Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
That’s the way she felt about it.
I’m sure that she thought that Ernie was a positive influence on Eric. He’d push him in the same way that she’d always pushed him. Eric wasn’t like Sadie, he was more like his dad. Ernie was very much like Sadie – they were both very businesslike, very determined characters.6
So attached, in fact, did Ernie become to his surrogate family that, whenever he had the chance to relax for a few days, he chose to do so with the Bartholomews in Morecambe rather than the Wisemans in Leeds.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Eric and Ernie, now that they spent most of every day together, living almost like brothers, should develop an unusually deep kind of mutual understanding. Each would finish the other’s sentences, seeming to know what he was thinking and feeling, and each would try his best to make the other laugh. They never tired of telling jokes, singing songs and imitating all of the other acts. Sadie, at first, was amused by all of this, but after enduring a succession of increasingly loud, long and boisterous sessions on the way to and from each performance her patience was wearing thin. When, late in November 1940, the show reached the recently blitzed city of Coventry, she was at her wit’s end.
They had to commute each day from Birmingham – the site of their previous engagement – because the digs that Sadie had booked for them in Coventry had been destroyed by one of the bombs. If this was not bad enough, an additional problem was that the twenty-one-mile train ride each day was frequently disrupted and delayed by the damage that had been caused by the Blitz. Sadie, trapped in a stationary carriage with two hyperactive teenagers endlessly repeating comic routines to each other, could stand it no longer: why, she asked them, did they not channel their energy and talent more constructively by working together on a double-act that might actually help their careers as well as provide her with just a little peace and quiet? Both Eric and Ernie, it appears, thought this to be an inspired idea.
It started out, according to Ernie, as merely ‘a hobby, a sideline which we would work on in addition to the solo spots we each had’.7 Within days of Sadie’s suggestion, however, they had already worked out a basic routine, comprising of a few gags (‘adapted’ from Moon and Bentley’s repertoire) and a soft-shoe shuffle to the tune of ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’. They had also, with the speed and the ease that they would later come to be noted for, shaken hands on the ground rules for their professional association: everything was to be split down the middle, fifty-fifty, and it was never, ever, to matter who got the laughs (the only thing that mattered, they agreed, was that someone should get the laughs). Even Sadie was a little taken aback by the extent to which her suggestion, which had only been semi-serious in the first place, had captured their imaginations, but, once she saw how well they worked together, she became, as always, totally committed to their cause.
Ernie Wise would say that Sadie was ‘the key element’ in the development of their act.8 While they continued to concentrate primarily on their solo acts – which, as Ernie reminded Eric, were still the things that earned them their wages – Sadie studied the other performers, scoured old joke books for suitable material, thought about possible props and bits of comic business, and watched and listened attentively as they rehearsed tirelessly in front of her. The great quality she felt that both of them possessed was that of professionalism: ‘They always worked very hard. It was perfection or nothing.’9
Ernie became the straight-man, said Sadie, because ‘he was the good-looking personality boy’, and Eric became the comic, ‘because he could look like a vacant American college dude in glasses and a big fedora hat’.10 They based their style, to begin with, on the rapid and rather soulless cross-talk associated at the time with Abbott and Costello, and their homage went as far as assuming American accents. Their early material would inevitably have a patchwork quality about it, incorporating the radio-oriented puns of Askey and Murdoch:
| ERNIE | (points to a coat hanger) What’s that? |
| ERIC | A hanger. |
| ERNIE | What’s it for? |
| ERIC | An aeroplane. |
and the considerably more louche humour of the music-hall:
| ERNIE | What are you supposed to be? |
| ERIC | I’m a businessman. |
| ERNIE | A businessman doesn’t walk like that. |
| ERIC | You don’t know my business.11 |
After several months of sustained effort (‘we lived, ate and slept the double-act’12) they – and Sadie – felt that they were ready. They approached Bryan Michie in the hope that he might consider allowing them to perform the act within the existing show. Although he seemed to like what they could do, he remained non-committal: Jack Hylton, he said, would have to see it first, and he was next due to visit the show when it reached Liverpool in the summer of 1941. ‘Leave it to me,’ announced Ernie. ‘I’ll tackle Mr Hylton.’13 He did, and Hylton, after suggesting a few changes – the most significant of which involved using another song, ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’, to complement their soft-shoe shuffle14 – instructed Michie to remove one of the acts from the bill so that Eric and Ernie could have their chance.
The double-act of Bartholomew and Wise duly made its début on the night of Friday 28 August 194115 at the Liverpool Empire. Sadie, standing next to Jack Hylton, watched proudly from the wings. Even though their material was blatantly unoriginal (their later exchange – ERNIE: That’s an Old Vic type joke./ERIC: I was there when old Vic told it – would have served as an apt evaluation of the antiquated nature of the affair), the audience, according to Sadie’s account, was sufficiently impressed to award her two ‘ardent and hard-working little troupers’ a ‘marvellous reception’.16 The show was due to move on to a week-long engagement in Edinburgh,17 and Hylton decreed that the double-act, in addition to Eric and Ernie’s existing solo acts, was, for the time being, to remain on the bill.
It took a while, none the less, for the partnership to find a regular spot in the show. Bryan Michie, fearful of incurring the wrath of the other mothers – some of whom could make formidable opponents – by appearing to indulge the whims of Sadie’s two boys, was hesitant at first. He only slipped the double-act on to the bill when he felt that he had a good enough reason to do so. There is no doubt, however, that Michie believed that it was worth persevering with – although not, he felt, with the names ‘Bartholomew and Wise’. He suggested either ‘Barlow and Wise’ or ‘Bartlett and Wise’,18 but neither sounded right to Eric and Ernie.
The matter was settled, eventually, when the tour reached the Midlands – Eric would remember the venue as being in Nottingham,19 Ernie in Coventry.20 According to most sources, the American singer Adelaide Hall and her husband Bert Hicks were appearing on the same bill as Eric and Ernie when Sadie encountered them backstage. ‘We’re trying to think of a name for Eric,’21 she explained. Hicks is reputed to have suggested that Eric should follow the example of an old friend of his who, in a similar situation, had assumed the name of his home town of Rochester in Minnesota. According to Michael Freedland,22 who ghostwrote Morecambe and Wise’s 1981 autobiography There’s No Answer to That!, Hicks was referring to Eddie Anderson, the song-and-dance man who found international fame in the role of Jack Benny’s gravel-voiced butler, Rochester. The only answer one can give to this assertion is a non-committal ‘yes and no’: Anderson was an old friend of Hicks, and he did come to be thought of as originating from Rochester, but, in reality, he had been born in Oakland, California, and one of Jack Benny’s writers had created the character called ‘Rochester’ long before Eddie Anderson ever came to audition for the role.23 What we can be sure of is that Sadie and Eric acted on Hicks’ basic advice and decided to change his name to Eric Morecambe. Ernie, perhaps overwhelmed momentarily by the spirit of adventure that was in the air, came close to changing his name to that of ‘Eddie Leeds’,24 but, in a cool hour, he realised that ‘Morecambe and Leeds’ sounded too much like a railway return ticket, and he thought better of it.
They would later discover that even this new combination was not without its own little drawbacks – Morecambe was frequently misspelt as ‘Morecombe’25