making mistakes, trying out new tricks, mastering old ones, refining their technique, sharpening their wits and, slowly but surely, evolving a style that was entirely their own. By the start of the seventies, therefore, Morecambe and Wise were more than ready for their close-up, and, when it came, they made sure that they made the most of it.
When viewers watched that final show at the end of 1977, they witnessed a rare and rich compendium of the very best in popular culture: the happy summation of a joint career that had traversed all of the key developments associated with the rise of mass entertainment in Britain, encompassing the faint but still discernible traces of Victorian music-hall, the crowded animation of Edwardian Variety, the wordy populism of the wireless, the spectacular impact of the movies and, finally, the more intimate pervasiveness of television. When it was all over, it was sorely missed.
Eric Morecambe died in 1984 and Ernie Wise in 1999,12 and on each of these sad occasions it felt to many as if they had lost an old and precious friend rather than merely a vividly endearing entertainer. The shows, however, remain, and the shows continue to matter. In November 1996, at the ceremony that marked the sixtieth anniversary of BBC TV, it was announced to no one’s great surprise that viewers had voted Morecambe and Wise the all-time Best Light Entertainment Performers, and The Morecambe & Wise Show the all-time Best Light Entertainment Series, and, in September 1998, the readers of the Radio Times voted the programme the all-time Best Comedy Show. Excellence never dates: even now, so many years after that last great night, millions of viewers still settle down to watch the old repeats, and to be entertained all over again by a rather tall man called Eric and a rather short man called Ernie. They were simply irreplaceable.
We are two people with one background between us.
ERNIE WISE
We’ve always considered ourselves sophisticated Northerners.
ERIC MORECAMBE
Music-hall … was professional, and our early ambition was always to become professional.
ERNIE WISE
Morecambe and Wise1 were made in the North of England. Their North of England, as far as their television conversations were concerned, was squeezed into a surreal and nameless little town that somehow managed to straddle the Pennines, a timeless place where clog dancing and cloth caps were forever to be found in fashion, and where all events of any real significance took place at one or other of five peculiar locations: the very modest working-class home of the Morecambe family, the rather grander working-class home of the Wise family, the somewhat insalubrious Milverton Street School, the long, dense and exotic Tarryassan Street or the compact but endlessly fascinating strip of land over which Ada Bailey would hang out her knickers to dry. Their North of England, in reality, was the materially impoverished but culturally rich North of England of the twenties and thirties, an area that stretched more freely over Lancashire, Yorkshire and a small but significant portion of Northumberland.
Eric Morecambe was a Lancastrian. One only had to hear his memorable voice utter a phrase like, ‘I’ll tell you for why …’, or invite a distinguished politician to ‘sit down and take the weight off your manifestoes’, or respond to a sudden show of affection from a male friend by shouting, ‘Geddoff! Smash your face in!’, or greet the inexplicable with an exclamation that slipped out from under a sigh, ‘Hhahh-there’s no answer to that!’, to appreciate the effectiveness of that warmly authoritative Lancastrian accent. It was J. B. Priestley who, during his English Journey of the early thirties, remarked on the fact that the ‘rather flat but broad-vowelled speech’ of the Lancastrian had come to be regarded as ‘almost the official accent of music-hall humour’2 – and that, coming from a Yorkshireman, was quite an admission.
It is certainly hard not to be struck by the fact that so many of the most memorable and original performers associated with a comic tradition running from the earliest days of music-hall through Variety and the BBC’s old North of England Home Service to the era of television have come from this solitary county: Billy Bennett, Harry Weldon, Robb Wilton, Fred Yule, Arthur Askey, Tommy Handley and Ken Dodd (all from Liverpool); George Formby Senior (from Ashton-under-Lyne); George Formby Junior, Frank Randle and Ted Ray (all from Wigan); Hylda Baker (Farnworth); Ted Lune (Bolton); Tubby Turner (Preston); Wilkie Bard and Les Dawson (Manchester); Al Read (Salford); and Gracie Fields, Tommy Fields and ‘Lancashire’s Ambassador of Mirth’, Norman Evans (Rochdale). What all of these otherwise disparate performers had in common was an accent that proved itself, as Priestley put it, ‘admirable for comic effect, being able to suggest either shrewdness or simplicity, or, what is more likely than not, a humorous mixture of both’,3 lending itself both to ironical under-statement (such as the exceptionally serviceable ‘Fancy!’ – used to register surprise at anything from run-of-the-mill gossip to declarations of war) and ingeniously sly put-downs (such as, ‘’Ave you ’ad your tea? We’ve ’ad ours!’ or, ‘I’d offer you a slice of pie, love, but there’s none cut into’).4 Priestley, attempting to define the distinctive character of the sound, listed ‘shrewdness, homely simplicity, irony, fierce independence, an impish delight in mocking whatever is thought to be affected and pretentious. That is Lancashire’.5 It was also, of course, unmistakably Eric Morecambe.
Ernie Wise, on the other hand, was a Yorkshireman. He was more than happy on stage and screen to play up to all of the old stereotypical character traits associated with the flat-capped tyke: arrogance (‘Welcome to the show,’ he would say to the audience. ‘What a pleasure it must be for you to be seeing me once again!’), conceit (the much-mocked wig), bluntness (when roused he would not hesitate to itemise all of his partner’s inadequacies) and stinginess (he would always be ashen-faced whenever a guest was brave enough to inquire about the possibility of a fee). There was also, of course, the Yorkshire accent – ‘quieter, less sociable and less given to pleasure’, according to the Bradford-born Priestley, ‘more self-sufficient and more conceited, I think, than the people at the other and softer side of the Pennines’6 – capable itself of conveying varying degrees of warmth, vulnerability and wit (witness the delivery of such gifted and popular comics as Albert Modley, Dave Morris, Harry Worth or Sandy Powell7), but ideally suited to the special technical skills of the straight-man.
Placed side by side, like their respective counties, Morecambe and Wise were able to play out their own private War of the Roses. Eric was hot, Ernie was cold. Eric was supple, Ernie was stiff. Eric was droll, Ernie was dour. Eric was playful with language, Ernie was respectful of it. Eric had the quick wit, Ernie the slow burn (ERNIE: ‘How do you spell incompetent?’ ERIC: ‘E-R-N-I-E.’ ERNIE: ‘E-R- … Doh!’). Eric knew all about the double entendre, Ernie still had much to learn about the single entendre (ERNIE: ‘I’ve always said there are no people like show people.’ ERIC: ‘Ask any prison warden.’). Eric liked to dress down (string vest, oversized khaki shorts, black suspenders, black socks and black shoes), Ernie loved to dress up (ill-advised ‘fashionable’ garments, odd ‘writerly’ outfits or white tie and tails). Eric was happy to appear less intelligent and cultured than he really was (‘I saw a play on TV last night: there was this woman – you could see her bum!’), Ernie yearned to appear less stupid and gauche than he really was (‘I’ve got 23 A levels, you know – 17 in Mathematics, and another 2, making 23’). While Eric had his feet planted firmly on the ground, Ernie’s head would sometimes float high up into the clouds (ERNIE: ‘You’re ruining everything! You’re making us look like a cheap music-hall act!’ ERIC: ‘But we are a cheap music-hall act!’).
Morecambe and Wise never were, strictly speaking, a music-hall act (the music-hall, as a distinct form of entertainment,