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 the old music-hall cross-talk routine, technically elaborate but remorselessly anonymous, and adapting it to suit their own very special relationship. ‘I think there’s a simple revolution in what they did,’ Michael Grade remarked:
If you ever saw the double-acts of the thirties, forties or fifties, they never really talked to each other – they would only communicate to each other through the audience, and they would ‘work out’, as I call it. Whereas Eric and Ernie were the first double-act to develop an intimate style, they were the first to talk to one another, to listen to one another. The old acts had this big yawning distance that separated them from each other. Eric and Ernie were the first ones to really have a proper relationship on the stage.87
Their partnership had already lasted longer than most before they had even worked their way to the brink of stardom, and both of them appreciated the elective affinity that had drawn them so closely together. ‘There was a kind of lightning thing that went between us,’88 said Wise. ‘We were, I suppose, like brothers who rarely, if ever, quarrelled and could cope with what was an intense partnership without any fear of its overheating.’89
It was the sort of relationship that was well suited to the special demands of the next medium that they intended to master: radio. They understood the importance of radio to their future because Variety was on the decline and the mass audience could now only be reached, it seemed, through the wireless. They also recognised the remarkable power of the medium and its potential for transforming regional stars into national celebrities. This had been underlined in 1949 by the extraordinary public reaction to the death of the comedian Tommy Handley (‘a national calamity’ according to the Spectator), when thousands lined the streets of London to watch his funeral cortège and hundreds more went on to St Paul’s Cathedral for the national memorial service.90 Getting on to the wireless – and then staying on it – was the goal of any ambitious performer at this time.
Succeeding in radio, however, was something that was easier said than done. Eric Morecambe would look back on it as ‘the hardest medium of all’,91 and not without reason. The BBC was still uneasy about Variety’s lively unpredictability, and no performer was acceptable unless he or she could prove themselves to be adaptable. The infamous Green Book, devised in 1949 by the then Director of Variety Michael Standing as a guide for producers, writers and artistes, sought to preclude the slightest hint of a nudge or a wink from broadcast Variety. ‘Music-hall, stage, and to a lesser degree, screen standards’, the guide announced, ‘are not suitable to broadcasting,’ and all producers and performers were warned that any ‘crudities, coarseness and innuendo’ that might pass as entertainment on the Variety circuits were most certainly not acceptable on the wireless. There was, for example, an ‘absolute ban’ on trade names and ‘Americanisms’, as well as jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men and ‘immorality of any kind’, suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, prostitution, ‘ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on’, ‘animal habits, e.g. rabbits’, lodgers, commercial travellers, prenatal influences, ‘e.g. “His mother was frightened by a donkey”’, and marital infidelity. If one had to err, the Green Book advised, it was best to err on the side of caution: ‘“When in doubt, take it out” is the wisest maxim.’92
Such draconian rules left many popular comics with barely any material fit for broadcasting, and led to a few, such as Max Miller, being banned on several occasions (one of them prompted by his notorious optician joke: ‘That’s funny – every time I see F, you see K!’). Writers, too, were often driven to despair by the multiple objections to perfectly inoffensive scripts (Frank Muir, for example, remembered being ordered by Charles Maxwell, his producer, ‘to remove any mention of the word “towel” from a script Denis Norden and I had written for Take It From Here because it had “connotations”’93), causing them either to devise increasingly devious ways of outwitting the censors (an example being the regular appearance of a character named ‘Hugh Jampton’ – from the rhyming slang ‘Hampton Wick’ meaning dick – in The Goon Show) or else to focus more on comic situations than on comic lines.
Morecambe and Wise took some time to find a way into this imposing and unfamiliar medium. Since contributing to Youth Must Have Its Swing they had found further radio work hard to come by – just a couple of editions of the talent show Beginners, Please! (one in 1947, the other in 1948) and a single edition of Show Time in 1948. It was only in 1949, after writing a hopeful letter to Bowker Andrews, a BBC producer based in Manchester, asking him to consider using them in his Northern Variety broadcasts and reassuring him that ‘we are also both North Country’,94 that they started participating on a more regular basis. In 1952,95 after taking part in an edition of Workers’ Playtime, they were invited to be guests on one of the best Variety shows transmitted by the BBC’s North of England Home Service:96 Variety Fanfare, produced by Ronnie Taylor. Taylor (who was also responsible, as a writer as well as a producer, for such popular programmes as The Al Read Show and Jimmy Clitheroe’s Call Boy) was one of the BBC’s great nurturers of young talent on both sides of the microphone. His support for Morecambe and Wise over the next few years would prove to be invaluable. His initial enthusiasm for them, however, was only translated into a firm offer of further appearances after they had planted an entirely spurious story – via a third party – which suggested that the producers of the show’s more prestigious Southern equivalent, Variety Bandbox, were on the verge of offering them a residency. Anxious not to let one of his discoveries be poached by his colleagues in London, he proceeded to book Morecambe and Wise for a succession of Variety Fanfares.97
‘That was the big break for us,’ Eric Morecambe would say of this run of appearances, ‘even if it was only Northern Home Service in those days.’98 It served, said Ernie Wise, a dual purpose: on the one hand acting as ‘a useful safety net to cushion us when we fell on relatively lean times’,99