Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ up to the gate. The only time I got you to do his, you went and cut the tail off his peacock!HUSBANDWell, I gave it ’im back!¹⁷

      The Northern music-hall favoured the comedy of recognition, inclusive rather than exclusive in its attitude. ‘The traditional northern comic gets great sympathy,’ remarked James Casey (a writer and producer of radio comedy for the BBC’s North Region). ‘The southern comics didn’t get sympathy – they were smart, they would basically tell you how they topped somebody … The northern comedian [in contrast] would tell you how he was made a fool of.’¹⁸

      At the centre of this world stood – a little unsurely at times – the great comic from Stockton-on-Tees, Jimmy James, a lugubrious and vaguely melancholic figure with gimlet eyes and protruding, cushiony lips. He usually found himself sandwiched between two prize idiots – Hutton Conyers on one side, Bretton Woods on the other. ‘Are you puttin’ it around that I’m barmy?’ one of them would ask him. ‘Why?’ James would reply. ‘Did you want to keep it a secret?’ Playfully indulgent, he would listen politely to his companions as they talked their way deeper into the depths of illogicality, rambling on about keeping man-eating lions in shoe-boxes and receiving sentimental gifts from South African trips. Sometimes he would interpose the odd supportive observation (‘Oh, well … they’re nice people, the Nyasas. I’ll bet they gave you something.’), or register a mild sense of surprise (‘Pardon?’), while pursuing a policy of divide and rule by encouraging the idiot on one side to think that the real idiot was on the other side (‘Dial 999 – somebody must be looking for him! … Go and get two coffees – I’ll try and keep him talking.’¹⁹).

      These triangular conversations would be revived on television in the seventies whenever a special guest would wander on to the stage to join Morecambe and Wise, with the guest on one side, Ernie on the other, and Eric, always running things, in the middle:

ERIC	(looking up at Vanessa Redgrave) Good lord! Are you on a box or (glancing down at Ernie) is he standing in a hole?
ERNIE	Eric – Miss Redgrave …
ERIC	(kissing her hand) Vanilla, how are you?
REDGRAVE	Vanessa.
ERIC	Oh? (kisses hand again) Tastes like vanilla. We had your dad on one of our shows, you know.
REDGRAVE	He’s never forgotten it.
ERNIE	They never do.
ERIC	Very talented man, your dad. The way he played those spoons up and down his legs! Fantastic! Dessert spoons as well – they can be painful if you miss …

      ‘Whenever you hear me using any of your dad’s material,’ Eric Morecambe told Jimmy James’s son, ‘there are two reasons. One is because it’s a kind of tribute, and the other is because it’s very funny. But mostly’, he added, ‘it’s because it’s very funny.’²⁰ All of the other old routines were drawn on for very much the same reason: they still seemed very funny.

      ‘Look at that,’ Robb Wilton is reputed to have said, watching from the wings as an acrobatic troupe clambered up on to each other’s shoulders, balanced themselves on chairs that were in turn balanced on tall poles and then spun themselves around at a dizzying speed. ‘All that’, muttered Wilton, shaking his head incredulously, ‘just because the buggers are too lazy to learn a comic song.’²¹ The same sly irreverence, the same effortless timing, the same sharp response to someone else’s airs and graces, could be found, all those years later, in Eric Morecambe’s remorseless teasing of Ernie Wise’s pretensions to being part of something altogether grander than a mere cheap music-hall act.

      Early on in their shared career, when their prospects seemed bleak, Ernie Wise was heard to complain: ‘We’re Northern … You can’t win if you’re Northern.’²² He could not, as far as the future of Morecambe and Wise was concerned, have been more wrong.

CHAPTER II

       Morecambe before Wise

       I’m an enigma, a one-off.

      ERIC MORECAMBE

      Eric Morecambe was fond of informing people that he had taken his name from the place of his birth: Eric. His real name, in fact, was John Eric Bartholomew, and the actual place of his birth was the small North Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe.¹

      He came, as he often said, from an ordinary working-class family.² His father, George Bartholomew, had worked as a labourer for the Morecambe and Heysham Corporation since leaving school at the age of fourteen. His mother, Sarah (‘Sadie’) Elizabeth Bartholomew (née Robinson), had worked as a cotton weaver and later as a waitress, but she was often obliged to take on a variety of part-time jobs in order to supplement a very modest family income.

      They had, in terms of background, much in common with each other. Both came from large families: George had seven brothers and three sisters, Sadie three sisters and two brothers. George had grown up in Morecambe, Sadie in nearby Lancaster. Both had known considerable hardship, and both – each in their own distinctive ways – harboured hopes of a less onerous future.

      As personalities, however, they were stark opposites. George, a tall, thin man with a long, narrow face, slightly protruding ears, sharp, attentive eyes and a hairstyle topped off by a Stan Laurel tuft, was by all accounts an even-tempered, warm, happy-go-lucky character who always gave the impression of being more concerned with enjoying what he had than with yearning for what he continued to lack. Sadie, a short, somewhat thick-set woman with dark curly hair, faintly quizzical grey eyes, full cheeks, a sharp wit and, if anything, an even sharper tongue, was a naturally intelligent, imaginative, doughty woman who, had she been born in more propitious times and more fortunate circumstances, might well have pursued an interesting and rewarding career of her own.

      They had met at a dance at the Winter Gardens in Morecambe, but their respective reactions to the occasion said much, in retrospect, about their subsequent relationship: whereas George had been sufficiently impressed by Sadie to consider the possibility of an open-ended series of dates, Sadie had decided, there and then, that George Bartholomew was the man she would marry. Sadie got her way. A relatively short time after, on 26 February 1921, they were married in nearby Accrington. Their first and only child, John Eric, was born – somewhat unexpectedly – at 12.30 p.m. on 14 May 1926 (‘If my father hadn’t been so shy I would have been two years older.’³) in the front living-room of a neighbour’s house at 42 Buxton Street, Morecambe.⁴ The Bartholomew family’s own house, at 48 Buxton Street, would be the house that Eric would come to think of as his first home, but he and his parents could not have stayed there for more than a few short months, because the building was by then in a state of terminal disrepair.

      His first vivid memory, he would always say, was of the ceiling having fallen in: ‘I remember being lifted on to the kitchen table by my mother and having my coat pulled on and my scarf tied round my neck, and being taken out of the house.’⁵ He would have been no more than ten months old at the time.⁶ The unwelcome and unexpected period of disruption turned out, however, to have been something of a blessing in disguise, because the local Corporation relocated the family into a relatively new and reassuringly sturdy council house – ‘with three bedrooms and an outside loo’⁷ – at 43 Christie Avenue. A measure of stability and security for the Bartholomews had, at last, been achieved.

      The next few years were, Eric would admit, ‘hazy’⁸ in his memory, but his mother likened her infant son to ‘a little doll with a head of blond curls’.⁹ He was, it seems, a rather precocious baby, beginning to walk at around nine or ten months old, and learning СКАЧАТЬ