Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ to set out seats for up to seven hundred people, put down the sawdust, set up the stage and help sell the tickets. Included on the bill were Speedy Yelding, ‘Britain’s Greatest Clown’; the singer Mollie Seddon, ‘A Thrill to Your Eyes, Ears & Heart’; Peter, ‘The Equine Marvel’; Evelyn’s Dogs & Pigeons; a quartet of dancers, ‘The Four Flashes’; Eric Morecambe and ‘England’s Mickey Rooney’, Ernie Wise. Each prospective member of the audience, as he or she pondered the 3s. 6d. that was the price of admission, was urged not to ’fail to visit the pets comer after the performance’.⁵⁴

      It did not go to plan. Audiences – when there were any – arrived expecting an event of Barnum and Bailey proportions, and were not at all pleased to discover that, far from a fierce menagerie of lions, tigers and elephants, the best that Sanger could offer them was one tired-looking donkey, a silent parrot, two chubby hamsters, a team of performing dogs, a shivering wallaby and a ring-tailed lemur. In between these so-called Circus acts the Variety performers, such as Morecambe and Wise, filled-in with, in their own words, ‘unfunny sketches and unfunny jokes’.⁵⁵

      Sanger himself lived and travelled in comfort, but his employees were not so fortunate. Each battered old trailer contained a canvas bucket as a make-shift sink and the artistes’ bathroom at each site consisted of a hole in the ground surrounded by a malodorous canvas screen. Meals were cooked over campfires and served on dented tin plates to be consumed under a nearby tree. Although both Morecambe and Wise came from relatively humble backgrounds, they enjoyed their creature comforts none the less and loathed this sharp taste of life on the road. Their lowest point came when they were obliged to perform in front of an audience made up of just six young boys, all of whom were seated right at the very back of the cavernous marquee in the cheapest of the seven hundred seats.

      Things went from bad to worse. First, everyone was obliged to take a cut in their wages: Morecambe’s went down to £5 per week, Wise’s to £7. They were then forced into taking part in an increasingly embarrassing and exhausting succession of gimmicks, the last of which involved the marquee being converted into a booth through which the audience wandered while the company somehow managed to perform no fewer than seventy-three shows in three days. Finally, to the disappointment of no one except, perhaps, Sanger himself, the show came to a premature end in October 1947 at Nottingham’s Goose Fair. Morecambe and Wise, tired-eyed and chap-fallen, dragged themselves back to their old digs at Mrs Duer’s in Chiswick and pondered their immediate future.

      It was, without doubt, a bleak time for both of them, but perhaps especially so for Ernie Wise, whose career had begun almost a decade before in such propitious circumstances. Mickey Rooney, by the tender age of twenty-two, had made over a hundred two-reel Hollywood comedies, been handed a special Academy Award and had married the very beautiful Ava Gardner, whereas Wise – supposedly Britain’s answer to America’s indefatigably spirited child star – was at the same age stuck in cramped digs in Chiswick, single, unemployed and in very grave danger, it seemed, of being forgotten. Sadie Bartholomew, by this time, had returned home to Morecambe, which left the two of them feeling even more insecure and uncertain. Sadie’s endless stream of sobering proverbs – such as ‘Marry a girl and your fourpenny pie will cost you eight pence’⁵⁶ – continued to echo in their heads. Neither of them yet drank alcohol, nor did either of them have any time for any of the other recreational pursuits associated with their profession, and each tried as best he could (Wise with greater success than Morecambe) to save what money he possessed, but it was still a period of considerable anxiety.

      Out-of-work Variety acts, they soon discovered, tended to converge on an unprepossessing Express Dairy café that was situated, in those days, near the Leicester Square tube station. Every morning the place would be packed with the usual mixture of young, old, ex- and would-be performers, each cupping their hands gratefully around hot mugs of tea and announcing loudly but unconvincingly that they had, or would soon have, or would definitely have for certain in a month or two, a marvellous job lined up for themselves. Overhearing these fanciful monologues, Morecambe and Wise noticed that agents seemed to be crucial figures in this profession, and, as a consequence, they made up their minds to find one for themselves as soon as possible.

      One way to attract an agent, they were told, was to get oneself on to the bill of certain key Variety theatres – such as the Metropolitan on the Edgware Road, the Brixton Empress or the East Ham Palace – which functioned as shop windows for new talent, but, paradoxically, Morecambe and Wise found it hard to secure a booking at such places without the assistance of an agent: it was a vicious circle. Determined somehow to get noticed, and to improve their act in the process, they lowered their sights and started accepting anything: one-off club and pub nights, masonic dances, a very rough week at a rowdy venue near Barry Docks in Cardiff, the odd date with ENSA, the occasional day’s work at the Nuffield Centre (a club just off Piccadilly where ex- and current servicemen could perform), a short tour of the American army camps in Germany and even the occasional private party. The only bona fide Variety engagement they attracted during this depressingly barren period was for a week at the Palace, Walthamstow in March 1948, but even this modest success was diminished by the fact that because one of the other, more established acts was called Vic Wise and Nita Lane, Morecambe and Wise – to avoid causing any confusion – were billed as ‘Morecambe and Wisdom’.⁵⁷

      The one bright spot amidst all of this gloom was the kindness of their landlady, Nell Duer. Although there were stretches of fourteen to eighteen weeks at a time when Morecambe and Wise were unable to pay their rent she remained remarkably sympathetic to their plight, telling them just to pay her when they could afford to. When things became intolerable they would take an overnight bus to Morecambe and stay with Eric’s parents for a week – sometimes a fortnight – before returning, well-fed and with a couple more pounds in their pockets, to mount yet another attempt at finding long-term employment. Oddly enough, however, neither Morecambe nor Wise was ever tempted during this time to seek a job outside of showbusiness: ‘The matter was never broached between us,’ said Wise. ‘We were Variety artists; we were pros. To consider anything else would have been heresy.’⁵⁸

      The post-war years were not easy times for any young entertainer to find employment. London was besieged by returning ex-servicemen nursing hopes of establishing (or, in a few cases, re-establishing) themselves in showbusiness: comics such as Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Eric Sykes, Graham Stark, Jimmy Edwards, Tommy Cooper, Benny Hill, Dick Emery, Eric Barker, Harry Worth, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Max Bygraves, Bruce Forsyth, Norman Wisdom, Alfred Marks and Arthur English were all back in the capital and all clamouring for an opportunity to show an agent or impresario or a BBC producer just what they could do. It was, to say the least, a fiercely competitive time. Morecambe and Wise, in the course of their long-running search for work, gravitated – like most other comics – to the one place in London where they felt they might be given the chance to perform: the Windmill Theatre in Great Windmill Street, Soho. The Windmill, since 1932, had been permitted by the Lord Chamberlain to present – as one element of the Variety revues known as Revudeville – nude tableaux on condition that all of the young women remained perfectly still for the duration of each presentation, the stage lighting was always ‘subdued’ and no ‘artificial aids to vision’ were permitted in the auditorium.

      Its owner, Vivian Van Damm (known to everyone as ‘VD’), was involved in every aspect of the running of the theatre, from opening the office mail to hiring and firing the artistes. He was sufficiently proud of the fact that the Windmill had remained open throughout the war to coin the slogan, ‘We Never Closed’, and he was sufficiently astute not to object when this was perverted into ‘We Never Clothed’ by the habitués of the shows for which his stage was famous. Ann Hamilton, who in 1959 became the five hundredth Windmill Girl and would later become the regular female presence in The Morecambe & Wise Show, recalled: ‘He would always say that we were in showbusiness – with the accent on show. Because of censorship he never told the girls to show everything, but, as far as the Fan Dance was concerned, he certainly wasn’t averse to the fans being lowered to reveal the breasts, СКАЧАТЬ