Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ of Jimmy Cagney singing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ (which proved, of course, sufficient encouragement for him to reprise the performance at regular intervals during the next thirty years). They also met innumerable West End stars at drinks parties hosted by Wendy Toye, the show’s choreographer.

      Throughout all of the seductive hubbub of this brightly unfamiliar showbusiness world, Morecambe and Wise continued to work diligently to promote their critically neglected double-act: ‘At least we loved our act,’ said Wise; ‘we thought it wonderful and were prepared to do it anywhere, anytime, at the drop of a hat.’⁴¹ They played several dates at the American officers’ club in Hans Crescent, off the Brompton Road. They stood in at short notice for indisposed acts on local Variety bills. They even played in people’s front rooms – anything to keep in practise and keep being noticed. They also managed during this period to make their very first radio appearances together when the BBC broadcast a special version of Strike a New Note on 16 April 1943, followed in May and June by a ‘spin-off’ series, Youth Must Have Its Swing, on the Home Service.⁴² In spite of their persistence, however, not everyone was convinced that the double-act had a future. Wendy Toye, for example – who had watched them perform both in the theatre and, slightly less willingly perhaps, in the middle of one of her soirées – continued to regard their partnership with a certain amount of scepticism. ‘I was very fond of both of them,’ she would recall, ‘but I did all I could to separate them’:

      I remember saying to Eric, ‘You know, Eric, you’re such a wonderful comedian, you ought to be your own stand-up comedian,’ and I remember taking Ernie to one side and saying to him, ‘That lad’s holding you back – you ought to be a solo song-and-dance man. You’d go straight into musicals and do very, very well.’ They stuck together, thank goodness, but just think: I nearly put a stop to that great double-act!⁴³

      Ernie Wise, by this time, was quite impervious to such advice. His often overlooked yet invaluable capacity for loyalty was very evident here – as, indeed, it would be at several crucial points later on in the act’s development – and even Sadie was surprised by how utterly devoted he had become to his partner. Although Wise was, strictly speaking, the one with the more distinguished past and still, some were saying, the more obviously promising future, he seemed perfectly content to let Morecambe berate him at regular intervals for his supposed inadequacies. ‘You’re not a bit of good,’ Morecambe would shout at him after he had forgotten or mistimed a tag line. ‘You’re supposed to have learnt this.’⁴⁴ On one occasion, Sadie, feeling that things had gone too far, intervened by ordering Eric to leave the room. Ernie’s reaction, she would recall, was entirely unexpected:

      Ernie turned to me. ‘You know, you shouldn’t have interfered.’

      ‘But I’m sticking up for you,’ I said.

      ‘Don’t you see? Eric is only trying to make me the best feed in the country, like Jerry Desmonde is to Sid Field,’ Ernie said.

      ‘Make you the feed!’

      ‘Yes, and shall I tell you something? He’s going to be the best comic in the British Isles.’

      Later I told Eric this, and there was no more temperament from my son, never another cross word, never any more argument.⁴⁵

      Their progress, however, was interrupted abruptly on 27 November 1943 with the arrival of Ernie Wise’s call-up papers. He had the option of joining the Army, the Merchant Navy or going down the mines; he decided to join the Merchant Navy, anticipating an exotic life at sea but ending up ferrying coal from Newcastle and South Shields down to Battersea Power Station in London for the Gas Light and Coke Company. Eric Morecambe, who was not due to be called up before May of the following year, stayed on in Strike a New Note until it finally broke up. He then found a job in ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association⁴⁶) as a straight-man to a Blackpool comic called Gus Morris (brother of the more talented Dave Morris). When his papers did eventually arrive, he opted to become a Bevin Boy,⁴⁷ volunteering to work down the mines in Accrington for Hargreaves Collieries. Eleven months later, however, he was classified C3 with what was referred to at the time as a touch of heart trouble and was sent home to Morecambe – first to rest and regain his good health, and then to work once again at the local razor-blade factory.

      Sadie Bartholomew, scanning the ‘wanted’ columns in The Stage, came across the news that a touring show was looking for a straight-man for its principal comic, Billy Revell. Morecambe got the job, earning £12 per week, and the show ran for six months. Wise was also doing his best to keep himself involved in showbusiness during this period. He had been made part of a permanent reserve of seamen available for placement anywhere in the world at short notice, but, as there were often long breaks between postings, he took the opportunity to keep in touch with a circle of agents and producers who provided him with a steady supply of short-term engagements around the country (billing him as a ‘boy from the brave merchant navy’⁴⁸). When at last he was discharged in April 1945 he returned to a civilian life still committed to the world of entertainment but now, it seemed, as a solo performer. During his prolonged separation from Morecambe the idea of being part of a double-act had lost some of its appeal – perhaps because of a belief that, at eighteen, it was time to redeem a once promising but recently stalled career, and a solo act might prove more adaptable than a double-act in an increasingly competitive market-place.

      Morecambe and Wise might never have reformed their partnership had not, yet again, another happy accident intervened. Sadie had taken Eric to London in order to assist him, once again, in his search for work.⁴⁹ After finding a suitable base in theatrical digs owned and presided over by a Mrs Nell Duer at 13 Clifton Gardens, in Chiswick, they had started the onerous task of scouring all of the showbusiness papers and visiting innumerable agents in the hope of chancing upon an opening. One day, as they walked purposefully along Regent Street, Eric glanced across to see the familiar figure of Ernie Wise waving frantically from the other side of the street.⁵⁰ When Sadie discovered that Ernie was staying in a rather insalubrious form of accommodation in Brixton, she invited him to move in with her and Eric: ‘You two might as well be out of work together as separately,’ she remarked.⁵¹

      As it happened, Sadie soon found work for both of them in a peculiar hybrid of a show that went under the grandiose title of Lord John Sanger’s Circus & Variety. This particular combination of Circus and Variety had been popularised in the Victorian era by a colourful showman called ‘Lord’ George Sanger.⁵² George Sanger’s involvement had ended abruptly back in 1911 when his manservant – in an egregious fit of pique – battered him to death with a hatchet, but the tradition stretched on into the post-war years under the watchful eye of the similarly self-ennobled ‘Lord’ John. The reasoning behind the project was that provincial audiences, starved of top-class professional entertainment and lacking the grand music-halls of the big cities, would welcome the opportunity to sample the respective delights of Circus and Variety within the same makeshift arena. It seemed, as both Morecambe and Wise would later remark, a good idea at the time.

      Sanger’s brother, Edward – who had known Morecambe and Wise since the days when he assisted Bryan Michie on Youth Takes a Bow – booked each of them separately for the tour. Wise was selected first – as a comic – on a wage of £12 per week. Morecambe, much to his and Sadie’s surprise, was selected as Wise’s ‘Wellma boy’ – the straight-man who starts with the self-assured line ‘Well, my boy, and what are you going to do tonight?’ only to be insulted by the irreverent comic – on a wage of £10 per week.⁵³ It was, at least as far as Eric and Sadie were concerned, a less than satisfactory arrangement, but, as no alternative engagements were available and no money was coming in, there was nothing to do but to accept it.

      The show travelled from place to place in a slow procession of converted RAF СКАЧАТЬ