Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ and thousands more than that were contemplating a probable future of bleak immobility and deadly deprivation, George Formby, however implausibly, seemed an inspirational figure.

      Sadie was convinced that Eric, if only he applied himself to the task, had the ability to become, like Formby, a professional performer. She made every effort to encourage him to explore his latent talents. It would not, she appreciated, be easy: she had a name for him – ‘Jifflearse’⁴⁰ – that had been inspired by the strange, nervy restlessness that characterised so much of his behaviour, and it would be heard often, and at high decibels, during the months that followed. She did succeed in persuading him to learn how to play the piano, the clarinet, the guitar, the trumpet, the euphonium, the accordion and the mandolin. ‘But’, she would complain, ‘when he’d got it, he dropped it.’⁴¹ At the same time, she also decided – on what seems to have been not much more than a whim – that he should go to dance lessons. One day, when Eric was ten years old, his cousin Peggy – a near-neighbour – called at the house: ‘Aunt Sadie,’ she is reputed to have said, ‘I’m going to dancing class on Saturday.’ ‘Where’s that?’ Sadie replied. ‘Miss Hunter’s, above the Plaza,’ Peggy said. ‘A shilling a lesson.’ ‘Do me a favour,’ asked Sadie, sensing a chance for a brief break from the antics of her increasingly boisterous son, ‘take Eric with you.’⁴²

      Eric, it appears, was rather impressed when he discovered that his first dancing partner was to be a girl – slightly older than him – named Molly Bunting. Miss Hunter, it appears, was rather impressed as well when she discovered that her new pupil could dance. Eric remembered:

      Miss Hunter, after I’d been there about six weeks, came and saw my mother and said, ‘I think this boy’s got something, Mrs Bartholomew, he’s got a rhythm, you know!’ and me mother said, ‘Oh!’ So Miss Hunter said, ‘Yes, I think he ought to have private lessons’ – private lessons with her in her front room in Rosebury Avenue, at half a crown a time! So me mother said, ‘Oh, yes, all right then, give him private lessons if you think he’s got talent.’⁴³

      Sadie, in order to pay for those lessons, had to take on work – in addition to her existing job as an usherette at the Central Pier Theatre – as a daily help, cleaning at three or four houses every week, but she did so, more or less, without complaint, because she now felt a sense of vindication: Eric was, at long last, succeeding at something.

      She found a plank of wood for him to tap-dance on at home, and made him a cut-down Fred Astaire-style outfit of top hat, white tie and tails for his lessons. She worked with him over time on a series of mini-routines that included borrowings from the likes of Flanagan and Allen and the latest Hollywood musicals.⁴⁴ She also had a calling-card made – ‘Master Eric Bartholomew. Vocal Comedy & Dancing’ – and started to find him opportunities to perform in front of an audience: low-key social events known locally as ‘pies and peas’ (because young amateur performers entertained elderly people – usually in a church hall – and, in return, were given a hot meal of meat pies and mushy peas). On at least a couple of occasions Eric also appeared at benefits at the Central Pier, where he would black-up and imitate G. H. Elliott, ‘The Chocolate-Coloured Coon’ – a very popular musical act of the time – singing ‘Lily of Leguna’.⁴⁵ Offers of further work started to arrive. When George and Sadie took Eric to the Silver Jubilee Club – a working men’s club – in nearby Torrisholme, the concert secretary asked George if Eric would perform for them at dinner time on the following Saturday. Eric recalled: ‘My dad said, “Oh, yes, he’ll do it.” So the feller said, “How much will he want?” My dad said, “He’ll do it for nothing.” He didn’t want anything for it! And me mother hit him.’⁴⁶ After Sadie’s swift intervention a fee of five shillings was agreed – the first sum of money Eric had ever earned for a performance. He arrived on time, put on his pumps (‘they wouldn’t let me put my taps on’), clambered up on to the billiard table that had been commandeered as a make-shift stage, and, there and then, did his act (‘There were balls flying everywhere!’).⁴⁷ So popular was the performance that Eric found himself booked again for the following week.

      His parents applied for a special licence from the local Education Committee that enabled him to perform in the local clubs, and the bookings began to accumulate: ‘For a Saturday dinner time and Saturday evening we used to get, I think, fifteen shillings to a pound, which was quite an addition to the family budget.’⁴⁸ Sadie soon realised that the act would need more material to hold the attention of the often noisy and easily distracted audiences. She came across the sheet music for an old song made famous by Ella Shields – a male impersonator – entitled ‘I’m Not All There’ which, she felt, would be perfect – once shorn of its saucy connotations – for ‘Our Eric’: ‘I’m not all there, there’s something missing,/I’m not all there, so the folks declare./They call me looby,/Looby as a great big booby …’ Eric, who thought the song was ‘ghastly’,⁴⁹ was also unimpressed by the costume Sadie designed to accompany it: from the top down, he wore a flat black beret, a kiss curl, round turtleshell spectacles, black bootlace-tie over a white shirt, a very tight waiter’s jacket ‘with a great big pin where the button should be’, very short pin-stripe ‘business trousers’, suspenders (which he would use to such comic effect thirty years later), red socks and black shoes, and he held in his hand an enormous lollipop – ‘as big as a plate’ – with a child-size bite taken out of it.⁵⁰ From club to club, week after week, in front of audiences swelled by the combined presence of Sadie, George and all of George’s brothers, Eric would stand, dressed in this outfit, sporting a suitably gormless expression on his pasty-white face, and sing the song he grew to hate.

      ‘In those days’, he recalled somewhat ruefully, ‘it was a Northern trait that a comic had to be dressed “funny” – to tell everyone, “look, folks, I’m the comic!”’⁵¹ Although the ‘I’m Not All There’ routine worked extremely well, thus confirming Sadie’s shrewdness as his unofficial manager, he always resented having to perform it. The warm reception his act usually received may well have been welcome, but the succession of cramped and dingy clubs, each one smelling of stale ale and cigarette ash, harboured no hint of glamour for a young boy uneasy in his ‘gormless’ attire. ‘It was a thing I never really wanted to do,’ he would later protest. ‘I never really wanted to be a performer.’⁵² There was, it seems, no burning ambition, no sharp sense of urgency, no irresistible will to succeed, no discernible drive: ‘I had no bright ambitions. To me my future was clear. At fifteen I would get myself a paper round. At seventeen I would learn to read it. And at eighteen I would get a job on the Corporation like my dad.’⁵³

      If it had not been for his mother’s forcefulness, it seems doubtful that Eric would ever have become a professional entertainer. In later years he would certainly appear eager to seize any opportunity to express the opinion that Sadie had been a hard taskmistress – sometimes too hard – and a few of the jokes he would make at her expense seemed to carry just a hint of bitterness beneath the surface playfulness:

ERIC	Ah, that’s me mother’s favourite song, that. If she was out there in the audience tonight there’d be tears in her eyes.
ERNIE	Why?
ERIC	She can’t stand me.

      Deep down, however, there were genuine feelings of respect and, in time, gratitude. As much as he adored his father, Eric knew that ‘the reason no one ever had a bad thing to say about him is because he never put himself in a position where he had to rock the boat, where he had to be judged’,⁵⁴ whereas Sadie would sometimes be prepared to come into conflict with her son – and, for that matter, anyone else – if she believed that she had his best interests at heart.

      ‘The truth’, reflected Gary Morecambe, his son, ‘was that he would have achieved much less in his life without her constant support. Since this was perfectly well understood between them, the gibes were a ritualistic repartee of their relationship.’⁵⁵ Joan, Morecambe’s widow, agreed: СКАЧАТЬ