Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ one but several theatre managers rushed backstage after the performance with offers of work. It was a turning-point in the development of the partnership. Suddenly, after the bleakest of times, they were in demand.

      Nat Tennens, who ran the Kilburn Empire, booked them ‘act as seen’ for the following week. This time they reversed the order, starting with their new material. It was again so successful that it even seemed to breathe new life into the old act, and their confidence started to soar. They went on to make another appearance at the Clapham Grand, and the week after that they returned to the Kilburn Empire – only this time at the top of the bill. They were now earning £40 per week, and Gordon Norval, the man who had been in the right place at the right time to help them, became their first agent.

      Their next stroke of good fortune, however, was prompted not by Norval but by a young dancer, Doreen Blythe, who had worked with Morecambe and Wise in Lord John Sanger’s touring show as one of ‘The Four Flashes’. She had grown sufficiently close to Wise to have carried on a correspondence with him once that unfortunate enterprise had ended. She was now appearing in another touring show, this one run by an impresario named Reggie Dennis, and – knowing of Morecambe and Wise’s recent success, and keen to find a way to spend more time with Ernie – she urged Dennis to go to see the double-act with a view to booking it for the next leg of the tour. He did so, and, liking what he saw, offered them the chance of almost a year’s continuous work in the revue he was calling Front Page Personalities. They accepted, and, on tour for the next eleven months, they polished their technique, improved their material and, for the first time, began to really relax in front of an audience.

      It was towards the end of this tour, in the autumn of 1950, that Morecambe and Wise came to the attention of an extremely influential London-based agent called Frank Pope.⁷² Pope seemed to have a hand in most of the important theatre circuits in Variety. He was responsible, for example, for booking all of the acts for one of the key circuits associated with post-war Variety: the so-called ‘FJB’ circuit, set up by an enterprising man by the name of Freddy J. Butterworth after purchasing a dozen ailing cinemas and turning them back into music-halls.⁷³ Pope also supplied acts to the far mightier Moss Empires circuit, which at that time owned around twenty-four large and well-run theatres (including the prestigious London Palladium). There could, therefore, have been few more suitable agents for Morecambe and Wise at this particular point in their career, because, as Morecambe noted: ‘In the early days our ambition [had been] to be second top of the bill at Moss Empires. Not top. At second top it was not your responsibility to fill the theatres,’⁷⁴ and now, as Wise would recall, they were feeling so optimistic that they were ready to think of making the top of the bill at the Palladium ‘the apex of our ambition’.⁷⁵ After coming to an amicable agreement with Gordon Norval, Pope signed Morecambe and Wise to what was a sole agency agreement (guaranteeing them a minimum of £10 per week but obliging them to give him at least six months’ notice if they ever wanted to opt out). They now, at long last, had the kind of backing that would provide them with a reasonably frill diary of top-flight Variety dates, a rewarding annual pantomime season as well as the chance to become recognised as fully fledged stars.

      ‘Eric always said to me’, Wise would recall, ‘that the reason we were so successful was that we stayed together. A simple enough statement,’ he added, ‘but also very profound. We were together from 1943, and from that moment on we sweated at it.’⁷⁶ By the early 1950s the tremendous amount of effort that they had invested in their act was finally starting to pay dividends, but with these rewards came a new set of challenges: as Wise observed, in the old days of the ‘youth discovery’ shows, ‘the audiences are on your side. They say, “Oh, aren’t they good for amateurs!” But it’s when you turn professional – that’s when it becomes hard,’⁷⁷ and not all of the audiences they now performed to were particularly easy to please. Southern audiences could sometimes be a problem, treating Northern comics with a certain amount of suspicion until they were satisfied that they could understand the accent and identify with the humour. Northern audiences, though obviously more suited in those days to an act like Morecambe and Wise (who by that time had abandoned their Abbott and Costello-style mannerisms and looked instead to Northern comics like Jimmy James and Dave Morris for inspiration⁷⁸), could still be hard work (indeed, the old story about the two grim-faced Northerners watching a comic perform his act – ‘He’s not too bad, is he?’ says one of them. ‘He’s all right if you like laughing,’ mutters the other – was made real for Harry Secombe when a member of the audience in Blackpool ‘congratulated’ him by remarking, ‘You nearly had me laughing when you were on, you know’⁷⁹). Clubs – even the relatively plush ones that were starting to emerge – were never among the favourite venues of Morecambe and Wise, in part because of the added burden of having to compete with the bar for the audience’s attention (one inexperienced comic, struggling in vain to win over an unresponsive crowd, was interrupted by a very loud and entirely unexpected roar of approval: ‘Don’t worry,’ the chairman told him. ‘It’s just that the hot pies have come …’⁸⁰).

      By far the most intimidating venue on the circuit, at least as far as English comics were concerned, was the notorious Glasgow Empire. When Cissie Williams – the formidable woman in charge of all bookings for Moss Empires – sent Morecambe and Wise up there for a week-long engagement, she paid them an extra £10 – not just to cover the rail fare and any other expenses but also to compensate them for the trauma of playing to such an aggressive audience. Everyone felt the same: whenever Jimmy James arrived at Glasgow station he would step out slowly on to the platform, sniff the air suspiciously, pause for a moment and say, ‘By ’eck, it’s been a long week!’⁸¹ Glaswegians loved American singers, but had serious reservations about most other performers and had a special aversion to acts from south of the border. ‘They always opened the show with kilts – McKenzie Reid and Dorothy and their accordions, or a cripple,’ Wise recalled. ‘There’s nothing more guaranteed to get sympathy than a crippled man playing an accordion, especially if it’s a bit too heavy for him,’ added Morecambe knowingly.⁸² It was actually the sudden and premature death of McKenzie – he was run over by a tram – that led to the famously harrowing experience of Des O’Connor (‘It was the time’, Morecambe observed, ‘when Des really stood for desperate’⁸³). McKenzie’s widow, Dorothy, insisted that the show must go on, and, with the assistance of a young nephew, she duly appeared, night after night, singing such songs as ‘Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?’ to uncharacteristically emotional audiences. O’Connor, unfortunately, was obliged to follow this act, night after night, with his amusing gags and humorous anecdotes about life down in Stepney. Each night proved worse than the previous one, until Dorothy, overcome with grief, cut short her act and thus forced O’Connor, coiled up in fear in a comer of his dressing-room, to hurry out and attempt to entertain a full-house of three thousand choked-up Glaswegians. He panicked, telling one story twice, then telling the end of the next joke before its beginning, all to an increasingly threatening kind of silence. With his mouth now bone-dry and his forehead dripping with sweat, he started to sway slowly from side to side and then, according to a gleeful Eric Morecambe, passed out: ‘He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I—I—I—” Bumph! He fainted! Actually fainted! From nerves, you know. And he was lifted up under the backcloth, and he was carried slowly off. His legs disappeared and he had “Goodbye” written on the soles of his shoes … I think that’s the best he’s ever gone!’⁸⁴

      When Morecambe and Wise came to make their début in Glasgow, they, like the vast majority of English comics who preceded them, walked off, shoulders slumped, to the terrible, flat sound of their own footsteps. As they passed the sad-faced fireman who always stood in the wings, he fixed them with a knowing look, flicked what little was left of his cigarette into a sandbucket and muttered, ‘They’re beginning to like you.’⁸⁵ Occasions such as these, though hard to take at the time, helped them to continue to improve: ‘We needed to have experienced the knocks, working in Variety,’ Wise reflected. ‘It chipped the rough edges off us.’⁸⁶ What that arduous process allowed was the emergence of something original from within the merely banal, taking СКАЧАТЬ