Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ Damm preferred to employ women as young as fourteen and a half, but he would often continue to employ them until it was deemed that they required the support of a bra. He was part benevolent father figure, part seedy voyeur: on the one hand, he would see that all of his young women were groomed in elocution, make-up, deportment, dress sense and singing and dancing skills, and also that each of them received free medical and dental treatment; on the other hand, as Ann Hamilton recalled:

      He would never knock when he entered the dressing-room. It was so hot in there, deep in the bowels of the earth where the girls had to change, that people would sit around with nothing on – because it was all girls together. He knew that, and he always walked straight in, but we’d know when he was on his way because you could hear his little shuffling footsteps and smell the smoke from his cigar.⁶⁰

      Although Van Damm took great delight in erecting a mahogany plaque outside on the comer of his theatre that listed all of those ‘Stars of Today Who Started Their Careers in This Theatre’, most if not all of the performers whom he claimed to have either ‘discovered’ or ‘nurtured’ were, in reality, regarded merely as tolerable distractions during the brief intervals that separated one nude tableau from the next. His policy was to audition almost anyone who applied to him, but he was by no means as easy to please as has sometimes been implied (his daughter, Sheila, estimated that around 75 per cent of all applicants were rejected⁶¹). Harry Secombe, who worked there during 1946, remembered the sad fate suffered by a Chinese illusionist who was auditioned by Van Damm: after spending most of the previous night sweating over his routine and preparing all of his elaborate props and painting on his intricate make-up, he shuffled on to the stage, bowed slowly with Chinese precision, and was just about to open his mouth when Van Damm shouted ‘Thank you’, thus forcing him to shuffle all the way back off again in silence.⁶² In his time, Van Damm also dismissed, with a similarly curt ‘Thank you’, Spike Milligan, Roy Castle, Charlie Drake, Norman Wisdom, Benny Hill and Kenneth Tynan. It was, however, as Morecambe and Wise discovered, one of the least worst places to attract the attention of a relatively good London agent. Peter Prichard, a regular visitor in those days, remarked:

      It became the nursery for comedians in this country. We used to go, as agents, to spot the talent. We could hardly ever get a seat, because there was the famous ‘Windmill Jump’ – these guys would sit in the audience for two or three shows and, eventually, if one in the front got up to leave, all the others would jump over the seats to try and get the front seat.⁶³

      Michael Bentine played there as part of a novelty double-act called Sherwood and Forrest:

      An extraordinary place. Very small theatre. Very small stage. And statuesque and beautiful girls. And, of course, the mackintosh brigade came in, as you can imagine, with a copy of The Times, and, shall we say, ‘engaged’ with other interests, and suddenly one of the girls would come off after a scene and say, ‘Row 3, seat 26: dirty bastard!’ The guy would be picked up by the muscle men and thrown out the door.⁶⁴

      It seems likely that Morecambe and Wise knew at least a little about this when one Sunday morning they went up to Van Damm’s tiny, dark and smoke-filled office near the top of the theatre, but they were determined to find somewhere that allowed them to perform. Van Damm sat at his desk (behind which the observation ‘There are No Pockets in Shrouds’ was spelled out in large Gothic type) and puffed on his cigar as they went through all ten minutes of their current act. He nodded his approval – a slow nod to register only mild approval – and informed them that he was prepared to engage them for one week (six shows a day, from 12.15 p.m. until 10.30 p.m.) with an option for a further five weeks. Their wage, between them, was to be £25.⁶⁵ Their rehearsal – the ‘undress rehearsal’ as some called it – went rather well, and they both looked forward to the first week of what they hoped would be a long run in the show.

      They were swiftly disabused of such dreams. On the Monday they found themselves having to follow an act which involved bare-chested male dancers squeezed into tights, cracking whips and adopting vaguely Wagnerian poses, female dancers performing their various jetés with the assistance of ‘artistic’ lighting effects, and, of course, several stationary nudes. They had seen nothing like this at the Bradford Alhambra. When the curtain came down they walked out on the stage to complete silence, and started their act in what they hoped would soon be familiar as their ‘usual way’ – ‘Hello, music lovers!’ They continued for seven painfully elongated minutes, facing an impersonal mass of crumpled broadsheet newspapers, before walking back slowly and disconsolately to the shelter of the wings. The same thing happened throughout the rest of the day – at the second house, and the third, fourth, fifth and sixth – each appearance eliciting complete indifference. Tuesday, if anything, was worse still, and after the last of their appearances on the Wednesday they were met at their dressing-room by a grim-faced Ben Fuller, the burly stage-door keeper who was often called upon to act as the harbinger of bad news.

      Fuller, ominously silent, escorted the two of them up to Van Damm’s office. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Van Damm with a wan smile. ‘My patrons seem to prefer the other double-act, Hank and Scott.’⁶⁶ ‘Hank’ was a young Tony Hancock, and ‘Scott’ was the pianist Derek Scott. ‘I’m not taking the option up, boys,’ Wise recalled Van Damm informing them ‘with all the charm of a surgeon telling you the worst’,⁶⁷ and they were instructed to leave at the end of their first and only week. Although both of them knew that their act had failed to capture the imagination of the Windmill audience, they also knew that most of the other acts had failed to capture the imagination of the Windmill audience, and so they were, therefore, ‘devastated’ by this news;⁶⁸ not only was it a cruel blow to their self-esteem, but it was also, more seriously still, a major setback to their hopes of finding an agent. Fortunately, Wise – with typically sound business sense – recovered enough of his composure before leaving to ask Van Damm if he would object if they sought to limit the damage to their professional reputation by placing a notice in The Stage to the effect that Morecambe and Wise were leaving the Windmill purely because of certain prior commitments. Van Damm smiled and acceded to the request and they parted company on as amicable terms as the sorry circumstances would allow.⁶⁹

      They played out the remaining days of that week and hoped that someone might see them and show some interest before they returned once again to obscurity. One agent did just that: Gordon Norval. Norval agreed to help them out, and he arranged for them to perform two spots the following Monday evening in yet another nude revue – this one entitled Fig Leaves and Apple Sauce – at the Clapham Grand. Unbeknown to Norval, however, there was a problem: they had agreed to perform two spots rather than one because the fee was £2 10s. more, but they were well aware of the fact that they had only twelve minutes of material rehearsed and there was no possibility that any number of Jack Benny-style pauses and silent stares could stretch this out for the duration of two whole spots. Panic, remembered Wise, was, in the absence of Sadie, ‘the mother of our invention’:⁷⁰ locking themselves away in their digs and forcing themselves to come up with new ideas, they managed, just in time, to have a second act ready.

      Arriving at the Grand on Monday evening, they had a plan fixed firmly in their minds: they would use their ‘proper’, well-rehearsed act for the first spot, win over the audience and then rely to some extent on that residual warmth to waft the remainder of their wafer-thin material through to the end of their second spot. The plan, however, had to be aborted after their first, disastrous appearance saw them walk off to the arctic chill that was known locally as the ‘Clapham silence’. Now all they had to rely on for their second spot was the residual indifference of the audience. They began with a barely concealed feeling of terror. What saved them was the unlikely success of a routine they had recently devised that featured Ernie teaching Eric how to sing ‘The Woody Woodpecker’s Song’; Eric, assured that he had the most important part, was eventually reduced to the famous five-note pay-off (‘Huh-huh-huh-huh-hah!’) at the end of each verse. It was a routine СКАЧАТЬ