You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: The life and work of Eric Morecambe. Gary Morecambe
sat up and insisted on finishing the performance, then went off to hospital to have his pacemaker fitted. Two days later he was attending a big function for UNICEF.’
And the next night of the play after Roger had been taken away sick?
‘Alan Alda, most famous for his role in M. A. S. H., stepped in and was brilliant,’ explained Hamish. ‘What made it work so well with him was the fact that his parents had been vaudevillians. He would watch the first half of the show from the wings, and I think he was the only guest star who did that. Normally they just made their entrance in the second half.’
Apparently Roger’s daughter, Deborah, had told Hamish that her father was terrified of doing the play. Also, Hamish said, ‘Ken [Branagh] told me when we were still at the rehearsal stage that the higher the status of the star the more terrified they will be. That was a very good tip. Roger played it pretty much like he was Prince Rainier of Monaco, when he first arrived. It was the blazer and dark glasses and not very communicative approach. Of course you could misread this and think that he was being deliberately aloof, but it transpired that he was just terrified about appearing in the play. When we got to know him he could not have been nicer. He was charming; he went on to do the show countless times both in the UK and the States, his wife always accompanying him. Wonderful. And I also went out to Switzerland and saw them there and was made very welcome.’
It was fascinating to hear Hamish’s own thoughts on something to which he was integral in making it such a huge success. Our previous times together had been while the play was up and running, so until now we hadn’t had the opportunity for this dispassionate ‘with hindsight’ overview of what that remarkably exciting period for all of us involved had been about. And, as consultant to the production, my role was firstly to nit-pick the script and later their performances in respect of their adopting, and consistently sustaining, the Morecambe and Wise feel in their delivery and actions. Obviously what was needed of me was to bring to the production any knowledge that being Eric Morecambe’s son and self-acclaimed know-all and walking A-Z on Morecambe and Wise gave me. This was essentially the role I had planned for myself back in the midnineties when first discussing the project with David Pugh.
The play would continue for several years right up to April 2007, but by then without its creators and performers Hamish McColl and Sean Foley. And what a list of guest stars had during that time graced their production: Ioan Gruffudd, Denise Van Outen, Charles Dance, George Cole, Simon Callow, Nigel Havers, Sue Johnston, Dawn French, Michael Starke, Ralph Fiennes, Richard E. Grant, Sting, Bob Geldof, Roger Moore, Kylie Minogue, Cilla Black, Maureen Lipman, Richard Wilson, David Suchet, Ewan McGregor—and they’re just the ones that readily spring to mind. Madonna came to see it, as did Pierce Brosnan, and both showed positive interest. But time passed quickly and before the availability of either could be confirmed, Sean and Hamish’s production was over.
‘I can’t watch any of the new productions of it,’ Hamish admits with a hint of melancholy. ‘Not after my involvement. The strangest thing of all was preparing the scripts for the first new cast. There came that point where I had to press the button which erased all our names—Me, Sean and Toby [Jones]—and replace them with the new cast. We were gone!’
I can’t help agreeing with Hamish when he says, ‘My personal feeling is that it could have run another year in the West End, it was such a big success and an award-winner. But it’s always something we could bring back to the West End in due course.’
The idea of the play making a return in its original form with the original team is an intriguing one considering that Hamish and Sean had gone their separate ways after a remarkable seventeen years together. ‘Not nearly as long as Eric and Ernie were together,’ Hamish said, ‘but still a considerable time.’ Was this a consequence of doing the play together? I wondered.
‘Not at all,’ Hamish was quick to point out. ‘We both had other things we wanted to try out. It was just time for change. And as I say, we would reunite for The Play What I Wrote, should that opportunity resurface.’
Hamish shares my misgivings about taking what was primarily a play about the spirit of Morecambe and Wise over to New York, where they were hardly known.
‘You say they are the spirit of the play; I would go further and say the entire soul of it,’ he said. ‘It became a different show. It became a show about a double act in crisis and their need to stay together, but it didn’t have that crucial emotional resonance that it had in the purely Eric and Ernie version in Britain. And you underestimate those things at your peril. Morecambe and Wise were the blood-line of the piece, and it made it much more difficult for us in America. We still got a lot of laughs, and good audiences showed up—we were never below half-full—but you sensed that vital connection to the audience was missing.
‘That was the magic thing about Eric and Ernie that made us want to do the play in the first place. Actually,’ he corrected himself, ‘it was what made us not want to do it at the outset. I mean, how can you go out and imitate an icon act like Morecambe and Wise? Until we found that device of it being about us as a way to do them, it wasn’t feasible.’
I can relate to this, of course, as I’d spent several years having the same discussions with David Pugh. Quickly we recognized that a pure imitation was not a possible way to execute the idea of a tribute to Morecambe and Wise.
After the low moment with Roger being taken to hospital halfway through a Broadway performance, what was for Hamish the high moment of the months spent in the West End, then on Broadway, and later on tour in the UK?
‘I have many,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘If we’re talking guest stars, and there were very, very few who didn’t really cut the mustard, then I suppose that you can name them on the basis of audience reaction. Firstly, we had Toby always on the side of the stage doing an impression of the guest star that then quietly walks on to the stage from the other wing. Some got muted applause, some good applause and some huge applause. But if they were a massive name, then you got a momentary pause during which the audience is thinking, can this really be them? Roger Moore was in this last category and also Sting, Kylie Minogue, Ewan McGregor, and Richard E. Grant. Richard did the show lots of times, a bit like Roger. John McEnroe, of course, in the New York production, was massive. He just got it totally. You had Toby Jones at one end of the stage and John McEnroe at the other shouting out in New York whines: ‘No, I’m John McEnroe.’ ‘No you’re not—I’m John McEnroe.’ Brilliant. Those names named are some of the big highs of the two runs and the short tour we did with the play. There were times in that show I would turn to Sean and say, “Listen to that laughter because you’ll never hear it as thick again.” That play really was a laughter machine. It was like being at a rock concert, not a stage play!’
‘There were times in that show I would turn to Sean and say,“Listen to that laughter because you’ll never hear it as thick again”.’
After the play finished, Hamish and Sean did not immediately part company to pursue independent challenges. Quite quickly they went into a new stage production which reunited the whole The Play What I Wrote team of Hamish McColl, Sean Foley, Toby Jones, Kenneth Branagh (as director), and David Pugh (as producer). This was to be the maligned and ill-fated Ducktastic!
The main reason it failed, in this humble writer’s opinion, is because the title is truly dire. For my money, any play named Ducktastic! sounds more like something the Krankies would come up with. Remember them? Fandabidozi! It must, therefore, have been an uphill battle from the opening onwards—and there wasn’t too much ‘onwards’!
But Hamish McColl has his own theories. ‘I think we set the bar too high with The Play What I Wrote. The next production just didn’t catch on,’ he explained. ‘It was an expensive show to stage, and they didn’t have the time to bridge that gap between an average start and developing it into something a bit special. So it was pulled.’
My mind drifts back to the opening night of The Play What I Wrote, before Roger was ill, before Hamish and Sean misfired