“Eric Morecambe Fell Here”.’112 ‘I saw this tall girl,’ he said, ‘who was very beautiful with wonderful eyes, and who had a wonderful kind of sweetness which made your knees buckle ... I knew at once that she was the one for me for life. It was as sudden as that.’113 Although Joan, once she had sensed something of his ardour, was not exactly encouraging – ‘I thought, “Not a hope – nope, fat chance he’s got!”’114 – he remained undeterred. In Joan he saw not just a very attractive woman but also someone who would be a calming influence on him, someone who – as a talented performer herself – would understand his anxieties and offer him encouragement as well as constructive criticism. ‘How on earth anyone could possibly have worked all that out in a single glance is beyond me,’ she laughed, ‘but that’s the kind of man he was, and the pursuit was on.’115 Morecambe – as decisive and as determined about some things as he was indecisive and irresolute about others – persisted, and on 11 December 1952, a mere six months after that first meeting, they were married. Ernie Wise, who was best man, spent the day in a kind of daze: ‘I think it was the fact that it had all happened so quickly,’ Joan recalled. ‘He was like somebody is after an accident, in a state of complete shock!’116 Doreen, who had already chided Wise for his lack of a sense of romance,117 was probably quick to help him recover sufficiently to see the obvious moral to be drawn from this episode, and, after five years of courtship, they too were married on 18 January 1953.
These were brightly propitious times for Morecambe and Wise. Settled and secure in their personal lives, increasingly successful in their professional lives, they must have taken special pleasure in responding to an offer of more work at the end of 1953 from the once-unapproachable BBC by sending back a telegram that read: ‘VERY SORRY UNABLE TO ACCEPT = MORECAMBE AND WISE.’118 The tables had, at long last, been turned. Now producers had to pursue Morecambe and Wise. They were starting to be billed as ‘stars of radio’, and, after just one brief appearance on a televised Variety show, they were even being touted in some quarters as ‘the white hopes of television humour’.119’
Such talk did nothing to unnerve them. ‘There is nobody making a mark on television now,’ Eric was reported as having said. ‘We would like to try.’120 They did not, in fact, have long to wait. They were appearing at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool when Ronnie Waldman, the man responsible for BBC TV’s light entertainment output, arrived backstage at their dressing-room with the offer of a television series of their own. ‘Ernie and I looked at each other,’ recalled Morecambe, ‘and we said, “We’ll do it!”’121
We are privileged if we can work in this, the most entrancing of all the many palaces of varieties. Switch on, tune in and grow.
DENNIS POTTER
| WOMAN | Have you noticed? |
| MAN | What? |
| WOMAN | There’s no TV in this room. |
| MAN | Then why does it exist? |
THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN
I’ve been in the theatre, in cabaret, in films and television – and this is undoubtedly the toughest job of them all.
RONNIE WALDMAN
‘Light Entertainment.’ What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment? or Dark Entertainment?
ERIC MASCHWITZ
‘When we start analysing our good fortune,’ reflected Ernie Wise from the vantage point of the late 1970s, ‘a great deal of it comes from the fact that we came in at the tail-end of the music-hall era, and we were young enough to start again in a new medium, television.’1 Eric Morecambe agreed: ‘If we hadn’t gone through the transition, we would have ended up as unknowns doing the whole of the North in the clubs.’2 Neither man was joking: surviving that transition had been the greatest challenge of their entire career. Morecambe and Wise took a long time to discover how to make the most of television, and television took an even longer time to discover how to make the most of Morecambe and Wise.
Television, in fact, took quite a long time to discover how to make the most of television. The fitful nature of its early evolution (launched in 1936, suspended in 1939, relaunched in 1946) did nothing to help matters, and neither did its exorbitant cost (the price of a post-war ‘budget-model’ set was in the region of £50, while the average weekly industrial wage was just under £7) and its limited reach (full, nationwide coverage would not be achieved for several more years because tight Government control of capital expenditure restricted the construction of new transmitters).3 Even by the early fifties, when the ‘television public’ was estimated to be around 22 per cent of the UK population4 and the number of people with television licences was beginning to increase significantly,5 the BBC continued to exhibit a certain ambivalence in its attitude to the fledgling medium, slipping its television schedule at the back of the Radio Times as a four-page afterthought. This unhappy situation owed more than a little to the intransigence of Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC between 1944 and 1952. Television, noted Grace Wyndham Goldie (a producer at the time), was Haley’s ‘blind spot. He appeared to distrust and dislike it and his attitudes … seemed to be rooted in a moral disapproval of the medium itself.’6
Hours of viewing, like hours of public drinking, were limited in the interests of temperance: transmitters were turned on at three o’clock in the afternoon during weekdays and five o’clock on Sundays; the screen was blank between six and seven o’clock each evening in order to ensure that parents were not distracted from the task of putting their children to bed; and transmission ended at around half past ten on most nights or, on very special occasions, at quarter to eleven. Even in between programmes there were often soothing ‘interludes’ featuring windmills turning, horse ploughs ploughing, waves breaking and potters’ wheels revolving. For long stretches of the day there was nothing on offer other than a blank screen or the sound of something from one of Mozart’s less sensational compositions.
The situation changed dramatically in 1953 with the televised coverage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Until that moment, remarked Peter Dimmock (the man responsible for producing the historic broadcast), the Establishment, and a fair proportion of the general public, had looked upon television ‘as a bit of a peep-show’.7 Then, with a near-flawless production involving the use of 5 cameras inside Westminster Abbey and 21 cameras situated at 5 separate sites outside, the visual power and immediacy of the medium was, at last, underlined. More than 19 million people – 53 per cent of the adult population of Great Britain – saw the television coverage, with 7,800,000 viewing in their own homes, 10,400,000 in the homes of friends and a further 1,500,000 in cinemas, halls and public houses.8 It was the first time that a television audience had exceeded a radio audience. The critics reacted positively – the Star declaring that ‘television had cornered the right to put its name first over the BBC door’, and Philip Hope-Wallace announcing, ‘This was television’s Coronation’9 – and so, judging from the BBC’s own research, did the public at large – 98 per cent of television viewers (as opposed to 84 per cent of radio listeners) declaring themselves to be ‘completely satisfied’ with the coverage.10
The BBC now had in Sir Ian Jacob, its Director-General between 1952 and 1959, a man who appreciated both the potential of television to capture the public imagination and also the duty of programme-makers to realise that potential. ‘A public service broadcasting service,’ he wrote, ‘must set as its aim the best available in every field … [This] means that in covering the whole range of broadcasting the opportunity should be given to each