letter finally arrived from London – not from Michie himself, but from his fellow impresario Jack Hylton. Hylton invited Ernie down to London for an audition. ‘There was,’ Ernie would recall, ‘great excitement in the house.’²⁸

      The subsequent events followed each other at a breathless pace. Harry travelled with Ernie down to London by train on 6 January 1939.²⁹ On their arrival they went straight to the office of Jack Hylton, and the audition was held there and then. ‘He must have liked me,’ said Ernie, ‘because that same evening he put me in the show.’³⁰ The show in question was a West End revue called Band Waggon – adapted from the hugely successful BBC radio programme of the same name – and, in spite of Arthur Askey’s presence at the top of the bill, it was not doing anything like as well as had been expected. Hylton’s impetuous decision may have been prompted more by an urgent need to improve his ailing production than it was by the precocious talents of the young stranger in his office, but, whatever the reasons, it was a decision that later that night proved itself to be inspired: Ernie was the talking-point in all of the reviews. The following morning the Daily Express, for example, reported:

      At 6.40 last night Ernest Wiseman, fair, perky-faced, quiffy-haired thirteen-year-old son of a parcels porter at Leeds Central Station, made his first professional appearance on the stage in Jack Hylton’s Band Waggon at Princes Theatre [now the Shaftesbury]. The moment he went on he became Ernie Wise. That in future will be his name. I believe you are going to hear it often …

      Ernie, one-quarter Max Miller, one-quarter Sydney Howard, and the other half a mixture of all the comics who have ever amused you, wears a squashed-in billycock hat, striped black and grey City trousers (too small for him), a black frock coat with a pink carnation in the buttonhole, grey spats, and brown clogs.

      His timing and confidence are remarkable. At thirteen he is an old-time performer.³¹

      Arthur Askey, interviewed almost forty years later, recalled his reaction to this new addition to the cast: ‘[He was a] fresh-faced, delightful kid, totally stage-struck. He had a good face, a good singing voice, and he was a very fair little dancer. He had a neat little evening dress with brown clogs on his feet – which didn’t quite go together – but he did a good clog dance.’³²

      It seemed as though Ernie, all of a sudden, was actually living the kind of Hollywood fantasy that he had always found so irresistible. Sitting in the unfamiliar splendour of the large room in the Shaftesbury Hotel (‘it boasted a courtesy light in the loo’³³), Harry read through all of the newspaper reports of his son’s extraordinary achievement. Quickly, he came to the realisation that he would no longer be needed as either a co-performer or mentor. He had cried with pride the previous evening as he sat through the show, but now, in spite of receiving an offer from Jack Hylton to stay on as a kind of personal assistant to Ernie, he made up his mind to go back home to Yorkshire at the end of the following week.

      Jack Hylton, in his absence, became, in effect, a surrogate father to Ernie, taking control of his career, his image and, for a time, his financial concerns. Ernest Wiseman became, on Hylton’s advice, Ernie Wise (easier to remember, he reasoned), and he was awarded a five-year contract that started at £6 per week (twice as much as Harry was earning at the time). Hylton moved him into a flat above the Fifty-Fifty, an Italian restaurant in St Martin’s Lane, and found him a chaperone in the form of a Mrs Rodway, a woman who had considerable experience in looking after juvenile performers.

      Harry and Connie did begin to benefit financially from their son’s dramatic success – Mrs Rodway, on Ernie’s insistence, sent at least £3 home each week before banking the rest (Ernie kept the bank book) – but, in his absence, it was a bitter-sweet experience. Years later, after Harry had died, Connie confided to her son that going back home alone had been ‘the breaking of him’.³⁴ He had tried, for a while, to keep the act going with other young performers, but his heart was not in it and he gave up performing altogether. His health began to decline, and, with all of the extra money coming in each week from London, he virtually stopped working altogether.

      Ernie, busy settling into a new routine and novel surroundings down South, was, it seems, entirely unaware of his father’s feelings. Everything was new and exciting and glamorous to the newly named Ernie Wise, West End star, and he threw himself into his new life ‘with all the ignorance and insouciance of the thirteen-year-old that I was’.³⁵ Although he was never quite the stolid and adamantine character that the public persona sometimes would suggest, the self-assured manner in which he coped with his sudden change of fortune was undeniably striking for one so young. One journalist who interviewed him immediately after his début in the show was understandably taken aback when Ernie, responding to a question concerning who would be looking after him during his time in London, answered coolly: ‘Nobody. Why should they?’³⁶

      ‘Ernie’, commented Arthur Askey, ‘was rather like a young Hylton then and I think that is one reason Jack liked him so much. He looked on him almost as a son.’³⁷ Hylton, a down-to-earth Lancastrian, made every effort to see that Ernie’s progress was not overly hindered by feelings of homesickness. After noting, for example, that the Italian food from the restaurant was not agreeing with Ernie’s East Ardsley appetite, Hylton invited him into his office to share meals of pork pie (made specially for him in Bolton) or cold tripe. Ernie respected him greatly, and was particularly impressed by his habit of keeping several thick rolls of banknotes stuffed inside his bulging pockets. Here, he thought, was a man worth listening to.

      ‘It was Jack Hylton who shaped my stage persona,’ he would say. ‘He knocked the raw edges off my act.’³⁸ The brown clogs were replaced with smart black tap shoes; the battered bowler hat was abandoned in favour of a new straw boater; and the odd, ill-fitting coat and striped trousers gave way to a sophisticated-looking bespoke white dinner jacket and black trousers. It represented a very deliberate and radical change of image: he now resembled more a cosmopolitan song-and-dance man than a parochial Northern comic, ‘more Maurice Chevalier than Max Miller’.³⁹ Hylton planned to promote Ernie Wise as ‘an altogether slicker product’ than before, a ‘boulevardier’ who performed like ‘an adult before his time’ (even if, as a consequence, that meant, as Wise would later reflect, that he remained ‘a child without a childhood’).⁴⁰

      It was a sobering contradiction: while on stage Ernie Wise seemed to mature at a rapid rate, off stage and deep down there was something oddly immature about him. He noticed the difference himself when, after Band СКАЧАТЬ